What did SQL Saturday 51 do for you?
As I had mentioned, I’ve been a little out of touch with the SQL scene for a while. Significant changes at work, combined with major changes to my responsibilities kept me from keeping up. Combine that with a baby growing into a toddler into… a walking, talking, full-fledged KID and, well, I shifted my priorities.
So, getting to the point, I recall the concept of SQL Saturday coming to Nashville slid into my knowledge sometime months prior to the actual date. The idea floated about, given that I still sit near the DBA team, and they are friendly enough continue to treat me as one of their own, despite my conversion to management. It wasn’t until the week of the event that I actually allowed it to materialize, and I registered.
From that moment, a re-awakening began. I downloaded the all-powerful TweetDeck and all those people I followed long ago gave the little bird inside it the breath of life, allowing it to chirp… constantly. I immediately scrambled to turn off the notifications to give myself a little bit of control.
As things cooled off a bit, I got back into a little rhythm sorting out who was who again. It wasn’t too tough – Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) and Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter) were there, of course. Those two were the pushers of the tweet-drug that got me into this whole thing 2 long years ago at the ’08 Summit. I spotted Michelle Ufford (blog | twitter) who I’d collaborated with on a cool little stored procedure that tracks the latency on a replication subscription using tracer tokens. I was able to pull out those stats just recently to help prove a point! There were the MVPs that I’ve not met, but listened to intently like Buck Woody (blog | twitter) and Denny Cherry (blog | twitter). I got to see that like Mr Rockstar, Jeremiah Peschka (blog | twitter) was mysteriously changing jobs… to then discover Brent had changed jobs, too… and Jeremiah had taken Brent’s. Ugh… my head hurts.
I also noticed I was following one of the best tweeters – Adam Savage (@DonTryThis) from the Mythbusters!
Sorry – I veered off from SQL Saturday, the point of this. When Saturday finally arrived, I was a bit put off by “losing” the day with my family, but I took it as an opportunity to get out on my motorcycle as well as to get re-acquainted with SQL Server. I arrived, got signed-in and worked out a game-plan with my co-worker Bill. It was clear we’d be side-by-side most, if not all of the day, as we had similar interests throughout the program. We went through back-to-back PowerShell sessions, learned about the internals of SQL server, DMVs, a first look at Data Collector, and then a nice framework for performance tuning.
In the midst of all that, it was a re-introduction to the people that put their knowledge out in front of everyone so we can all be better DBAs, no matter the scale of our environment, our seniority in an organization, or if we’re Ops or Dev. The camaraderie was fantastic, and it was a great to find a new set of faces to drop into Twitter so that annoying little TweetDeck bird can chirp a little more often – Glenn Berry (blog | twitter), Kendra Little (blog | twitter), and Aaron Nelson (blog | twitter).
Amongst those 500 words above, I’m not sure if I said much, but take this from them: SQL Saturday isn’t a ‘lost’ Saturday. If anything, it’s a great kick in the pants to get back to your database servers and make them bigger, stronger, faster. It’s an awesome way to see a larger population of database geeks and find out that a bunch of them stay in continual contact via the intertubes. And even better, because they are in such good contact, they’ll be in good contact if you need help with something.
So here’s hoping I can get the funds approved for the 2010 Summit, because there was this really interesting hashtag I saw on twitter and I really want to join in.
