#90

This was a fantastic event! This was Oklahoma City’s first SQLSaturday, so it’s quite an accomplishment and something to celebrate.  Tim Mitchell, Russell Loski, and I started off by heading from Dallas to Oklahoma City which only took about 3 hours. The speaker dinner was held at the Embassy Suites hotel restaurant. The hotel and restaurant were very nice and the food was good. They served finger foods and pizza, but the pizza was not your typical mediocre pizza. This was some good stuff.

The next morning we headed to the Norman Moore Technology Center, which was a prefect venue for an event like this. This place was new, clean, and very well laid out for sponsors and attendee networking.

Keynote
Steve Jones (Blog|Twitter) delivered a key note speech. His keynote was titled “The Winding Road” and was about his life and path to technology, how he became a SQL Server expert, and how he started SQLServerCentral.com. He went on to talk about how we make choices that define where we go and how those choices are presented to us. Sometimes those choices are not clear cut. How often do you hit a fork in the road where you get to make a choice? Steve says that for most of us, we are on a road and the choice is to stay on that road or take an exit and try something new.

Steve also talked about why we make the choices we make. Did you choose a career path for money, or maybe knowledge? The reason for making a choice is a good indicator whether it will be a good one or not. He suggests that we not decide what to do, but first decide what things we do NOT want to do.

Session 1
Wes Brown presented on “Understanding Storage Systems and SQL Server”. Wes runs the Austin, TX SQL Server user group and they are planning SQLSaturday #97. Make sure you check that event out in any way you can. Whether you are looking to sponsor the event, speak at the event, or just attend and I’ll see you there!

Have you heard that something is only as good as its weakest link? Well for SQL server that is the disk subsystem. Wes covers everything about the various disk systems and how they all integrate together. 10 minutes into the session and I had an overwhelming urge to hop on Newegg and start building a new home system. If you are building out a new SQL Server system then this session is for you.

Session 2
I spoke during this time slot on Policy Based Management and Central Management Server. If you attended this session or want to see what it was about then you can view the abstract and download the slide deck HERE.

Lunch
They served a nice box lunch with sandwich, apple, cookies, and chips. My chips expired on August 9th, so I hope that was the only expired thing in the bag.

Session 3
I used this time to do a little networking and some great conversations. I got the opportunity to talk to Karla Landrum, who recently joined the PASS HQ team. We had some great community dialog and I look forward to working with her in the community space.

Session 4
Sri Sridharan spoke on data governance. Sri explained how he handles mining configuration data from his servers and aggregating all the information. It can serve as an inventory, but it’s the data that is mined that can give you real value. It provides a way to see the discrepancies between test, dev, and prod. It also gives you a central way to manage your data and server environment. Have you ever wondered which cluster node your SQL instance is currently running on? Sri shows a way to see that from one central point across your enterprise.

Session 5
This session was a 30 minute time slot and is the first time I have seen this done at a SQLSaturday. It’s a short time, but I think it worked well and encourages networking after the session for those that want to dig deeper. I watched Ben Miller talk about TDE, but I was called out of the session early.  Make sure to check back tomorrow to find out why.  I was able to meet up with Ben after the event, and talk shop to fill in the gaps.

Closing
The closing ceremony went very smoothly with good advertisement of SQLPASS and community events. The raffle process is a pain point for many of these events and OKC did a great job making it run smoothly.

Other Observations
The speaker evaluation forms only had two criteria. One was for expectations (Did Not Meet, Met, Exceeded) and the other was a scale of 1 to 5 for overall quality. The fact that it was short and sweet might have yielded a greater return of forms.  People are more inclined to fill it out since it’s quick.  The tradeoff is whether it was enough for the speakers.  It worked fine for me as an attendee and speaker.

In all honesty I only saw two things that could have been improved upon, and that is absolutely amazing for a first time event.  Those things were no signs outside and pre-event communications were behind schedule.  I suspect the communications thing was due to pre and post event venues, and sometimes there is just nothing you can do about it.

Icing on the Cake
The OKC SQL group officially became a chapter of PASS on the day of the event.  The team was able to announce it at the event which really made it special.  Congratulations OKC!