Today is the final day for the PASS 2006 Community Summit, and I am quite tired. Still, I am up early and heading over to meet with some of the best DBA’s in the world to discuss an idea that Bill Wunder has regarding an open source initiative. In a nutshell, Bill is looking to form a group that can help to facilitate the creation of a toolbox that other DBA’s can use and improve upon. I am fascinated by the idea, and that is why I decide that sleep can wait until I get home tomorrow.
After our breakfast, we head on up to the general session to listen to some speakers, one from Dell and the other from Microsoft. As always, there are some humorous moments, especially when someone from Microsoft demonstrates how they too can be quite frustrated with their own products. After they were done, the new board members were introduced and I was quite excited for the newly elected members.
One of them, Lynda Rab, has worked very hard for PASS these past few years and I am quite happy to see that she now has a formal position on the board. Next up, the volunteers need to figure out where we want to dedicate our time in the upcoming year. I love how I can volunteer my time to the association and I do not have to be pigeon-holed into doing the same thing as I have done previously. It allows me to remain interested, to remain enthusiastic, and most importantly to continue to develop my skills in areas that are unfamiliar to me such as marketing or project management.
The first session of the day was on advanced tuning techniques in SS2K5. While it was somewhat interesting to see some of the advanced ideas, it was disappointing that we did not see any real demonstrations. The session was not very interactive, and to be honest I do not see myself ever needing to use any of the techniques that were presented.
After the session it was lunch time, and “the gang” got together. Lunch was a bit long today, and we spent over an hour together before heading up to the afternoon sessions. But we remained quite productive during lunch as we were able to come up with new ideas for some of us to develop our own hooks, such as the Faceless DBA, the Unknown DBA, and your favorite, Crazy DBA.
The second session was on Zen and database automation. This session was better than the one in the morning, but it was more of a lecture than anything interactive. But the speaker was dynamic enough to hold our interest as we listened to his discussion involving where our field is headed. Essentially, as a DBA, we are holding the reins of a runaway horse. So, it would be best if we figured out ways to make our lives easier, before they get far too complex.
The third session of the day may be the best session I had during the conference. I attended thirteen sessions, if you include the pre-conference seminar, and this is easily in the top three, and there are a few reasons how it earns votes for the top overall. It was given by Peter Ward, a bloke I met this week who hails from somewhere near Brisbane, Australia.
The subject was on Server Management Objects, or SMO. Essentially, Peter demonstrated just how easy it is to build our own SMO objects to assist in our administration of server instances. His talk was easy to follow, and his examples were easy to understand. Plus, he was hitting a nerve for everyone in the room. We all have too many servers to manage, and we all have tools, hand-crafted or purchased, to assist in our jobs. But here was Peter showing us something simple that we could do for ourselves. I bet the geek in every person in that room came out during that talk as they started to think about how they would apply the use of SMO in their own shop. I know that I am ready to get started on various things, such as pushing out scripts to my servers, or gathering data from them, and tying it to report services, etc. The possibilities are endless, they really are limited only by our imaginations, and it also ties back to the open source initiative.
The last talk was something near and dear to my heart, titled “What I wish Developers Knew About SQL Server”. It offered some good information geared towards developers regarding how they should build code, specifically how they should examine query plans to see if their statements are efficient, or how to tune cursors, or avoid them altogether.
And that was it. The conference was over, and I had to catch a flight. I had a few hours to spare, so I ended up having dinner with five of my closest PASS colleagues. We all discussed what we want to do for PASS in the upcoming year, and what we want to do for ourselves professionally. After dinner it was off to the airport, and I arrived back home on Saturday morning. I added up the hours for the week and checked my math.
Ninety-four hours!
Twenty three of those were traveling back and forth between cities, leaving seventy-one, or an average of about fourteen hours a day. That sounds about right.
Thanks for the memories and I hope to see everyone in Denver next year.
