SQL Saturday #271 Albuquerque New Mexico

February 5, 2014February 4, 2014 ~ SqlAsylum ~ Leave a comment

Seems like just last weekend I was heading off to New Mexico for my First SQL Saturday of the year. It was actually 2 weeks ago but who’s counting. 🙂

I arrived really late Friday night unfortunately so I missed the speaker dinner. I checked in did some double checks on my presentation and headed off to bed. The event started at 8:00 so it was an early morning for me. I picked up Gabrielle (blog|Twitter) from his hotel at about 7:00 a.m. so we could get over to the event early and help setup.

This was the first SQL Saturday I had attended where I had not organized the event or been part of the organizing committee. It’s very different in the morning to not have nearly as much stress that comes with putting on an event. Not that the SQL Saturday team had anything to worry about they put on an excellent event and took great care of the attendees, speakers and sponsors. I was really impressed with how they did and how smooth it ran.

We had a great space for the speaker room so I quickly got in and started to test my presentation and get my computer setup. I recently moved to a new computer and it only has 8GB of ram since I was running a VM and SQL server I wanted to make sure I only had open what I needed.

My presentation time came around and I felt I was ready to go. The presentation really went well in my opinion even though my demo did fail. The issue of not having enough ram came back to bite me. When I was trying to run my Sqoop import the computer froze on me. I couldn’t get back to my Power point or anything with the VM. Luckily we had enough questions and discussion to get around the issue. The rest of the presentation went pretty well after that. Overall I was satisfied that everyone learned something in the presentation.

The rest of the afternoon I attended some other sessions but also spent some time hanging out in the speaker room catching up with friends I usually only see once a year at the PASS Summit. It was really nice to just sit and chat with them. I made sure to spend some time at lunch chatting with people I didn’t know as well so that I can make new contacts in the future.

The end of the day giveaways went well and then we headed off to some cocktails/food for an after party. It was great to sit down and chat with others and talk about all the various projects they have going on.

I woke up early Sunday morning and went out to greet the sunrise I ended up with a few good shots. Overall it was a great weekend and I can’t wait till my next SQL Saturday weekend at a future event. I’ve submitted to SQL Saturday Las Vegas and SQL Saturday Madison hopefully I will be able to speak at both. I really want to make it back to NM next year as well

All my photos of the event are located here.

What to do when the demo goes bad

January 28, 2014January 27, 2014 ~ SqlAsylum ~ Leave a comment

ABGNMSunrise — An Early Morning sunrise at SQL Saturday 271

This weekend I attended and spoke at SQL Saturday #271 in Albuquerque, NM. This was my first time speaking outside my own events so it was a new experience for me. I spent some time in the speaker room during the morning getting my computer setup for the presentation later that day.

I started out with my presentation and slides and everything was going well. Very interactive group (I like questions throughout the session) and lots of good discussion. I only had about 60 minutes worth of content in a 75 minute session so I knew I had to get some good questions going. I started into my demo and was showing some of the key points and then started on my Import using SQOOP. It started up just fine and then just stopped on one step. Not only did it stop my whole computer froze. I thought for sure I was going to see a BSOD or it was just going to shut down. Luckily I was able to handle this and continue the presentation without it causing too much damage. I didn’t get to show the process I originally wanted to show but I was able to explain and go over with the audience all the pieces I still needed.

This got me thinking about some key things you need to do WHEN the demo goes bad. It is not a matter of IF but when. Sooner or later you will have it fail on you.

When things go bad!

Don’t Panic! Apologize for the issue and keep moving with the presentation work on the next step. Letting it throw off your focus or send you down a tangent will not end well.
Fix it, if it is a quick fix then take a quick 2-3 minutes to resolve it. See next point about communicating if you are fixing something.
Keep communicating. The last thing you want is a long silence in the presentation while you fight your demo issues. Ask more questions of the audience or find out how things have gone so far.
Don’t apologize too much. I actually failed this one in my presentation. Apologizing over and over isn’t going to change anything. Apologize for the issue move forward and keep going.

Some ways to avoid the problem.

Have a backup, this can be easy for some things and hard for others.
The backup can be static content/hidden slides with images that you can show what the demo is supposed to be doing.
Test and re-test your demo’s many times. Even if you have presented this 100 times testing the morning before is a good idea. ( I didn’t and look what happened to me)

These are just my simple suggestions and I would love to hear if you have additional suggestions as well.

Overall I received good marks on the presentation and my fellow speakers said I handled the issue well some suggested just removing that part of the demo from the presentation. This is something I’m considering but I’m also working on solutions to fix the problem so that I can avoid it in the future.

I hope future demos for you go well but in case they don’t keep these things in mind and it may make the pain a little less!

Upcoming Speaking Events

January 21, 2014January 20, 2014 ~ SqlAsylum ~ Leave a comment

This is going to be a very busy next few months for me. Besides putting on some really cool and rocking events in the next few months I will also be speaking. Hopefully in several different states. I’m working on blog posts to go along with these presentations but for now here’s what I’m currently presenting on and when.

Building a Cost Effective Reporting system.

This presentation is all about using the right tool for the job. At my current company we moved from a vertical scale system to a horizontally scalable system. SQL Server does a lot of things really well but scale horizontally is not one of them. Using a mix of open source technologies and SQL Server we were able to get a highly scalable system at a much better cost. If you have been looking into #bigData technologies and what you can do with them(or what all the buzz is about) this is a great presentation to get you started and show you what can be done when you use the right tools for the job.

I will be presenting this at SQL Saturday #271 in Albuquerque NM coming up on the 25^th of this month. This is going to be a really fun event with lots of great presenters. Check out the schedule to see the great lineup. It will before the First SQL Saturday that I am presenting at that I did not in some way organize or help put on so this should be very interesting for me to observe just as a speaker and attendee.

I’ve submitted this same topic to Sql Saturday #287 and Sql Saturday #295. I hope to be able to present at both of these events in the next few months.

Along with presenting I’m working on 2 other Major events coming up in the next few months. Utah Code Camp will be held on March 15^th 2014. This will be our largest event to date and the most diverse with many varied topics all related to technology in some way.

Big Mountain Data is coming up April 12^th 2014. This will be an event all about Big Data. Whether you are an expert in the field or just getting started and want to know how to work with big data we will have something for everyone. You can register now and we hope to have the schedule up very soon for this event.

I’m looking forward to a very busy next 4-5 months and hopefully I will see many of you at one of these events.