Category: PASS Community Summit
This morning's post is from Brian Knight, who will be presenting ETL with SSIS Bootcamp - you can find more about his session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/BIA225P.
Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
In the first hour of the presentation, we cover the basics of SSIS and then quickly jump into more hard core SSIS. If you’re a novice you’ll get a lot out of the session on building the best performing packages with lots of tips and tricks along the way that you won’t get elsewhere.
After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
The thing that excites me about this presentation is the surprise real world data (no, not AdventureWorks). We’re going to show how to performance tune SSIS, load a data warehouse and solve common business problems with SSIS, like data cleansing.
What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
Even though we show a little about the SSIS basics, we drive into the meat of the presentation fast. So ideally, the attendee should know the basics of the various components in SSIS and what they can do.
What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I’ve been using SSIS since the early beta stages of SQL Server 2005 and DTS prior to that. I’ve implemented it across hundreds of customers and trained thousands of students on how to use it. I’ll bring real world insight to how you can scale and use SSIS.
You can register for the 2010 PASS Summit here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Registration.aspx
See you in November!
Today's post is from Denny Cherry, who will be presenting Storage and Virtualization for the DBA - you can find more about his session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/DBA491P.
Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
All DBAs that work in companies where they don’t make the storage decisions.
After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
- DBAs will have a better understanding of the storage solutions that their companies have purchased.
- DBAs will be able to bridge the communications gap between storage/system admins and the DBA team.
- The attendees will have a better understanding of the advanced features which are present within their storage arrays to reduce costs and storage requirements for second and third level systems (dev, qa, stage, etc).
What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
A general understanding of storage would be nice, but none is required.
What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I’ve been a product storage administrator for 5 years at three different companies and I can talk intelligently about various different storage solutions.
You can register for the 2010 PASS Summit here: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/Registration.aspx
See you in November!
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Chalk Talk sessions at the PASS Community Summit. These sessions are shorter, 40 minute sessions, and they happen in the vendor expo hall at the Summit. In the past, this has been a Microsoft sponsored event with Microsoft sponsored speakers. These were discussion focused sessions – a combination of presentation and Q&A session.
Guess what? It is a Microsoft exclusive event no longer!
We’re opening up the Chalk Talk sessions to community speakers. There’s a catch, though. You have to meet the following criteria:
- You are currently attending the PASS Community Summit.
- You are not speaking at the PASS Community Summit.
- You submitted a session to the PASS Community Summit that was not accepted.
That’s pretty stringent requirements. So, what do you get in return? Unfortunately, we can’t offer comp codes for this. But we’ve got something extra in store. In addition to speaking in the Chalk Talk Theater, we're also introducing Lightning Talks!
Lightning Talks!
Yeah, that’s right: Lightning Talks. We’re doing them at the Summit this year. Just in case you don’t know, a lightning talk is a short, prepared talk. We’re going to aim for 5 minute talks. That should keep things moving quickly.
We like this idea so much that we’ve dedicated one session every day to nothing but lightning talks!
All of the details around Lightning Talks aren't finalized yet, but we’ll keep you posted.
How Does This Help You?
If you’re not going to get a comp code (BOO!), how does giving a Chalk Talk help you?
1) You get exposure – You can put on your speaker resume that you spoke at the PASS Summit in the Chalk Talk Theater.
2) You get exposure – You’ll be presenting a separate lightning talk with other speakers and it will be witnessed by a boatload of people.
3) You get exposure – see points 1 & 2
Should I Submit the Same Abstract?
I would say “probably not.” Chalk Talks are a different format than a standard 75 minute session. They’re shorter (only 40 minutes) and they involve more audience participation (a lot more). Feel free to submit similar topics, but be prepared for a different audience and delivery.
Visit the Call for Speakers to get started.
This year the Program Committee decided to try something different to increase community involvement with the abstract selection process for the annual summit. We decided to allow any registered PASS members to vote on the final 4 community sessions to be presented at the Summit in Seattle this year. With our historically low turnout in surveys of our membership, I turned to the team at PASSHQ with a simple question about whether or not we could use the same voting tool that is in place for the upcoming Board of Directors election. Considering our surveys have traditionally resulted in 300-500 results , at the time I put a personal goal on the survey response rate of 500, anything greater than that and I would consider the time and energy It took to put it together a win, anything less and well, we wouldn’t be doing any more exploring in the use of public voting for Summit Sessions.
I’m VERY pleased to say that by all indications, the voting process was a great success, sure we will always aim to do better but, for now, having over 1100 people vote on what they want to see at the Summit is a huge win for PASS as an organization. In the App Dev group, the winner was declared by 2 votes. 2 votes out of 600 is pretty outstanding, if you didn’t take the time and vote, you could have been the vote that swayed the result!! Don’t miss your chance next time!! The winning sessions can be found here.
I want to take the time to thank each and every member of the awesome PASS Community who voted. As well as Jeremiah Peschka (Twitter|Blog) & Lori Edwards (Twitter|Blog) for dealing with my crazy ideas on putting this together, and keeping me in check. Andy Warren (Twitter|Blog) for helping me get the voting tool he built for pass working for this use. Id also like to give a huge thanks to Hannes, Wesley and Elena at PASSHQ for helping bring all of this to PASS (pun intended)
If forums are your game - then please send me your name!
We are actively searching for volunteers for the following:
1. Two (2) main moderators who assist the administrator on the Summit forums; they will also help “seed” boards by starting topics, asking questions, and engaging posters [estimated time about 15-30 minutes daily; avg = 2.5 hrs/week]
2. Two (2) “seeders” whose main job is to start topics and engage posters on a regular basis to keep conversation flowing on the Summit forums.[estimated time about 15 minutes daily; avg = 2 hrs/week]
This is a great way to get involved and gauge the pulse of the Summit. If you are interested, please send me an email at nancy.nasso@sqlpass.org (submission deadline is July 30, 2010)
Thanks in advance!
Nancy Nasso, Community Coordinator
Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Headquarters
Phone: 604.899.6269 I Fax: 604.899.1269 I Email: nancy.nasso@sqlpass.org I http://www.sqlpass.org
I’ve never had the opportunity to be on the abstract selection committee, so it was interesting to see the process in action. To be clear, I was not on one of the selection committees, but I am on the Program Committee so I was still involved in the process.
The abstract selection committees are chosen out of the group of people that apply to volunteer for the Program Committee. We work to ensure that each team includes at least one person that has been on an abstract selection team in the past. Our hope is that they can provide some additional guidance. We also provide at least one training session to go over the tools and answer any initial questions.
Prior to the call to speakers, the number of allocated sessions are set. They are allocated in total to fit the number of rooms that we have available. That total number is then split between the tracks (Application and Database Development, BI Architecture, Development and Administration, BI Client Reporting and Delivery Topics, Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment and Professional Development) to help make certain that we provide a balanced Summit selection.
Once the call to speakers closed, we knew that the abstract review committees were going to be in for a lot of work. Here are the numbers that we were looking at:
Total # of regular session abstracts submitted: 513
# of regular session community slots allocated: 72
Doing the math, that means that only 14% of the abstracts submitted were going to be selected. Within the tracks, that percentage ranged from 11% to 18%.
During the review process, the individuals on each team go through the abstracts in their track and rate them on 4 different areas – Abstract, Topic, Speaker and Subjective. Each of these areas are rated using a 1-10 scale and there is an area for comments. The abstract section has to do with, among other things, whether the abstract was complete (were session goals identified?), clear (was it easy to understand what the session would be about?) and interesting. The topic referred to the interest in and relevancy of the chosen topic. As far as the speaker – the abstract review teams had access to a report that provided previous Summit evaluation data for previous Summit speakers. They could also draw on personal knowledge or other information that they had access to. All of the individual scores added up to a total rating per abstract for the team.
Once the individual team members were finished with the evaluations, they came together as a team to rank the sessions. Along with looking at the total rating, they also looked at the different topics that were covered to ensure that the sessions covered a broad range of topics. Once the abstracts were ranked, the teams updated the session status to Approved, Alternate or Considered (Not accepted). If the status was Considered, the teams provided a reason as to why the abstract was not selected.
At that point the list of sessions came back to the Program Committee managers. We made certain the correct number of sessions per track were chosen and that no speakers had more than two sessions. There were a couple of cases where speakers had more than two sessions – for these cases, we went back to the teams for additional selections.
That’s it. Well, I guess I mean, those are all of the steps – it’s a ton of work and I’m grateful to everyone involved for all of their hard work. We recognize that there are probably ways to improve the process and we’re in the process of setting up meetings with all of the teams to get their input. I hope this provides clarification to some of the questions that people might have about the abstract selection process.
The call for speakers is closed and the selection committees are about to begin reviewing the abstracts. Before they get started, here are a few little pieces of trivia about the sessions.
Keep in mind that I have done minimal cleansing on this data so it’s going to be a bit messy and unreliable for anything apart from entertainment purposes.
Raw Numbers
There were 574 sessions submitted this year by 209 speakers working for a total of 163 separate companies.
Out of a total of 127 job titles, the most common one was “Consultant”. Or, it would be until you take into account the different variations of DBA, Database Administrator, etc. Taking that into account, 20 of you are some kind of DBA.
If you want to get a bit fuzzier about the numbers:
- 17 of you are an engineer and are probably measuring something with calipers right now
- 12 of you identify as a manager
- 12 of you think you’re a developer
- 27 of you claim to be a consultant
- 11 of you work in B.I.
- 32 of you claim to be architects. You draw squares and arrows to represent work.
All of you work for a total of 163 different companies. Unless some of you can’t spell your company’s name right. Then you may work for fewer companies, I’m not sure. The data, as I said, is dirty.
The Submissions
The average length of a session abstract was 617.7 characters or 99.19 words with a standard deviation of 243 characters and 39 words. Out of all the presentations, 187 have never been presented before. They may very well be 100% fresh in November when you arrive.
Here’s the distribution between the different levels:
- 100 Level (Novice) - 109 sessions
- 200 Level (Intermediate) - 239 sessions
- 300 Level (Advanced) - 178 sessions
- 400 Level (Expert) - 44 sessions
- 500 Level (Advanced Expert) - 2 sessions
Pre/Post Conference
42 total pre/post conference sessions were submitted. That’s a lot of competition for a few slots.
- 14 were B.I. (9 for architecture and 5 for reporting/delivery)
- 13 relate to DBA work
- 12 relate to application development
- 3 relate to professional development
The only conclusion I can draw is that very few of us are prepared to talk about our careers for a single work day. Are you playing Legend of Zelda at work all day? What’s up with that, guys? People making a living talking about this kind of stuff.
Spotlight Sessions
There were 58 spotlight sessions submitted and I’m afraid to say that your day jobs fared even worse in this section.
- 20 were DBA related topics
- 15 were development topics (this better not be all IronPerl … I mean PowerShell)
- 13 were somehow related to B.I. architectural whatnot
- 5 were related to B.I. reporting and delivery. Apparently these guys are too busy making money to talk at the PASS Summit for 8 hours.
- 5 of you thought that you could talk about your job for 90 minutes. Good for you. That’s long enough to get to the good parts in Krull or watch any number of amazing kung fu movies.
The distribution is starting to skew a bit here. If we combined the BI tracks it would look a lot more like the pre/post conference situation.
Here is where you guys clearly shine. You submitted a whopping 472 sessions. That’s an average of 2.25 per person. While not bad, you could have submitted 4. I’m just saying that maybe next year you should pick it up a little bit.
- 137 application development topics. We’re number 1, we’re number 1
- 135 DBA topics put this in at a close second.
- 113 BI architecture topics
- 48 Professional development (you can talk for 75 minutes about your job, but not 90?)
- 39 B.I. reporting topics. I think these people really must have jobs to do, because that’s not a lot.
Or, “Enter Now for Your Chance to Win!”
Hey, I bet you've heard that the PASS Call for Speakers is now open.
No matter what your skill level as a public speaker, I would encourage you to submit an abstract. Even if you think you're not good enough or don't have enough speaking experience, go ahead and submit an abstract. It may be your lucky day and your abstract will be selected; at worst, it will be practice in the art of composing a good abstract.
Why will this be good experience? After looking through thousands of abstract submissions for years, I've decided that composing a good abstract is an art. It requires equal parts black magic and pixie dust to make a good abstract, and even when you have that, it takes a bit of luck to get it accepted at a national conference.
In order to help potential speakers understand why their abstracts weren't selected, last year I asked the review teams to tag each unaccepted abstract with a reason that it couldn't be accepted. As you might expect, this created quite a bit of extra work for the teams. But for new speakers, there should be good value in knowing whether the reason for no selection was the competition, a poor abstract, lack of interest in the topic, or some other reason noted. The system isn't perfect by any means because we don't have the means to provide a detailed reason for no selection, but hopefully it's useful.
One final reason I think everyone reading this should submit an abstract: If during the submission process you select the «speaker bureau» check box, your info will be used by other PASS events needing speakers, so you will have more potential exposure that will help you get the experience needed to speak at the Summit.
Important pages I would use if I were submitting an abstract to ANY SQL-related event:
– Allen Kinsel
As we get deeper into the logistics and planning process for 2010 PASS Summit, Craig Ellis from PASS HQ sent out an email today asking if we wanted to plan broadcasting a live track at the summit for the community not in attendance. This was based on some feedback and suggestions we had received from a couple of board and community members. I have put the discussion in front of the board and also want to solicit your input. Some of the considerations the board will need to weigh include... Read the rest of entry »
It feels like eternity, yet only 6 weeks back the PASS community came together in Seattle for yet another exciting summit. The educational content was cutting edge and the company comprised of who's who of the Microsoft SQL Server world. This year's summit certainly did not fail to excite and rejuvenate everyone who attended.
The PASS board and the terrific team at HQ worked extremely hard all year to build the community at large and support various community initiatives. The summit was a time for the entire team to reach into the community, to receive input on how they had done so far and what they should do moving forward. Although the summit itself was demanding, it was also a time to celebrate successes.
As we went through the pictures from the summit, we found this collection of amazing pictures of our board members. We hope you enjoy them as well. Read the rest of entry »
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