I know, I know.  It might not be a big deal for you, but it is for me.  You see, that’s one of the things that I struggle with is being able to get up in front of my peers (or anybody for that matter) and talk, let alone talk about something technical. Actually, it was actually one of my high level goals,  to give at least one technical presentation before year end.

Point Of No Return

My employer, Farm Credit Services of America, is a large supporter of the Heartland Developers Conference (HDC) and a couple of months ago an email came out asking if anybody wanted to speak.  If so, be at this meeting at this time and bring your ideas.  So, I showed up to the meeting, pitched my idea and next thing I knew it was being submitted for selection.  Within a couple of hours, I get that email stating that my presentation was selected.

Whoa.

Of course, at this point I’m freaking out a bit.  I had crossed the Rubicon and I was committed. For my fellow SQL nerds:

BEGIN TRAN
UPDATE dbo.John
SET IsSpeaking = 1
WHERE Conference = 'HDC'
COMMIT TRAN
GO

Unless I could fake my death, I was going to be speaking.  I did have a reprieve to an extent, I was actually going to be c0-presenting with a .NET developer from another team, Karim.

For you see, our presentation was “10 Things Your DBA Wished You Knew” and it was going to be presented in a way so that developers could write better code to help out their SQL Server.  I was going to be presenting on the ideas and methodologies and then my partner, Karim, would be showing the demo side of things in LINQ To SQL.

So here’s the agenda for the presentation:

1. Data Types
2. SELECT *
3. SET based vs Row Based
4. Transactions
5. Error Handling
6. Transaction Isolation
7. Indexes
8. Execution Plans
9. Sargable Queries
10. Pop Quiz

Fast forward to last week.  Karim and I had rehearsed several times and we both felt comfortable with the presentation and the demos.  We had made some minor tweaks along the way but all in all, we were ready.

Ok, hang with me.  Jump forward to last Thursday.  D-Day.  Today was the day and it was going to happen whether I had knots in my stomach or not.  I went to the office first to get some emails out of the way and get a good cup of coffee.  Once I had taken care of some business stuff, I decided to head out to the conference so that I could get a feel for the land.

When I arrived and wandered around a bit, it hit me.  Like a small truck hitting a watermelon on the highway.

The audience was potentially going to be MUCH larger than I had expected.  I went to check out the room that I was going to be in and after looking at it, I figured that it would hold about 100 people in your usually classroom format. I wasn’t expecting that.  I was expecting something along the lines of a SQL Saturday where you had 30-40 people (maybe!) and in a normal class room.  Nope, this room was a large conference room that had one of the largest projector screens that I have ever seen.

And I was going to be speaking in that room.  Yikes!

Fast forward a couple of hours.

2:00PM.  The session before us ends and people start to filter in and out of the room.

2:05PM.  More people start to fill in the room and seating is becoming valuable real estate.

2:10PM.  More people continue to fill in.  People are standing.  More people come in.

2:15PM.  I look at Karim and we exchange quick nods like two people were about to face the firing squad.

Rock'n The House!

2:16PM.  I kick off the presentation.  Standing room only.  People are standing/sitting along the back way and down both sides of the room.

Well, we were rolling.  Other than a few minor glitches, it went really smooth.  We had some excellent questions from the audience and I think that only 1 person got up and left and we think that he had to take a phone call.

We think that we had well over 120 people in the room.

I will admit that we ran over by about 5 minutes and to be honest, I could have spent probably another hour or so talking about the concepts.  I do love SQL Server after all.

Once it was all over and done with, I had several people come up to me and wanted to talk more about things.  It was one of the best feelings in the world.  Knowing that I had reached someone, and more than one!! It was right there and then that I realized that I was hooked on presenting.

I had one gentleman who asked if he could pick my brain for the next 6 hours or so.  He was striving to get into the DBA world and for him to say that, it was quite the honor for me.  I was floored.  But that’s another story for another post.

The moral of the story, get out there and speak.  Yes it takes hard work, practice and research, but if you are passionate about something like SQL Server, get out there and talk about it!  You never know who you might reach with your talks.

To sound totally cliche, if I can do it, so can you!

When Robert posted the invite for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I’ll admit that I really didn’t have any idea on what I would write about.  I couldn’t come up with anything that I thought had bearing to the topic of “data presentation”

That is, until this morning.

I’m going to go a different direction and probably not show anything technical.  You see, I think that data presentation is really about communication. Yup, you heard me.  Communication.  I want you to talk to your end user.  Engage them to find out how they want the data presented.  After all, it’s probably their data.  We just store it for them and now they need our help to get the data into a meaningful format.

The end user probably doesn’t care if you use a Common Table Expression (which are really cool!), a cursor (not so cool!) or some fancy SSIS package to do the dirty work.  All they really care about is that the data is in a format that is readable, meaningful and makes sense to them.

I’ve been in those conversations before and I would bet you have too.  Everybody is sitting around the room and you start in with how you’ll pull the data and twist it this way and that way.  When you look at your end user, you see their eyes are glazed over like a fresh doughnut.  They probably don’t even know what a CTE is nor do they really care, and I don’t think that they should.  I think that it’s great that we are passionate about doing it right in terms of extracting the data, but usually the end user isn’t technical.  If they were, they probably wouldn’t be coming to you.

So how do you start that conversation? Easy.  Start asking questions.

• Is there any particular format you want the data in?
• What are the requirements for the data? In other words, what is going to be in the WHERE clause.
• Is there going to be any type of grouping?
• Does the data need to be ordered in any fashion?
• Do you want pretty graphs?

And the list could go on and on.

We are just a bunch of nuts afterall!

In a nut shell, it’s really about talking with your end users and find out what they want and/or need. So start asking questions and it will shake out in the end.  By all means, data presentation is one of the most important aspects of what we do.  It is definitely something that all DBA’s should keep in mind as they write their awesome CTE’s or SSIS packages.

After all, data presentation is just a way for the data to communicate something meaningful to the reader.

What A Crowd!

You get nervous when you stand in front of a group of people let alone speaking in front of your peers? Try putting together an event for 200+ people who all share the same passion you do about SQL Server.  Talk about a pressure cooker! I’ve faced full blown structure fires that were easier than this.  However, just like anything that comes with hard work, it is VERY rewarding.

I will say it was quite an honor to be a part of our first SQL Saturday in Omaha, Nebraska. Watching the event come together and knowing that I helped put the show together, even with the headaches, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  There were some issues that we had to face, which I think for our first time, we did so with class and style.

Here are a few things that I made note of as things to share.  If you are planning your very own SQL Saturday for the first time, maybe they’ll help.

Time.

Where Did The Time Go?

Find some.  A lot of it.  I grosslyunder estimated the time commitment it was going to take to put this thing together.  I am very lucky in that I work in an environment that is very community proactive, so I was able to work on things during the day as long as my job responsibilities didn’t slack.  There are phone calls to be made, emails to be answered, decisions to be made and usually all before 9AM.  If you can’t devote a large amount of time to this project, find help.

Delegate.

If possible, get a small group (<10) of individuals together to help plan this thing.  If you don’t know how to delegate and let other people handle things, this is going to be rough for you.  There was an absolutely zero chance of me putting this together by myself.  I certainly don’t have enough hair for that.  Our team meet every other week for months planning and then moved to a weekly meeting about a month out from the event.

Budget

Put together a budget and be realistic in the numbers.  We put pretty high numbers on our budget as we would have rather come in under budget than over.  It’s easy to get rid of the excess funds but it’s quite harder to find some.

Speaking of money, if you don’t have a company to run the funds through, I highly advise that you get yourself a separate bank account so that you don’t have any co-mingling of funds.  I would also advise you to contact your local CPA about any tax issues that you need to be made aware.  If you are the one in charge of the money, be as transparent as possible to the rest of the committee. I setup a “check register” within the drop box folder and kept it updated so that everybody in the group could see what money was being spent on. One thing to note, if PASS holds the funds for you in trust (recommended) they will not report anything to the IRS, that duty falls down to you so definitely ask questions if you have them.

Basically, at the end of the day, you don’t want any funds left over as then that is considered a profit and you might have to pay taxes on it.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not an accountant nor do I claim to be one.  Ask your local CPA about how to best handle the funds for you and your event.

Liability Insurance

It's All About Liability

Find it and buy it.  Make sure that you ask your venue (assuming you found a place) if they have any specific requirements for insurance well in advance.  This one came back to bite us in that we knew that we were going to purchase some, however the University had a non-standard requirement that pushed the cost of the insurance through the roof (>$800).  We didn’t discover this until later in the process which put additional pressure on us.

However, we lucked out in that apparently there is a a company in Texas that specializes in providing liability insurance for Universities.  Here is the URL: http://urmia.bene-marc.com/.  My advice is to call them directly and talk to them.  Their online application process is not that smooth and I found it a LOT easier to talk to them directly. Oh yea, their cost was significantly lower than what I was finding out in the marketplace, which was a bonus for our budget.

Shirts & Event Bags.

If you are going to order custom shirts and event bags, make sure that you order them in time.  This is a fine line you have to walk as it’s tough to order when you don’t have a good idea on numbers on how many you need to order.  It’s much better to have extra on hand than not enough.

Also, plan on things being on back order.  We ordered the shirts and the color we wanted in the larger sizes was on back order so we had to go with Black instead of Red for the larger (3XL) shirts.  Not a big deal, but it’s worth noting.

Technology

There are a couple of things to note here.

1. Drop Box.  Sign up, download it, install it, share it, love it.  This was critical in sharing information as we went through the process of getting things setup for the event.
2. Evernote.  I liked Evernote as it allowed me to take various notes and sync them up to the cloud.  Just like Drop Box, I had this installed on all of my various computers (Home, work, phone,etc) so that I could access my notes very easily where ever I might be.
3. USB Drives.  If you don’t have one, get one.  Just about anything over 1GB would be just fine.  As your event draws closer, keep it with you and keep it updated with the files from the Drop Box.  You never know when you need to transport a file to a vendor for processing and you can’t email it to them.  You can pick up a 8GB drive for less than $10.
4. SQL Saturday Wiki.  This wiki is LOADED with information.  I referred back to it on more than one occasion looking for guidance.  Use it.
5. Twitter.  There are plenty of people out on Twitter who has gone through this process and are willing to help.  You can use the #sqlhelp hash tag in Twitter to ask for additional guidance, although take heed not to abuse that hash tag.  This also helped me out several times. If you have questions, you are welcome to hit me up, @sqlrus.

Have Fun and Keep It Simple.

These are two very important ideals that you need to keep in mind.  Yes, it’s a pressure cooker planning your event, however you need to keep in mind that it’s a free event (other than lunch if you choose to charge for it) and it’s about the community.  If you keep things fun and simple, planning the event and the event itself will be much smoother.  We had to continually remind ourselves of this as there is always the “What if” scenarios and they will show up right up to the day of the event. You have to be flexible and ride the wave.

Water Wings!

More importantly, have some fun with it.  Our SQL Saturday took place in the middle of the Flood of 2011 so in true “geeky” style, we got water wings made up with our SQL Saturday logo.  It was our way to try to have some fun with the event and have some fun with some of the local troubles that Mother Nature threw our way.

Hopefully, some of these will help you to plan a great event.  As you plan your event, make notes of things that work or didn’t work.  The SQL Community is one of the best in the world and after it’s all said and done, share your notes out to the community.  Your notes just might make someone’s future event top notch! =)