In the last couple weeks as I’ve thought about where I want to go and focus on, and how we’re doing at oPASS, it just made sense that it was time for me to hand over the reins to Jack, let him set the direction fully. Originally I had thought to make it contingent on whether I was re-elected for the PASS Board, but I think it adds a bit of uncertainty to oPASS, and I think it’s good for leadership to change. Whether I’m re-elected or now, I won’t lack for opportunities to participate in the community.

Making that decision now drives a lot of other decisions. We’ve always been light weight, not much of a formal charter and I’ve just run the little bit of sponsor money through my business account for simplicity. It’s worked, even worked well I’d say, but now as we face change, we need to revisit all of that and figure out what comes next. In truth the money management is the biggest pain for us (and most chapters). Incorporating for a few thousand dollars a year is tedious and poor use of time in my opinion. I’d really like to see PASS extend the idea of holding funds in trust to chapters in the same way it does for SQLSaturday. That would remove a huge pain point, and it would also contribute to transparency, we could easily share the details of money in or out for each chapter.

Between now and the September meeting we’ll see who is interested and what direction they want to go. I don’t have any firm preference, I just want to see the group sustain and grow. Maybe we can iron it out in September, maybe it takes a little bit longer, but by end of year we’ll make the changes and start the next…chapter…as it were!

Not easy to let go. Still, it feels like the right move.

• Attendance was about 20, lower than expected for a good perf tuning presentation. Talked to Jack afterward, think we’re static or declining, need to revisit our chapter plan soon.
• Nice presentation from David Pless from MS, good audience participation
• Meeting sponsored by Red Gate (thanks!), Jack Corbett did the demo of their source control product, but the script didn’t explain/show how to rollback from history. Seems pretty easy to implement overall.
• Good discussion after meeting about working with staffing companies, some frustration from those who get ‘hey how ya been’ emails from someone that last contacted them 2 years ago!

This discussion will continue to cover how to troubleshoot performance issues on SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. In this discussion I cover performance impact analysis using DMVs, SET options in SQL Server, and Profiler and perfmon analysis. In this discussion I will cover SQLNexus, PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs), RML Utilities, SQLDiag, and other tools. Finally I discuss reading query plans graphically and what you can learn from reading the XML plans.

Free pizza, good networking, learn some stuff – hope to see you there!

The competition was definitely fierce, all the proposed seminars received some votes, and thanks to all that were interesting in participating.

Full details and registration link at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/49/eventhome.aspx.

Started just a couple minutes late, ran through the standard PASS chapter deck and talked about upcoming events in the Florida area and our own SQLSaturday #49 in October. Struggled with LiveMeeting before/during that, audio didn’t want to work correctly. Not supposed to be this hard, usually it all works well.

We tried a new networking exercise, talking about the technique of a good handshake and then putting it into practice, everyone walking down the line of attendees doing a handshake and introduction. Mostly it went well, because everyone was conscious of trying to do it well, though most admitted that the focus on the hand shake hurt their ability to remember names. It’s a lot like the childhood game of rubbing your stomach and patting your head, takes time to build the skill to put all the pieces together.

We stopped for pizza then. Another pizza adventure story here – I placed the order with Dominos about 5:30 (adios Pizza Hut, we seemed to be a challenge for them), they called back about 15 minutes later to say that they had run of out roasted red pepper for a couple of the pizzas. Interesting dilemma for them, what else can they do but call? So we shift to green peppers and move on. Still, is it good enough to call to change the item, or would good customer service do more?

Then on to the presentation by Kendal Van Dyke on HA and DR. I did the introduction, which I think is always nicer than having to do your own introduction, and then he launched into a PowerPoint only presentation of the options and considerations. Overall it went well, but it’s a lot to do in an hour and tricky too – trying to stay really high level on concepts, yet it demand diving into some details, especially on limitations of various techniques. Thought it went well for a v1 presentation. Scored well on the post presentation evals.

Wrapped up on time with a quick raffle (still got a few Quest balls to raffle!), and then moved in to our after meeting social time. Lots of small conversations this time, including an interesting one about the bang for the buck of attending any training when it’s not directly related to a task or project that will be done directly after the training. Pure professional development training is, to me, both an investment and a leap of a faith, in both cases you do it because you think the odds are at least slightly tilted towards it being worthwhile, but knowing it’s not always a direct payoff. We’ve got to work on providing better ways to capture ROI on free and paid training to help the ones that are undecided, or that have a boss that doesn’t see the benefit.

Details at www.opass.org, or join us via Livemeeting.

That gives me time to focus on logistics more. I’m driving up to the site this week to do a formal ‘signage’ plan, deciding exactly where we need signs to make sure people can navigate the somewhat confusing Seminole State College campus, and then I’m going to order some nicer reusable signs and get them into a nice container, this year won’t be the last year we’ll use them!

I’m also going to quickly revisit our recommended hotel. We don’t have that many people staying overnight, but for the ones that do, we want to make sure the hotel is in good shape.

Along with that, I’m going to be selecting the site of the speaker dinner. The last couple times we used Jax Fifth Avenue, but I think we’ll change it up this time and try to find someplace a little quieter.

Nothing exciting yet, but details on the road to a solid SQLSaturday #49.

We debated trying to hand off to someone else in the group, but we haven’t done any planning for that (mistake #2?), so we’re going with the conservative strategy of moving the meeting to the next week. Hope you’ll attend, either in person or via Live Meeting, for an exciting presentation titled Paging DR Availability, You’re Wanted in the Recovery Room by Orlando local Kendal Van Dyke.

oPASS site will get updated later today.

That’s not a knock on Jack, he’s passionate about PASS and the value of the Summit. It’s just that our group is, well, our group. If PASS disappeared tomorrow, our group would still meet, still enjoy our time together, and really suffer no impact from that change. It’s not that they aren’t interested. Many are PASS members. But PASS remains an abstraction to them, and that’s just a tough thing to change.

Sorry, back to the meeting! We moved on to a quick discussion of our upcoming SQLSaturday #49 in October, lots of interest, everyone waiting for the good parts – matching up volunteers with tasks and selecting our pre-con seminar(s). I also asked about the interest in doing the Cha Cha Slide at lunch, and that definitely earned me some puzzled looks. Clearly that idea is going to take a while to grow!

Dean did a good job on the presentation, though I missed about 20 minutes right in the middle for a SQLSaturday coaching call. Heard a few good questions, think everyone found the presentation useful and it didn’t come across as a vendor pitch.

Confio did sponsor the meeting, and David Waugh did get to do his sales pitch, and that was interesting – it’s been a long time since we had a product vendor at the meeting, usually it’s local sponsors. He announced Ignite Free coming up on official release on May 8th and I’ll be curious to see how that works out. Giving a somewhat limited free version away is a great way to build market awareness. Take out too many features and it doesn’t get used, leave in too many and can hurt revenue. For those interested in getting that type of decision right, I really recommend Free by Chris Anderson.

We need to get more of the product vendors in, and it reinforces for me that there will be value in having a vendor track at SQLSat#49. Our members want (and need) to see these products in action so they have an idea of options available.

At the end we did something new. Robert Hurwitz has been of our regulars, and prior to the meeting we had an email from his co-worker and oPASS regular letting us know that Thursday was Robert’s birthday and last day in Orlando (moving to Jacksonville), and asking if bringing a cake would be ok – of course! So we sang a really bad rendition of Happy Birthday and enjoyed some cake. Seems funny to write, but it worked – these meetings are as much social as technical, and we should find ways to do stuff like this more often.