It Depends

Flawed URL Validation and Not Eating Your Own Dog Food

MS includes a bunch of reasonably nice validation controls in VS 2005 and one of them includes the ability to validate that a string is a valid (syntactically) a URL. Sort of. If you don't prefix it with 'http://', it says it's invalid. I'd argue that we could just assume it's supposed to be there, but I guess erring on the side of caution is ok. But today, I was just about to post a link on www.opass.org about http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;912914&sd=rss&spid=2855 and the stupid control says it is not a valid URL, yet clearly I can browse to it! Possibly I'm missing some service pack, hot fix, or super secret turbo switch. Then again, maybe the MSDN guys don't use their own controls?

Building a Local User Group

I've had a couple people ask me about ideas for growing (as opposed to starting) a SQL user group. While it's definitely a lot about content, formula, and presentation, it's just like running a business, it all comes back to marketing. That said, here are a few suggestions:

• Ask PASS to email everyone in your area. They won't (and shouldn't) give you the list directly, but they can do a one time intro email to those in your area and then run announcements about upcoming events in the bi-weekly newsletter.
• Submit each meeting to the big community sites (SQLTeam, SQL-Server-Performance, SSC), they will usually advertise them for you
• Contact the IT chair of any local colleges
• Get to know the leader of the closest .Net user group and the nearest INETA mentor
• Get to know the nearest MS Developer Evangelist. They are typically very good at helping you network with other groups. Here in Fla Joe Healy has been my contact and has really been helpful.
• Contact as many local staffing companies as you can. They all want to meet more prospects and they always appreciate a reason to email/talk to their existing client base. They are more than happy to advertise your event (and probably buy the pizza too!)
• Ask every member that attends to tell one new member about the group. Remember that not everyone will attend every time, so focus on growing the mailing list AND attendance
• Don't forget to get to know all the other groups. Other SQL groups in the same state, other types of computer groups, all are usually willing to post your event (and vice versa)

Most of us running groups dream of the day the group is self sustaining. Can't say we've reached that state in Orlando or that we've got it all figured out either. Drop me a note if you've got other ideas, always room for more.

More & Better News about the PASS Summit from Edgewood

I try not to just post links to other content, but the guys at Edgewood did a pretty good job of capturing what was happening at the conference and I like to promote PASS where I can. Here is what they had to say about Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Wayne Synder Elected President of PASS

Congratulations to Wayne on becoming President! I've known him for years and you couldn't ask for a guy with more passion about PASS to lead the organization. He's just a down to earth nice guy that wants to do a good job and takes the responsibility very seriously.

SSC Site Upgrade

I see they finally rolled out the new site. Lots of annoying quirks so far, the biggest for me is that the URL's in the notification emails aren't coming across as hyperlinks, forcing me to copy/paste into a browser. Given that I look at a couple dozen a day, this is really annoying. I'll be curious to see how the general community reacts to the change!

Notes from PASS - Part 3

Today was interesting. I headed for breakfast and after a few stops to chat with friends, wound up sitting with some guys from South Korea, one of whom is actually the chapter leader. We talked a little about the challenges of trying to be a PASS chapter outside of the US and it being that much harder since the native language obviously isn't English. It was their first time at PASS, said it was a 10 hr flight, a lot worse than the 3.5 hr flight up from Orlando. They said they were having a great time and hoped to come again. Can't ask for better than that. I also got to meet - and I dont the card in hand to remind me of the name - the leader of the Louisville group. Good start to the day!

I also had a chance to catch up with Ulysses from the Orlando Chapter. PASS allows each Chapter President to attend the conference at no cost (they do not pay travel) and since I was getting in free as a speaker, we worked it out that another group member could leverage the offer. Ulysses attendeded the volunteer day on Tues and even volunteered at the PASS booth. When we get back he'll be writing up his impressions for posting on www.opass.org and he'll be talking to the group at our upcoming Oct meeting about his impressions. He said he was having a great time and hoped to attend again next year.

I saw very few glitches at the conference this year. Bravo to the PASS volunteers and the team at CCEvents for making it seem effortless. Not that I don't have a complaint or two! Would be nice to have some different stuff for breakfast, every day it was the same fresh fruit/bagels/muffins, and why the heck was the coffee so far away from the food? Coffee was pretty good though. I also wish (and I know it costs) that they could always have coffee and water available instead of just certain breaks.

I skipped the keynote to do one last run through on my replication session. Spotlight sessions run 1.5 hours and wanted to make sure my "extra" material was good in case the presentation went faster than expected. Headed up early to set up and had a chance to talk with a MS guy (Im not so good at names sometimes) and we discussed database mirroring. I was expecting that they were doing something similar to the logreader that transactional replication uses, but it turns out they move pages rather than commands. Can't say it matters, but was interesting to discuss. I was surprised to have almost a full room, probably 50 people, and possibly the best bunch I've had, must have had 50+ questions. Dennis Tight from MS replication attended and caught up with me afterward. Found out that Bren Newman has left MS (big repl guy) and also that I answered one question wrong, it IS possible to do partial subscriptions but with some restrictions. I need to look into it since I both got it wrong and I don't really see a good reason for it! Also got to chat for just a min with Jeff Aven - the Imceda/litespeed guy, and it looks like he is back in the game. Great guy and I'm looking forward to checking out their product in the next month or so.

After wrapping up there I spent a few minutes talking to Steve, he was still on a bit about the bad presentation yesterday. I get frustrated by bad sessions too, but I also know that somedays it just doesn't go well and try to remember what its like to be on the other side. Im headed back to Orlando as I write this and tomorrow back to the office to catch up on things.

Notes from PASS 2007 - Part 2

Denver is a great location for a conference. The convention center is two blocks from the 16th street mall - must be 10-12 blocks of shops, restaurants, etc. I stayed at the Courtyard Marriott, small rooms, but directly on 16th St, and nice enough. Only downside is the airport is about a zillion miles from town, runs about $50-60 if you tax in. This time of year is perfect too, great weather. I imagine more years than not the conference will be in Seattle to leverage the MS presence, but they should plan to return to Denver again sometime soon.

Keynote this morning wasn't bad, usually spin and backstory before they got to the demos. SQL 2008 gets the ability to manage servers via the equivalent of Group Policy, long overdue! Spatial data types and indexes look interesting and the demo they did wasnt bad, though was slow in one case. They also finally are providing a way to throttle queries, sort of. You can create different buckets that get x resources, then use a function to specify which bucket a connection falls in to. It works great if you can put MainProductionApp.exe in a bucket and give it 30%, and let anything else run in the "other" bucket and give it 40% or so. In that case even if someone runs the proverbial cross join in the other bucket the MainProductionApp is unaffected. In practice most applications expose search or similar functionality that can often be pretty tough, though not as bad as a cross join. You can get the same results by executing those queries with a different connection string so that they fall in the "other" pool, otherwise one user running the query from hell can still affect all the other production users. They explain it better than I did, and its a great improvement, time will tell if its enough.

Spent more time today just talking shop with old friends and new. Had the chance to spend a good bit of time with Greg & Jeremy from Edgewood. We go back a ways and are about the nicest guys in the business. They also run http://www.mssqltips.com/ which is nicely packaged and pretty useful, worth looking at when you have time. Finished up the day at the SQLSentry party, who are also nice guys - they work hard, have a good product, and always played fair back when we were selling them ad space on SSC. And no, no vested interest in either of them, other than nice guys deserve some recognition from time to time!

Lots more discussion about PASS chapters today, in the next couple days I'll finish up my wish list. Not as big as you might think and I think most of it would be easy to do. Then again, it's easy to say easy when you're making the list and not executing it.

Technical Speaking - Again

One of the points mentioned in the volunteer meeting on Tuesday was that it makes a lot of sense to grow local speakers rather than try to always bring in the 'big name' speakers. I agree with this and there is much you can do to try encourage that first step from attendee to speaker, but I was reminded by a friend yesterday that some of us have done it, could do it, but just prefer not too. Good to remember that all of us have some mental roadblocks that we may or may not want to remove. Anyone reading this want to do telemarketing? Would any amount of training, coaching, etc, make a difference on that? You could do it, but you wouldn't be happy. The conversation yesterday was a great reminder to be careful about pushing too hard to get someone to speak no matter how much potential they have. Sometimes it's just not a good fit and we should respect that.

Another good conversation was about someone trying to ascend the ladder to be among the 'high' speakers, you know, the ones that speak at PASS and similar events. Most things seem daunting until you try them and do them a couple times, but I can't say enough - speaking at PASS requires very specific domain knowledge, the will to submit an abstract and present if selected, and a bit of luck to wind up on the schedule. The 'very specific domain knowledge' is the key part. It doesn't have to be about how do some really arcane and difficult topic and often shouldn't be. Instead, imagine if you submitted a topic you're passionate about. Solved an interesting problem, learned a new way to solve an old problem, etc, all can be as good a topic as any other speaker may present.

That's not to say that some sessions don't draw 200 people and some draw 10. It's fine to try to come up with a big draw session, but its really about satisfying the ones that come to your session. Earlier this year at the Orlando Code Camp my friend Bayer White had 1 person attend his session - so for over an hour this person got 1 on 1 attention on a subject he was really interested in. Good day for both of them in my view.

We all choose to speak for different reasons; giving back to the community, increasing name recognition, maybe just adding something to the resume. The reason doesn't matter - you don't to be that pure of heart! Just remember that the only difference between you and the person speaking is that something motivated them to share something about their profession with you that they have been forced to learn a lot about. Doesn't mean they are smarter than you!

Not sure I said that well, but maybe it will do!

Notes from PASS 2007

I attended the morning portion of the volunteer/chapter meeting today and got to put some names with faces for some of the groups we do hosting for (note, if you need to host a sql chapter and you can live with what you see at www.opass.org, email me). Good sized group present, and was interesting to see a lot of them had been involved since the early years. Greg Low did a quick presentation on User Groups and it was the best part of the day for me. He pointed out some lessons he (and I!) had learned the hard way and a few things that were useful. For example, he said that just personalizing emails sent out to group members increased the attendance rate. Easy enough to do, but we haven't been doing in Orlando. Worth trying. I haven't read his book but at about $17 at Amazon I think its worth getting (Building Technical Communities

We also got some updates on the various areas of PASS. One interesting tidbit is that the move to a new management company is projected to reduce annual management costs by 50%. Substantial. The new company seems competent and helpful and PASS gets them on a dedicated rather than time sharing basis. I think its been a painful transition, but post conference hopefully we'll see more timely replies on chapter and other misc business. An unfortunate side affect - I think - is that PASS is not going to provide liability insurance to chapters for at least the short term, perhaps longer - changing mgmt companies they no longer get the super discounted rate that made it possible. I suspect most venues have insurance, but still, in this day, who wants to run the risk?

We got a high level look at the financials and while interesting, it wasn't the line item level look that I think would have been helpful. PASS is still primarily supported by the conference, and obviously the conference is it biggest expense. Lots of questions about wanting more detail because many members/prospects ask. Just to be clear, no one is questioning the integrity of anyone at any level of PASS, but in the lack of disclosure many tend to jump to conclusions. I think the leadership sees the need for transparency but in my view are being overly timid about making more detail available to the general membership. I can see where it will suck; people nitpicking your spending decisions and have to include some kind of narrative about big points, but I think it will be mainly a one time exercise and then we can just look at year over year numbers. Why does it matter? Well, for example they announced that they were funding the Speaker Bureau sufficiently to provide 20 speakers, but sadly there are about 40 chapters. Said entirely in the absense of detailed knowledge of other requirements, I would have cut something else to get the additional - and fairly small - amount of money to make sure each chapter could get one PASS paid for speaker during the year.

One of the best parts of the conf is running into all the people I only see once a year, or meeting people I only correspond with. Lots of great people and I should have tried to write down their names! I was thrilled in particular to see my friend Michael Lato is presenting a topic on Fri - good luck Michael, and go see him if you get the chance.

I spent some time at the PASS reception, but its just a bit noisy and crowded, not the best environment for talk, then headed over to the SSC reception. Steve did his usual great job of getting it all set up, getting the shirts and books and all the details that make it work. For once I could just relax and talk to friends old and new and that was a nice change. Still, dont we think Steve should come up with a new theme for next year besides gambling - he needs a challenge!

And one not quite on topic comment. Saw Chuck Heinzelman (now the managing editor of the SQL Server Standard) and Steve & I teasing him a bit about being from Wisconsin. One thing led to another and I ended up promising to send him $50 if he would send me a video of him joining the polar bear club. He needed a laugh or two after a busy time, and besides, it would be worth $50 if he does it - ask him if you see him.

Technical Speaking - Some Misc Thoughts

Last week I taught 'Successful Technical Speaking' for the first time - it's a free four class I put together for End to End Training to help train local speakers for the upcoming SQLSaturday, or maybe just to speak at an oPASS meeting. Getting people to speak for the first time is hard! They often have unfair expectations about how good they need to be combined with a natural fear of failure, so we thought it might be good to provide some coaching if we're going to try to talk people into speaking! The class went pretty well and I think eventually I may extend it to about 7 hours to allow more time to practice, and to spend more time on the public speaking aspect.

In this case the students had already done some speaking but were hoping for some pointers, and it seemed like out of all the stuff we discusssed (a lot!), the thing that was seen as absolutely new and useful to them was my 10/10 rule, that is, the 10 minutes before and after the speaking engagement are really key to your success. You need 10 minutes to get set up, test AV, and then just get into the Zen state required to speak, and then the 10 minutes afterward are where most speakers fail - they are tired and ready to be done, and they ignore (or at least don't enjoy) the people that crowd around to ask questions. In my experience a strong close there really helps. You move people to the back or out of the room, then take additional questions for as long as you can. Those people - out of all the ways that attended - really found something of interest in what you said and are hoping to explore it more deeply.

Off to the PASS Summit in Denver

I'm flying out tomorrow for the event and looking forward to it, nice break from the office/work routine, a chance to learn some new stuff, and to see friends that I only get to see once a year. First time I'll be in Denver during decent weather, all my previous trips it was miserably cold!

Tuesday I'm attending the chapter leader event to see what is new and exciting in that world and then have a couple meetings, Wed I get to just be a regular attendee and soak up presentations, and then on Thursday I'm presenting "Transactional Replication For Beginners". The talk should be fun as it's really just a walk through with me narrating and answering questions, not quite a "demo" session. Normally I stay all week and return Sat morning, but this year I'll be leaving Thurs evening to be back for some scheduled stuff on Friday.

How Many Good Hours Do Employees Work?

You might call me a bean counter, but it's a fact that every manager needs to manage the distractions that take time away from the real work that needs to be done by their team. At my last job I tried to never let meetings and other interruptions grow beyond 8 hrs/week, leaving a mythical 32 hours for "real" coding. In practice I had a very hard time getting that number to average about 30, usually due to interruptions to clarify specs or to accomodate the somehow unavoidable task switching. If the numbers started to trend below 28 hrs/week that was a sign that we were losing focus and needed to go back to managing our time a little more aggressively.

And note, it's even more true now that Im part of a 3 person company. I have to stay focused or important things don't get done!

All of this came up because a recent blog post from Steve McConnell (the Code Complete guy) wrote that trying to figure out what that weekly goal should be is very very hard and not easy to achieve. Smarter guy than I am and a much wider range of experience, but it was interesting to see that someone is asking/looking at the issue. No easy answers!

Dell Selling an iSCSI Box

Saw an plug for it from our sales rep yesterday, MD3000i. Starts at $7300 with just a couple drives, goes up to about $25k maxed out at 18TB. I've always considered the Powervault stuff pretty usable/reliable compared to the complexity of a SAN, but I see in the configuration that if you're going to connect to 8 or more servers it requires an on-site implementation (at no cost). Maybe not so simple anymore?

SQLSaturday - Who are the Customers?

For those who might not have browsed previous posts I'm heading up a free one day training event called SQLSaturday as part of my efforts on behalf of oPASS. It's been an interesting experience so far and we received a lot of good initial info from the ONETUG team. But being slightly competitive, we're trying to drive the quality of the event higher than customers might expect of a free event. Customers at a free event? Absolutely! Which brings us finally to the point...

Attendees expect a lot even if it's free. Of course one part of that is to set their expectations before they arrive, so far we've focused on the schedule and free lunch, but no details beyond that. As we get a bit closer we'll be providing them with both a PDF and printed program guide that has details on check in, lunch, raffles, the after event, etc. It's not so much that everything has to be done as well as it might be at a "real/paid for" event, but it's nice to meet their expectations.

So we're looking at how to make sure the attendees - the real focus after all - have a good enjoyable event. But I think where the Code Camps often miss the mark is they don't work as hard for their other customers; the people providing the facility, the volunteers, the speakers, and the sponsors. That's not to say they do nothing for those groups, just that it often feels half hearted. For example, here's a little thing that can really help a speaker; make sure there is plenty of cold bottled water on hand in the room! Couldn't the speaker carry their own water? Sure, but most are getting in the zone right before and are reviewing their material, they tend to forget about water until about 10 mins in under the glare of the projector.

Why worry about anyone except the attendees? Well, just like a business, I need them all as customers again for SQLSaturday 2008. If I don't look after the facility people, take care of volunteers, etc, it becomes that much harder to make each event better than the last because we keep repeating year one over and over again.

Will we succeed? Remains to be seen, but even if we don't quite live up to our own expectations it won't be for lack of thought and effort. Posted by Andy Warren with no comments