SQL Saturday 2012 – Lessons learnt

We had our fifth SQL Saturday at Louisville this year. It was an awesome day of free training and networking, with a record attendance of over 200 people and 35 sessions on 7 tracks. Our venue was at the School of Business at University of Louisville. Some of the lessons learnt and experiences we had as  organizers are as below.

1 Pre Cons/Day before: I have written a separate post covering pre cons themselves. Generally having pre cons at the same location gave us a huge breather in terms of organizing – usually we only get the location the day before – and stay there until late night setting up. This allowed us to put up signs, fill bags and get tables and swag organized a whole day earlier. Many volunteers could enjoy the speaker dinner and show up far less stressed the next day because of this. While it is tough to get the same premises again without interruptions on a working day, the advantages are tempting and we will try to make this happen in similar ways next time.

2 Signs: We made a significant investment in getting good signage this time, and it paid off really well.Many people appreciated the signs, and not too many complained of being lost.

3 Speaker Dinner: We wanted to pick up the tab on speaker dinner this time since we had not done so in the past. The Bristol Bar and Grille provided good food with local flavor at a reasonable price and well within our budget .Most speakers and attendees enjoyed the dinner.

4 SpeedPass: This was our first experience using speedpass. We were a little skeptical to be honest – since a lot of our attendees show up with barely any info/paperwork on them even for paid conferences. The location did not have any fast printers, and it didn’t seem practical to have inkjet printers on us. Printers are pretty heavy to lug around and set up, and we had enough to do without that as overhead. So we made printouts of name tags and raffle tickets, to be safe. Approximately 20-30% of attendees showed up with no printouts, much lower than what we thought. So while the printouts were useful – speedpass largely worked for us and we will use it again.

5 Vendor Area: Setting up vendor area went very smoothly and all vendors were appreciative of the experience.This is also a landmark event for us in terms of finding local vendor support – we had four local vendors, two of whom was gold sponsors.All of them seemed extremely happy with the experience.

6 Lunch – Our usual vendor Jason’s Deli did a great job this time also with delivering quality food on time at very affordable prices. The only hassle with lunch was that no food was allowed in classrooms and people had difficulties finding areas to sit and eat. This is one of our action items to work on for next year.

7 Speakers and Sessions – Our speakers were a mix of those who were loyal to us and proven good speakers, and new speakers who had submitted interesting sessions. We have recieved great feedback on most, and some small complaints on others. As is the norm this will be considered for selection next year. It is heartening to note that the list of ‘loyalists’ or proven good speakers grows every year, we regard this as an extremely healthy trend.

8 Session timings – We timed sessions to last one hour each with 15 minutes for questions. It seemed to satisfy most speakers – a couple of attendee feedback comments indicated that some were ‘rambling to fill time’ We are not sure if this is serious enough for any kind of action – but we will let speakers know of the duration well ahead of time.

9 Professional Growth – We had a dedicated track to professional growth this time that included an awesome panel of speakers for Women in Technology and many other useful sessions. Unfortunately these sessions had very thin attendance – I have seen Professional growth suffer low attendance even in PASS summit so this is nothing unusual but i personally believe many speakers on this track deserved better. Perhaps having the WIT session at lunch and scheduling some of the other sessions around the technical sessions instead of a dedicated track might help in this regard. This is something to experiment with for next year.

All in all the event was a huge success. With 35 tracks and 230 people signing in, 4 local vendors and 4 national vendors, it was bigger than any we had ever hosted. We were proud and happy to have provided quality free learning yet again, and look forward to next year already.

SQL Saturday 122 – Addressing attendee feedback

Most organizers including me usually write one post covering the entire event. This year I decided to break it up into multiple posts simply because the lessons are many and the audience for each post is different – a post on budgeting would probably interest organizers a lot more than an attendee. This post is for attendees, addressing some of their feedback.

A lot of attendees have never been to a sql saturday. A lot of attendees have, but do not know much on basics of how these events operate. At every one of the five events we have hosted – I have explained to wide eyed attendees (including one microsoft employee this time) that this is a completely free event, and nobody makes a dime out of doing it – the organizers as well as speakers, all do it for free, just for the pleasure of learning and community. To add to that a few more facts -

1 There is a lot of feedback on having more vendors and more swag. Starting with vendors – we are thrilled to have as many vendors as we can possibly have and we try very hard to sell our event to as many as possible. But how many vendors we actually get is a combo of budgeting decisions vendors make and the luck factor. This year has been a landmark year for us in terms of finding local vendor support – VSoft Consulting and SIS, both local consulting companies, came in as a Gold Sponsors. New Horizons, another local training company came in as a silver sponsor. Lakeshore Consulting sponsored breakfast, and Republic bank gave us swag bags, as well as 10 attendees for our pre cons. We hope to get more of their support going forward too. As for national vendors, we still had four of them - Quest, Idera, Confio and PASS. But they have a huge choice of events, some events much bigger than ours – we understand that and we have to live with the choices they make.

2 On to SWAG and give aways- many vendors have cut down on swag material due to budgeting decisions. SWAG is cool for an attendee but in reality it is extremely hard to handle – someone has to store it before distribution and someone has to keep the leftovers after, that takes up room in their homes and garages, space that they would rather keep their personal stuff in. Truthfully having less swag has given us more time and energy to organize other parts of the event better. Give aways again, are a vendor call. We do not control any of the decisions they make – if they have an IPad or not, and if they have 3 gift cards instead of one.

3 To clarify both points again – all SQL saturdays are not funded the same. Some of them get 10x more funding than we do (and no, not 10 times more people or more sessions!!). It is a vendor decision to offer more funding to some events and less to others – so if you are at an event with several ipads or television give aways or karaoke parties, do remember that we didn’t get as much funding as they did to make those things happen.The main goal of a sql saturday is in two words ‘free learning’. Any feedback you can give us to make that better can and will be greatly appreciated – but free giveaways and swag are not likely to get on the improvement list easily.

4 Space for lunch – We realize that not having enough tables and eating areas around was a significant issue for several attendees. The location is given to us for free (we cannot afford most paid locations with such facilities). Their request was not to allow food in classrooms – which we had to accomodate in return for 7 awesome classrooms and some vendor display space. This limited networking opportunites and also took away valuable time from having well attended lunch sessions such as WIT or Toastmasters.This is definitely on top of our list of things to improve for next year.

5 Post event party – This is again one thing that comes up for discussion every year and has not happened yet, for several reasons.On top of them is the fact that our small and committed team of volunteers are tired to the bone towards the end of the day. Heading to a party is frankly the last thing on our minds, and it is difficult to have a party without atleast one person there making sure things are going ok. We considered having a job fair kind of a party this time – but the recruiting companies we worked with had already signed up as vendors and done their networking at the event itself.  Lastly, most bars are packed in and around Louisville on friday and saturday nights, and we cannot book any of them for you without dropping a significant sum of $ which we would gladly use for other purposes. All said ,this is also on our improvement list for next year and the goal is to make it happen.

6 ‘Missing’ or bad lunch payments – A couple of attendees claimed they had paid and were showing up as not. There are 3 ways to track a lunch payment – one is if they have a lunch coupon, two is if they have the paypal receipt for the payment, and three is if they show up on our list as paid. If none of the three are available it is really very hard to attach payment to the person or prove he paid (in all probability he just thought he did and didn’t). We did have spare lunches but it was against rules of the school to accept cash payments on site, and also would have been unfair to paid attendees. So all we can say in this regard is to keep your tickets and payment proof handy.

The remarks on various speaker sessions have been taken seriously and passed on to the speakers. We hope you have considered giving them same/similar feedback on the paper forms that were available in each session. Speaker feedback is taken very seriously by speakers and organizers but with reasonable limits attached – so if you went to a design session and complain that you didn’t’ get something to ‘act upon’ immediately (unless you are half way through designing something that is unlikely) – it is really not the speaker’s fault. We have also noted the requests for more developer sessions and will try to accomodate this as well.

Last but not the least – SQL Saturdays happen on a global level, in all countries and all communities. The last place where you expect a racist remark is on feedback for an event, but this time I got one. This person accused ‘one community’ of ‘dominating the event’ and that ‘knowledge is not enough but communication skills are important as well’. Being an organizer has nothing glamorous to it – it is not a position of ‘authority’ or ‘domination’ in any way. You are lucky as an organizer if you get committed volunteers to share your load, like I do. It is a task that makes huge demands on your personal time, makes you handle a lot of $ that is not really yours but you are accountable for it just the same – you get nothing out of it other than a few compliments here and there and you do it just the same because you love the community and the team work. I am a US citizen and living in this country for 17 years now. My team is as american as apple pie. If anything  we did upset this person all I can say is more constructive feedback would be appreciated, and references to communities/domination etc is just plain hurtful.

Judging from the overwhelming number of personal compliments many of us got, and the fact that almost 95 percent of our attendees who responded to the survey want to come back next year and the remaining 5 percent are just a ‘dont know’ – we have done most things right. Now is the time to kick back and relax a while..until next year..thank you everyone!!

SQL Saturday Louisville 2012 Pre Cons – An organizational perspective

We had our fifth sql saturday at Louisville – this time at a much bigger location, the school of business at University of Louisville. We also had a day of pre cons (our first pre con was by Kevin Kline last year, and was moderately successful with an attendance of 23 people. This year we tried 4 pre cons – we were unsure of which subject area to pick mainly, and all the 4 speakers were rated highly previously and among our loyalists). Some of the lessons learnt on the pre cons are as below:

1 The day started with a bit of confusion – one of the speakers had to move their room from what was originally scheduled since there was a class going on. We were relieved to be given an alternative.But much to our dismay this happened one more time, in the afternoon, actually disrupting an ongoing class. We learnt later that the reason was that the school actually has classes, and many happen without schedule. They helped us out greatly the next day by posting notices on doors that our classes cannot be interrupted. We also learnt not to host classes on premises that have their own events going on, particularly on working days.

2 We didn’t have the room number printed on the ticket – this was a gotcha on our part while setting up the ticketing with Eventbrite. Several attendees turned up without reading the email info on pre cons and those of us at the reception didn’t have them on us although our signboards had them. Our lesson was to keep room numbers printed on tickets going forward.

3 Some candidates walked to their rooms directly without checking in. (We assumed they would register/check in). Although we did not find anyone attending without payment – this indicated a possibility of that happening – lesson is to keep the check in process directly outside the room instead of in a common spot.

4 We learnt later from pre con speakers as well as other sql saturday organizers that having 20 attendees is generally considered good for pre cons – and we did nearly touch that number with 3 of them. The lesson to take away is possibly that two pre cons are the best way to go for us – possibly one on BI and one on the DBA track. That might give an above-average count of people for each class and also ease manageability issues.

5 One of the pre cons had an offer for multiple attendees to attend for the price of two. Initially it seemed like it sold well and brought in a few numbers, but many of those who signed up on this deal simply did not show up. Perhaps they did not get the day off or perhaps they thought it was not worth their time – we had to give away the extra lunches we bought for these people. The lesson here is to reduce ‘deals’ since there does not seem to be accountability with no payment.

All that said,  most attendees seemed very happy with what they learnt and wanted to do this again. The teachers seemed happy too since the attendance was well above average. Overall, we would call this event a success and hope to do it again, incorporating the lessons learnt. Our thanks to our teachers – Kevin Kline, Eddie Wuerch, Bill Pearson and Dave Fackler, and to all the students who attended. We don’t have a spot yet to upload their presentations but will email attendees with them – you may also want to follow their blogs for the downloads.

Becoming a DBA

This is in response to John Sansom’s call for posts describing a DBA story. Here is mine -
1 How did you get started?
I was working as a Visual Basic programmer in a leading financial company on Wall Street in the 90s. Despite being a large company with sensitive data they did not have a dedicated DBA – my boss managed a team of developers and did most of the DBA work himself. He was often overwhelmed with many things to do. I offered to learn some of his work, particularly DBA work since databases interested me. He taught me basic dba tasks – how to do backup/restore, how to create and maintain databases and certain other things that were specific to that business. He greatly appreciated my help despite having a lot to do myself. The story went well with both of us helping each other. One day it so happened that he was working late. The company had requirements for people to work late during monthly closes and it was one such night. He decided to go for a walk to give himself a break and walked into a bar. He got back in after a drink too many and dropped a mission critical database, bringing all the activities in the company to a standstill. Those were days when we did not have capabilities to log in remotely or even cell phones – so the phone in my home rang at 2 am. I was asked to get in to work immediately as it was an emergency. When I went in I learnt the story and also that he had been fired. I was able to restore the database and apply the logs. They had only lost 15 minutes worth of data and they were happy. With that came the keys of my first DBA job, and I have not looked back since.

2 Describe what a typical day is for you?
I currently work as a senior DBA in a leading healthcare company. I manage about 150 servers, with a team of 3 other DBAs. A typical day begins with a quick scan of our ticket queue – there may be tickets for failed jobs, backup failures, space issues or login problems. Sometimes these are small issues fixed easily, sometimes they may take longer depending on nature or complexity. Most of our alerting system and ticketing system is automated eliminating the need for checking individual servers since we have many. Following that is checking the queue for change management requests. These may be requests for backups, restores, promotions and the like. Most promotions involve code reviews for standards compliance and also performance – like usage of hints, appropriate indexes and so on. This may take a few minutes or a whole day depending on size of the request. Then there may be meetings to attend – a new application to be rolled out, a server upgrade to a newer version, a standards revision and so on. There may be documentation and internal team discussions on new features of SQL 2012, patches and service packs, scheduling off hour work and so on. In short, rarely a dull moment and lots of opportunities to learn and grow.

3 What advice would you give to someone considering becoming a DBA/DB Developer?
It is probably the same advice I would give to anyone who wants to be good at what they do. Brent Ozar said it very well in a post on time management sometime ago – ‘Decide you want to be incredible’. I have worked in many jobs and most of the time I would look to my collegues and friends to be as motivated as I was. Many people just want a job – they will go to a training if their boss sent them, browse the internet most of the time there too, do their jobs on a purely task basis, go home on friday, return monday, take the yearly vacation and go on again. I got a lot of attitude and a lot of ‘looks’ from people when I got excited about the latest release of SQL Server or the latest great book out there or even if I stayed late trying to fix a query to run faster. It took me a while to get it that if I had to excel it was time to ignore all that and do what is right for *me*. Passion is nothing to be ashamed of, and if you feel a passion for what you do – grow it and find places that will support it. Grow out of the need to be like ‘them’ and you will find more people like you who will inspire and motivate you to be better.

TSQL Tuesday #31: Logging: Case of the Missing LSN

 This is in response to Aaron Nelson’s call for T SQL Tuesday – on the subject of Logging. There are many things that come to a DBA’s mind while talking of logging. For this I chose an incident that happened some years ago. I had joined a new job, and the dba who had taken my spot had been there for several years before she left. She had set up most of the maintenence jobs on existing servers, most of which were on SQL Server 2000 then.

On the second day of my job I was asked to restore a backup as of a certain date/time to a development server to recover some data for an application manager. I was directed to the place where backups were stored. I found the full backup, and hourly transaction logs following that. As I set about restoring, I got a certain log that gave me a missing LSN error. The log job was set to run hourly, and the timestamps showed all logs were there and there were no errors on the job. I looked further to see if anything else was going on at that time when the log was backed up – I found a reindexing job in which the recovery model was being set to simple and back to full again. In 2005 and above if this change is done – the log chain is broken and one gets an error that a full backup is needed before restarting it. But in 2000 there was no such thing. The log chain was still broken but the job was not throwing any errors to show that. The backups were just not usable.
The process had been in place for more than 4 years, and luckily there had been no requirements to use the transaction log backups during this time interval. They even had a testing mechanism for testing backups, but they did not test backups during this particular sequence of operations. After that episode I also changed the testing process to work through job cycle – through all jobs and maintenence windows, in case there was any issue. It was a great lesson for me on backup testing and how many issues can remain dormant for years until one gets them accidentally. Luckily it was not a crisis situation when it was discovered but it might very well have been. Test your backups, and through jobs and processes as necssary, not just during small windows.

SQL Cruise Alaska 2012

I had the good fortune of joining the SQLCruise this year. Below is summary of my experience. I plan to write more detailed posts since there is so much I learnt both personally and professionally, but just had to get this out soon.

Countdown: I landed in Seattle on Thursday, May 24th. In the evening I did a tour of Seattle underground – during this tour got acquainted with fellow cruiser Wayne Sheffield and his family (wife,mom and m-in-law). They were great company on the tour and also in the days that followed. On Friday I did a tour of Snoqualmie falls – which included a visit to two wineries and a chocolate factory.The day ended with SQL Cruise kick off party – which was great fun and organized very well by Tim and Amy Ford. There was food for every taste and lots of fun games/prizes too. I picked up a few of Red Gate swag books for the user group and myself (thank you Red Gate). I left the party early since the next day seemed busy and was still suffering east coast jet lag.
Day 1: I took a cab to the pier around 11 am. The cruiseline promptly took over the luggage and I joined a big crowd of people waiting in the building outside the ship. I met with several fellow cruisers there and the wait was not long before we were called to check in. The check in process was simple – only involved a brief overview of passport and cruise documents, and one was issued tickets and other necessary stuff. By noon we were allowed to board the ship although our rooms were not ready. We were also allowed to eat lunch. It was an awesome first lunch on the sunny deck overlooking seattle harbor with a light breeze blowing in, with several friends for company. The ship took off by around 4 pm – and we were allowed to get into our rooms at the same time. After a short nap/rest everyone was ready to go for the Red Gate discover the ship contest – a fun game where we get a list of things ‘to do’ on board the ship that helped us explore various areas as well as get to know our partners well. I was paired with Jes Borland and her husband Justin – we had a great time getting around the ship and talking to various people for taking pictures with them. Jes is a natural extrovert and just being around her made me feel very upbeat, not to mention the fun we had going around various areas of the ship. By the time the contest was done we were tired – although we did not win the prize it was designed really well and thoroughly enjoyed it. The next day seemed packed with training so retired early.
Day 2: The day started with Brent Ozar‘s presentation on Procedure Cache BI. This is an area I work with a lot – I greatly enjoyed the presentation and discussion that followed. After lunch we continued with Kevin Kline‘s presentation on Leadership Skills for IT Professional. I learnt many things from this, also re confirmed my own assessment of myself – that I would probably do well as a technical expert than a manager. The class was also very interactive and we discussed lots of different scenarios ranging from outsourcing problems to difficult bosses.Kevin also mentioned the Quest give away of a whole suite of tools to all sql cruise attendees  – since I use almost all their products I asked if I could raffle this away at my upcoming SQL Saturday. I think very highly of Quest tools and this is a great give away.  In all this was a great and very enjoyable day. 
Day 3: We landed at Ketchikan bright and early at 7 am. I took a boat tour of Misty Fjords, which lasted 3 hours. The boat went through some amazing landscapes with misty cliffs and silvery waterfalls all around. We also saw some seals, eagles and bears en route (too far away for my little point and shoot camera to capture . After lunch we had a session with Allen White on SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer – an excellent free tool that am already using. Allen showed many scenarios that the tool can be used with which I was not aware of. That was followed by Jeremiah Peschka‘s presentation on Killer Techniques for Database Performance. I was particularly struck by a difference he found between developer and enterprise editions on handling indexed views, and also by the ‘goats in the tree’ funny calender which I plan to order soon ) Jeremiah also explained of how benchmarking can be doctored for any environment. I have always found his presentations to be funny and informative and this was no exception. The day ended with a fun dinner with several other sql cruise-ers.
Day 4: This day began with 3 glacier helicopter tour at Juneau. Standing on top of a glacier, the ponds of blue ice and the amazing serenity are highlights of my trip and sights i will cherish for a very long time. We spent the afternoon in the suite rented by the BrentOzarPLF team. The views from the suite was amazing. We had a story telling contest where many participants shared their stories of memorable work experiences – Darcy Williams won a Kindle fire prize for her simple,down to earth story.  Brent made mention of every one of our stories and gave each of us a gift that seemed to tie in with our stories in some way. He also took time to do a brief intro summary of his rather famous pre con professional workshop, which seemed informative in itself. That afternoon was great community time teamed up with amazing scenery as the ship sailed through the glacier.
Day 4: We docked at Skagway in the morning. I could not do the hike i had planned earlier due to some minor health issues – but the cruise line kindly accomodated me on a train ride to White Pass in the afternoon. The morning was spent shopping at the amazing art stores in downtown Skagway. The train ride was the best I had ever had in terms of scenic beauty, have a hard time even describing how awesome it was. The skagway break was long and we did not have any class this day.
Day 5: After 4 days of sight seeing this was a day of hard core training and began with Allen White‘s Introduction to Powershell. As someone who has not used much of powershell I learnt a lot from this. Allen also provided several useful links/info on blogs and books for those wanting to learn more on the subject. This was followed by Kendra Little‘s presentation on Sports Medicine for High Transaction Databases – she talked of baselining strategies for busy databases, how to find windows to do maintenence, and several other tips and tricks. The day ended with Robert Davis‘s presentation on backup and recovery strategies.
Day 6: The last day began with Brent Ozar’s presentation on Scaling SQL with Solid State. It was packed with great information on Solid State/Hard drive layout and various strategies to get the best out of it. It was a tough subject for me and i cannot claim I understood all of it but it seemed like a great start to learn more and plan to revisit these slides again soon. The training concluded with Idera Iditarod challenge – a clue based ship search with some sql questions thrown in. I was partnered with Max Gomeniouk. Max was an extremly  agile creative person who handled the ship search swiftly and well, while I fielded the sql questions. Between us we made a good team and managed to win the prize – a Kindle fire, a great start to my ebook reading habit. Thank you Idera for the well designed contest and the wonderful prize!! The afternoon was spent at Victoria, Canada -  I had dinner again with Kevin and his lovely mom Shirley and bid good bye to them.

In conclusion - you can perhaps count the number of times the word ‘amazing’ and ‘awesome’ appears in my post – that is perhaps an indicator of what a great trip this was. It is not easy to organize a training aboard a cruise ship – there is very minimal electronic communication, which is what we use most of the time for events, there is no ‘common’ place where one can post timetables or itineraries and it is hard to find people when you need them. Despite all these challenges Tim and Amy Ford designed a near flawless schedule with awesome trainers and great networking.

From the time i set foot in the boarding room on Day 1 until the time I actually got into a cab to the airport (oh no wait, I met a couple of people at the airport too  I was talking and socializing with someone from the group, and that in itself speaks for what a well knit, cool team of people we were together. Do consider the next SQLCruise on your travel/training agenda, it is worth every dime you spend. I surely am considering going on the next one,  already )

My 3 priorities.. and SQLCruise

I was reading a link recommended by Kevin Kline on Getting Results the Agile way. This author talks of thinking in 3s- setting goals and priorities in 3s and watch how you meet them. If I were to think of 3 things i need to do every year to get ahead in life/career – what would they be?  Mine are as below -

1 Take a vacation – Seems odd that that is the first thing to say for career growth – but to me it is . I was a die hard workaholic for several years in my life – used to think I carried the place on my shoulders, and worried about every single thing that could go wrong if ‘I’ wasn’t around to fix it. Needless to say that didn’t get me anywhere. I ended up really sick with overwork twice, and once even getting fired because the guy on top didn’t like my work ethics (there was more to it than overwork but that was one of the reasons). But after all that the lesson I have learnt is that time away from work is important. Also to add to that – when one reaches mid age one realizes in a very real way that time is limited. That bucket list of places to see and things to do needs to be looked into atleast one a time…after that realization I make it a point to go somewhere atleast once a year and spend two weeks away from work. Sometimes it is my home country, India, sometimes it is other places.

2 Network – I had a speaker in my user group sometime ago. He used to ask me often if I ‘understood’ how networking worked, since he was a rather introverted person himself. After every talk he gave and every meeting he attended he would ‘count’ how many people he had met and if he had gained anything from them. Needless to say after a few meetings he decided there was nothing to this and gave up. I was of the same mindset as this man for a while, since i am also somewhat of a private person and it is hard for me to be ‘out there’…but I was willing to give it a better shot than he. I started the user group locally and after running it for two years – I was approached by someone who attended my meetings with a great job offer. The next two jobs I have landed have been via people I have met, and mostly via conversations rather than formal interviews and resume applications. Networking takes time and effort, but networking pays huge dividends if one is patient and persistent with it. Networking is something I consider I should do with more focus and more diligence as I grow older.

3 Attend as many trainings as possible – As a production DBA I must admit the time I have to learn on my own is somewhat limited. It would be great, as Brent Ozar said once, if the learning is part of the job itself but most DBAs struggle with a lot of operational work – you don’t do cool jazzy stuff every day, you have to do repetitive things and have to attend to a lot of things outside work hours. So the only way really to keep up with learning is to attend trainings – as many trainings as possible. I am a train-a-holic – be it free trainings or paid trainings (my company is generous with paid trainings) – I am there, opening my ears wide to gain as much knowledge as I can possibly gain.

So..the three priorities defined – I found a place where all three can be accomplished in one shot. The SQL Cruise. I get to see Alaska, a place that I have longed to see since I saw pictures of glaciers in my sixth grade geography textbook. I get to network, with some of the most successful and best people in the SQL world (The BrentOzarPLF team, Allen White, Aaron Bertrand,Kevin Kline….). I get to train with them too. Can’t think of anything better that would fit my needs this year and counting every day down to the cruise.