A few years ago, I wrote about my first experience speaking at SQL Saturday. Recently I had a conversation with one of our first-timers speaking at SQL Saturday Rochester 2020 and realized I should do a follow-up with some additional tips.
Use the FAQ Did you know that PASS has an FAQ section for speakers on the SQL Saturday site? But don’t limit yourself to that - look through the whole FAQ, you might get some new insights into SQL Saturday.
I presented a few times in 2019, and I’m starting off 2020 with several as well. Here’s what’s on the schedule for Q1.
2020-01-06 Yep, ISO8601 format. That’s how I roll. - I’ll be giving a lightning talk at work titled “What Does a Database Administrator Do, Anyway?” This one isn’t open to the general public (though I might tweak it for use at community events), but The Bobs and “It Depends” both make an appearance in the deck.
It feels like SQL Saturday Albany just wrapped up, but I have another announcement to make. I am proud to announce that I have been selected to speak at SQL Saturday Boston on September 14th, 2019. I will be presenting “Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server” at 11:15 AM.
Abstract Developers and DBAs have had a long, sometimes strained relationship. Some developers see DBAs as roadblocks standing in the way of getting their work shipped; some DBAs see developers as agents of chaos bent on ruining their perfect database environments.
Thanks to everyone who came out to see dbatools for the Uninitiated at SQL Saturday Albany on July 20th, 2019. I had a lot of fun sharing dbatools with you and hope you’re ready to start exploring on your own!
The slides and demo scripts are available in my GitHub repository.
If you have any questions about the session, please feel free to contact me via:
Email Slack (@alevyinroc) Twitter
I am pleased to announce that I will be presenting at SQL Saturday #855 in Albany, NY on July 20, 2019. Join me at 2 PM in room LC05 for “dbatools for the Uninitiated”
You’ve just inherited a large SQL Server estate, and next month’s merger will double the number of instances you’re responsible for. Or maybe you have one big instance with thousands of databases on it. Are there backups?
Probably a bit late getting this posted but I will be speaking at the March 5, 2019 meeting of the Rochester SQL Server User group (RSVP link). I don’t have a great title or abstract for the talk (yet!), but here’s the gist:
The relationship between DBAs and developers has a long history with challenging moments. Some developers see DBAs as roadblocks. Some DBAs see developers as rogues bent on destroying the database server’s performance.
The first edition of the PSPowerHour is in the books and it looks like it was a big success. This one was dbatools-heavy but I chalk that up to the dbatools community having lots of free time because we’ve automated so many of our tasks :)
Overall Impressions I signed in about half an hour ahead of the webcast and was the first one there. Shortly thereafter, I was joined by Michael Lombardi (twitter, then Jess Pomfret (blog|twitter) and Chrissy LeMaire (blog|twitter).
It’s official! I will be speaking at the inaugural PowerHour online lightning demo event on Tuesday, August 21st at 2200 UTC. I’ll be demoing Better, Safer SQL Queries from PowerShell.
If you’re working with SQL Server from PowerShell, either as a DBA, analyst, or anyone else running queries, you’ve probably used Invoke-SqlCmd. But depending on how you’re building your queries, this can be error-prone or a huge security exposure! With the help of the dbatools module, I’ll show you how to write and run these queries better and safer - and make them easier to work into your scripts to boot.
Earlier this week, the PowerHour was announced. What is it? It’s kind of like a virtual user group. One hour, 6(ish) lightning demos (10 minutes or less), centered on PowerShell. All community-sourced and driven - anyone can submit a proposal for a demo and if accepted, you’ll be slotted into an available spot.
They’ve already set up a YouTube Channel so you can either watch live or catch up later on, and the whole deal is being organized and managed through GitHub.
Consider this the outtakes from my previous post about speaking at SQL Saturday.
It took a while for me to build up the courage to finally get up in the front of a room at SQL Saturday. As I mentioned in my prior post, I did quite a bit of studying of other peoples’ sessions, read peoples’ studies of other peoples’ sessions (Grant Fritchey’s “Speaker of the Month” series) and talked to a few people at the speakers’ dinner.