On Speaking

“Would you like a comp for the European Summit?”

Lynda Rab was on the other end of the phone, offering me a free registration to the 2006 PASS European Summit in Barcelona. Lynda was on the PASS Board of Directors and could not attend the event. She was offering it to me in exchange for my efforts as part of the PASS Website Special Interest Group. I was fortunate to make arrangements to attend and bring my wife, Suzanne. I remember thinking “things won’t get better than this.”

And then they did.

As part of the comp I was allowed to attend a precon session. I decided to attend a session being delivered by members of the Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS). I didn’t recognize any of the names on the list that day: Bart Duncan, Bob Ward, and Ken Henderson.

It was, without a doubt, the greatest session in the history of PASS.

It’s been eleven years and I still haven’t been in a session as good as that one, on that day.

Ken started his part of the session by reviewing definitions. For 45 minutes he went through a list of terms that we needed to know for the rest of his talk.

Stable media. Hardware read cache. Hardware write cache. Write ordering. FUA. WAL. Log parity. Read retry. Torn I/O. Checksum. Time of last access. Copy on write. Latch. Read ahead. Page read completion. Scatter/gather I/O data pages.

He went through each term. His voice remained the same, very matter-of-fact. It was like sitting in a college lecture.

It was glorious.

Also, it made me realize that I could be up there, too. I spent years teaching mathematics at places like Northeastern and Washington State University. Putting together a full day session was a subset of putting together a 15-week course. I knew I could deliver sessions at SQL Server events, all I needed was the technical experience. Which, of course, is why I was attending the conference.

The night before we left Barcelona, Suzanne and I were sitting in the lobby piano bar. This bar, to be exact:

The place was empty except for a handful of airline pilots and flight attendants.

In walks Ken.

He was with Bob and Bart. I watched as they walked in. To me, they owned the room at that moment. They sat down. I just watched them. I wanted to go over and say hello, but couldn’t. Suzanne told me to go over and introduce myself, but I didn’t.

Instead, I turned to her and said:

“See those three? They are the very best in the world at SQL Server. They are rockstars. And I want to be sitting at that table someday.”

It was then, right then, at that moment in a hotel lobby piano bar in Barcelona, that I decided I would focus on SQL Server as a career.

We flew home and I dove deep into the world of SQL Server. I read everything I could, starting with the SQL Server Unleashed books. I joined forums, blogged, wrote a book, and did tech reviews for other books. At some point I decided to earn some certifications, eventually earning my MCM.

And all because I wanted to sit at a table with Ken, Bob, and Bart.

I saw Ken speak one more time. It was in Denver in 2007, at the PASS Summit. A speaker canceled, leaving an empty room. Someone decided that they could pull together a quick Q&A with Ken, hosted by Kevin Kline. As the room filled up and there were people waiting outside, the event staff decided to take down the partition wall divider, turning a large room into a much larger room. To this day it remains the only PASS session where staff had to remove a wall to allow more people to attend a session.

I sat there next to my friends TJay and Kathi while people streamed into the room. I swear there were 7000 people there by the time it was over. Ken was brilliant, too. I will never forget how, when asked about writing the Guru’s Guide to T-SQL, Ken told the room “you don’t write a book to make money”.

Years later I found a blog post that Ken wrote about PSS being at the PASS Summit in 2006:

I think PSS’ ongoing involvement in the Summit is a wonderful success story for the user community and especially for PASS.  None of this would have been possible had the PASS folks not enthusiastically welcomed fresh ideas and worked hard to make the whole thing happen.  None of it would have survived had the user community not embraced it, and PASS was a big part of that.  I always considered the PASS folks my partner in helping connect PSS and the user community, and much of the credit for all of it coming together rightfully belongs to them.

Read that paragraph again. Now read the whole article again. Throughout the article, Ken gives credit to others, not to himself. To me, that’s the mark of a true leader, someone that understands to lead is to serve.

So I guess it is natural that’s why I gravitated towards SQL Server. It wasn’t just the technology, it was the people. And Ken was nudging me forward through his words and actions. Everything I needed to know about being a good data professional was there, in front of me, 11 years ago:

• Do what you love
• Help others before you help yourself
• Praise publicly, criticize privately
• Connect, share, and learn
• Have empathy for others
• Lead by example
• You don’t need fancy slides, or gimmicks, to attract an audience

 

Summary

So here I am, writing a post about how I got started on my SQL path. In the past 11 years I’ve been speaking at events around the world. I now get paid to write about data, databases, and related topics. I even get paid to tweet (seriously).

Tomorrow I will deliver a session at PASS. Many presenters will tell you that they spent days, weeks, or months prepping for their sessions. I am here to tell you that my session tomorrow was 11 years in the making. Because every presentation I deliver, every time I am speaking in front of a room, is built upon the lessons from all my previous sessions.

And I can trace them all back to the one moment, in a hotel lobby piano bar in Barcelona.