SQL Saturday #50 East Iowa

I just had another awesome weekend! I took a road trip from Oshkosh, WI to Iowa City, IA to speak at (and attend!) SQL Saturday #50 on Saturday, September 18, 2010. I want to thank the East Iowa I-380 PASS user group for putting together an excellent event!

The weekend started on Friday night with the speaker’s dinner at Iowa Power Company restaurant. I was excited to meet Michelle Ufford (blog | Twitter) and Ed Leighton-Dick  (Twitter), Kathi Kellenberger  (Twitter) and Arie Jones  (blog | Twitter), Chris Leonard (blog | Twitter) and Trenton Ivey (blog | Twitter), among others. I got to catch up with Jason Strate (blog | Twitter), Bob Pusateri (blog | Twitter), Wendy Pastrick (blog | Twitter) and Ted Krueger (blog | Twitter). The food was excellent and the company was better. I would like to thank the hosts for an enjoyable evening!

Saturday morning I woke up early (as I’m known to do). (No Saturday morning run, though. I got that out of the way on Friday.) Ted and I made our Starbucks run, walked back to the conference center, and then sat in the center watching the day begin. This was my second SQL Saturday – my first being SQL Saturday #31 in Chicago earlier this year – and it was really fun to see some familiar faces in the crowd. It was also great to get introduced to their friends and coworkers, and meet new people. 

The first session I sat in was “Take Control With Resource Governor and PBM” with Arie Jones. As I move into a larger environment with my new job, I”ll be looking for tools like Resource Governor and Policy-Based Management to help make administration easier. AJ is a great speaker – very energetic, with great slides and better demos.

The next session I attended was “Take the Awesomeness Home: The Data Collector” with Kendra Little (blog | Twitter). First - thank you, Kendra, for traveling from Seattle to present for us! Data Collector is a framework for gathering data about your servers. It’s great for tuning, and trending. Kendra is an excellent presenter, with easy-to-follow information, great pictures in her slide decks, and the ability to make an hour seem like minutes!

My center stage (well, really, stage right) moment was at lunch. I was on the Women In Technology lunch panel with Kathi Kellenberger – yes, Aunt Kathi! – and my good friend Wendy Pastrick, with the one and only Michelle Ufford moderating. Our topic was “Encouraging the Next Generation”. We presented to a full room, which was really exciting. We heard great ideas about how to get girls involved in tech – formal organizations like DigiGirlz, having them make a web page for their soccer team, playing WoW as an intro to tech, or taking apart a broken microwave. Tech is all around us, and girls can be exposed to it in a thousand ways. They might not realize all the ways they could get into it. I loved getting questions from both the men and women, feedback from the women about their experiences in school and the workplace, and feedback from the men about working with women.

Another point I like to emphasize is that sometimes, you just need to ask a girl to get involved. That is what brought me to where I am today – nine years ago, my friend Frank asked me to apply for a job at his ISP, and the rest is history. We also talked about how to get girls interested in taking math and science and computer classes, when they may be one of only a few girls in the class. One audience member brought up a great point – he asked what boys are doing in these classes to make women shy away from them. That was an enlightening thought and opened up another avenue of discussion – what is is that boys and men are doing, or not doing, that makes girls uncomfortable in these classes?

I want to thank everyone that attended the lunch panel, and especially those that asked questions and shared their experiences. If we all realize there is a need to get more young people interested in tech, and we work with the boys and girls to steer them towards it, one at a time, we can make a huge difference.

The following session was my “networking time”. I got to know AJ and Keith better, and talk at length to Michelle and Ed about their PASS chapter, organizing the event, a future SQL Saturday in Wisconsin, and next year’s SQL Saturday East Iowa.

My afternoon learning started with another presentation by Arie Jones, this time on “Change Data Capture:”. CDC can provide consistency, reduce programmatic overhead, and reduce computational overhead in your environment. It can also make you a Ninja DBA, which is #awesomesauce.

To round out the day, I sat in Jason Strate’s talk on “Getting to Know Your Indexes”. I’ve been pointed to Jason’s blog several times for index information. It was great hearing him explain how the scripts work, or find information they returned that I wasn’t using to the fullest extent. Also, he has the best Star Wars desktops ever, which I enjoy watching.

The closing session was full of raffles for great door prizes provided by the great sponsors, getting smacked in the forehead by the beach ball being tossed around the room, and a big round of applause for the organizers, volunteers, speakers, attendees and sponsors. I love it when a plan comes together, and event is well-run, and everyone has a great day!

If you haven’t been to a SQL Saturday yet, please consider attending the next one nearest to you. You can view the schedule at http://sqlsaturday.com/. They are exciting, informative events. Better yet, volunteer and help during the day, which is even more rewarding and will let you meet more people. And even better than that – submit a session and speak! After my first experience with that, I can say it is worth the preparation and the nerves and the stress.

I am already looking forward to submitting sessions for and attending more SQL Saturdays in the future. I think this is one of the best training events in the community!

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