Jimmy and I were chatting about undertaking major life changes like these and, as is often the case, his thoughts were too good not to share. Be sure to explore these excellent career development resources.  So here were some great pointers from Jimmy:

I’ve referred you before to J.D. Meier. Incredibly powerful guy. Here are some brief yet powerful posts:
What’s the Challenge?
http://sourcesofinsight.com/2011/06/24/whats-the-challenge
101 Ways to Motivate Yourself and Others
http://sourcesofinsight.com/101-ways-to-motivate-yourself-and-others/

Want more?
30 Days of Getting Results
http://sourcesofinsight.com/30-days-of-getting-results
Take a Tour of Sources of Insight
http://sourcesofinsight.com/2011/06/21/take-a-tour-of-sources-of-insight
Still not enough? Here are his three blogs:
www.sourcesofinsight.com
www.gettingresults.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier

Let me know what other resources you enjoy for professional and career development!

And if you’re really interested in developing your IT leadership and management skills, I encourage you to attend my Leadership Skills for IT Professionals seminar.  I’m presenting this full-day seminar in Dallas at the SQLRally on May 8, and in Louisville at SQL Saturday 122 on June 19.  Hope to see you there!

Thanks,

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter at @KEKline

Swag on hand? I’ve got a special printing of 500 video training DVDs for this trip:

SQL Server Training on DMVs

Performance Monitor and Wait Events

Plus, I’ll have a few posters, stickers, and other goodies.  Come see me!

SQL Saturday 105; Dublin, Ireland; March 24

My maternal grandmother was first generation Irish-American and, somehow, going to Ireland feels a lot like going home to grandmom’s house.  And all my Irish friends make it feel like I’m going home to see the extended family – cousins and ‘once-removed’ family types.  And on top of that, we get to talk about SQL Server at SQL Saturday #105!   I’ll be doing a session called “Top 10 Things Every Developer Should Know”.  I’ll also be hanging out at the Quest Software booth much of the day and, just for fun, I plan on doing a completely unscripted lightning talk.

SQL Server User Group; Maidenhead, UK; March 27

From Dublin, I head over to the lovely town of Maidenhead, UK.  I’ll be spending a couple days in the Quest Software office there in Maidenhead, whose SQL Server User Group is lead by fellow Questie Richard Douglas (blog | twitter).  I’ll be presenting after Business Intelligence impresario Jen Stirrup (blog | twitter).  Space is limited, but there are still some seats left.

I’ve already heard from other twitterati that some great Microsoft SQL Server MVPs will be attending, like Tobiasz Koprowski (Blog | Twitter).  If you live in south, central England, then this is your chance!  Register here: http://www.sqlserverfaq.com/events/386/Maidenhead-UG-meeting-SQLBits-Preview-Speakers-include-MVPs-Kevin-Kline-and-Jen-Stirrup.aspx.

SQLBits; London, UK; March 29 – 31

This is the official launch event for SQL Server 2012!  This is your chance to get the best and biggest dose of SQL Server 2012 training for quite some time.  The free training day event is sold out.  However, some of the training day seminars have open seats, including my seminar Leadership Skills for the Database Professional.  This seminar distills the years of formal training and hard-won experience I’ve accumulated throughout my career starting as a developer leading a small team, through the founding and early startup years of PASS, into my later years leading a large, multi-national development organization.  You’ll learn all the skills that are crucial for you to make the leap (and it’s a big one) from full-time technologist to a leader and manager of people.

And we’ll be hosting our popular SQL trivia quize and IT Horror Stories sessions as well.  So be sure to plan on grabbing your lunch and heading into our fun lunch-time sessions!

I hope to see you at one of these upcoming events!  Cheers,

-Kevin

-Follow me on Twitter

The Expert’s Conference (TEC) is a multi-day event featuring five co-located Microsoft educational conferences at the San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina April 29-May 2.  It’s pretty – see!

The event includes advanced 400-level training on Microsoft Directory & Identity (including Active Directory), Exchange Server, SharePoint, Virtualization (Microsoft Hyper-V) & Workspace Management, and PowerShell Deep Dives.  There are lots of great activities for Quest and Microsoft customers and partners.  In addition, there’s a Quest Software Day, with User Groups sessions; Focus Groups to steer product direction; and Executive Briefings.

In the registration section, be sure to mention my name when it asks “How did you hear about TEC?”  If I get enough people to sign on, they’ll let me off of the chain and give me fresh bread and water instead of the old moldy stuff they usually slide under the cell door.

Click on the pretty picture below to get more info!

Component Code Challenge

Ever had these two distinct thoughts – “I have a good idea for an application, however what can I get for it?” and “I would love to go to a big conference DevConnections or Tech·Ed, but how would I pay for it?”.  Haven’t we all had thoughts like that at some time or another?

Well, you are in luck.  The INETA Component Code Challenge for 2012 will send one lucky winner to their choice of those aforementioned conferences for slinging some serious code. All you need to do is create an application using 2 approved controls from 2 approved vendors, create a video talking about your application, and submit it to their judging panel.  The judging panel consists of Bill Reiss (blog | twitter), Nikita Polyakov (blog | twitter), Matt Hidinger (blog | twitter), and Greg Leonardo (blog | twitter) are on the lookout for innovation and creativity in the use of approved controls.  To read official rules click here.

Grab your computer and Visual Studio and GET YOUR CODE ON!

Fine Print: INETA covers one conference ticket, hotel, and travel to the conference as is outlined in INETA’s travel policy. Please visit the site for additional rules.

INETA Community Champs

Are you a hardworking community builder in the coding world?  Then INETA wants to know about you!  Check out the latest round of INETA Community Champ nominations.  According to INETA:

The mission of the Community Champs program to recognize and thank those members of our community that make it all possible. The first quarter is flying by, so this is your friendly reminder that you should submit your entries for Community Champs. Are there any “Rock Stars” in your community who should get a “thank you” for their hard work be sure to let us know. The deadline for submissions is March 31, so what are you waiting for go to http://www.inetachamps.com. If you have any questions about the program feel free to contact us at noram.champs@ineta.org.

Enjoy,

-Kev
Follow me on Twitter

Here’s a run-down on my professional activities over the course of 2011:

• Articles: 3
• Conference Spoken: 14
• Customer Calls: 124
• Customer Visits: 7
• Magazine Columns: 14
• PASS Chapter Presentations: 12
• Pre-cons/Full-day Seminars: 7
• SQL Saturdays: 4
• SSWUG Sessions: 8
• Webcasts: 16

Plus, I got to got on an awesome SQLCruise and was featured on Richard Campbell’s RunAsRadio show at least once (Richard’s blog | twitter).  (I was thinking that I’d been on twice in 2011. But that other appearance may have been in late 2010. My records aren’t clear.)

I was also put in charge of the SQLServerPedia portion of the DBPedias sites.  Some statistics there:

• 133 contributing bloggers
• 4,500 blog posts added in 2011 (out of a total 9,000 blog posts)
• 57,000 content items added in 2011 (out of a total 138,000 content items)
• Monday-Thursday all Pedias average 8,700 visits combined
• 1.9 million visits in 2011 (out of a total 3.8 million visits to Pedia sites since SQLServerPedia was started in 2008)

2011 was also my year to jump into Twitter.  By years end, I had accumulated:

• 3,452 Tweets
• 531 Following
• 2,656 Followers
• 230 Listed

I think that my increase in tweets had a direct correlation on my decrease in blog posts.  Ironically, I have accumulated even more topics to blog about (I’ve somewhere around 630 nascent blog posts), but simply run out of time to put them into WordPress.  My blogging activity for 2011 was down to 77 entries, about half what I wrote in 2010.

I’ll talk a little about my plans for 2012 in another post.  I hope to see you following me on Twitter soon!  Thanks,

Kevin

If you were to mention “Wayne Snyder” to me, I’d instantly start to grin and, probably, nod a little bit.  Wayne is the kind of leader who always comes to mind with overpowering and emotional warmth.  Sometimes when you visualize a memory of a person, you see them in your mind’s eye stooped over a console deep in thought or pontificating at a meeting somewhere deep in corporate America.  But when I recall Wayne, I always see an image of Wayne smiling with his arms out wide as if he’s going to wrap you in the biggest, most comforting, Southern-fried, big brother  hug you’ve had all year.  And that image is loaded with all kinds of deep positive connotations: supportive, enthusiastic, sincere offer you thoughtful conversation, honest convictions, and straight answers. 

To use an analogy, some leaders are only the “thermostat” of their organization – they set the temperature for everyone else.  But Wayne was also the “thermometer” as well – he showed what temperature at which our organization was running.  And that temperature is warm. As a PASS member, you knew within a heartbeat that it was ok to give a shout-out back to the speaker in a crowded auditorium, that there were no stupid questions, that it was ok to be the one who knew the least in the room because, in fact, he was the guy who knew the least in the room once and here he was to help you become the one who knew the most in the room! I honestly can’t count the number of people who Wayne recruited into the ranks of PASS simply by being Wayne.

Thank you, Wayne, for your many years of service to our community.  And thank you most of all for acting as the wellspring of our communities exuberant, uplifting, and just plain fun attitude of embodied in our motto of “Learn. Grow. Share”.  No one does it better than you.

Now, it goes without saying that Dr. Dewitt’s keynote is one of the singlemost anticipated sessions of the entire event.  Why?  As Dr. Dewitt mentions himself, the hallmark of his sessions are a semester of graduate school IT learning distilled into one hour of awesomeness.  There are lots of great resources discussing NoSQL on the internet (and I’ve pointed out a lot of them in the past).  But who wouldn’t rather leapfrog months of on-the-side research learning about NoSQL by enjoying Dr. Dewitt’s keynote?  Watch the streaming video at this SQLPASS link.

And if you’re here at the PASS Summit on Day 3, I hope to see you in my two sessions this afternoon:

Crash! Boom! Bang! 10 Ways to Blow Up Castle SQL Server and the Techniques that Catch Them (DBA-318)
Enterprise Database, Administration and Deployment, Regular Session (75 minutes) in 3AB

Are you a Linchpin? Career management lessons to help you become indispensible. (PD-200)
Professional Development, Regular Session (75 minutes) in 4C4

 Follow me on Twitter!

Keynote

Rushabh Mehta, the PASS president, spent a few moments extolling the value of community and the achievements of the professional association.  And he’s got a lot to be proud of.  PASS has come such a long way.  One of the most telling facts about the significance of PASS, to me, is that important SQL Server announcements now happen at the PASS Summit.  There was a time, and not very long ago too, in which Microsoft made important SQL Server announcements at other Microsoft events like PDC and TechEd.  No longer!  PASS is the nexus for Microsoft’s data management users.  And it shows.

Ted Kummert, Microsoft’s top data executive, had a lot of exciting talking points about how the community has grown.  PASS now has hundreds of chapters worldwide and nearly ninety thousand members.  The event has over 4000 paying attendees this year, which means probably around 6000 total attendees including press, exhibitors, speakers, etc.  That’s big!  In fact, that’s just about the peak capacity for the Washington State Convention Center here in Seattle.  No wonder PASS will be at other locations in the future.

It’s Officially called SQL Server 2012

SQL Server “Denali” is officially rolling out as SQL Server 2012.  There are a lot of interesting new developments with SQL12 regarding the way the product is splitting into multiple types of appliances designed for specific workloads and customer needs.  Need a massive processing appliance, check! That’s PDW.  Need a hybrid solution for data housed both on premises and in the cloud?  Check.  Need processing power for BigData?  Need processing for non-relational and unstructured data?  Check.

Microsoft’s improving tools will culminate in a new release of development tools called “SQL Server Data Tools”, formerly known as Project Juneau, while the business intelligence side of the house will have a new set of tools in “Power View”, formerly known as Project Crescent.  Hadoop figured large in the keynote, as Microsoft acknowledges that many BigData problems are best served by non-relational data stores.  Denny Lee, of SQLCAT, proposed an in-house data marketplace during his demos.  My face lit up like a kid at a surprise 10-yr birthday party.  Really?!?  FOR ME?!!?  I laugh because I’d been doing that at jobs throughout my career, offering up what I used to call the “data feedstore” to managers within my team.  +! for validation of your ideas.

First Session of the Day

From there I headed out to my first presentation of the conference, which I was delivering with my pal Buck Woody (blog | twitter) of Microsoft. Our session was all about Cloud 101 – when it’s appropriate to use the cloud and where you can learn more about the specific technologies like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.  Many IT pros don’t know the difference and are being subjected to the “implement it!” decrees of their bosses who simply read an article on an airplane saying that the cloud is the future.  The best quote from the Twittersphere about our session?  “Elastic is fantastic”  I couldn’t have said it better!

Speaking of conference sessions, my buddy Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) pointed out this great mobile schedule planning resource:

Go to Guidebook and download the app for your iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, or Blackberry.  After launching it, you’ll be prompted to download a guide.  Type in PASS Summit, and we’re near the bottom of the list.

Voila! Instant mobile schedule guidebook to the PASS Summit.

The Energy is Nuts!

After delivering my session, it was off to the Exhibit Hall, where I played the role of booth jockey for Quest Software for the rest of the proceedings that day.  I noticed two things of significance.  First, the crowds were thicker and more energetic than I’ve seen in years.  Wow!  I knew attendance was our highest ever, but the crowd was near to bursting out at the seems like a 14-year old kid wearing last season’s clothes.  So either the Washington State Convention Center is no longer big enough or more planning is needed to make this venue work.  When I was in leadership for PASS, planning and properly utilizing the venue was always a logistical nightmare.  So I don’t envy the current leadership in figuring out how to make the PASS Summit scale to an even larger size.  The second thing I noticed was how focused the crowd was.  Usually, you get a lot of tire-kickers in the booth who, deep down inside, only want your vendor swag.  Yes, we had some cute swag this year (a Toad beanie baby and some cool ribbons for your badge).  But we also had huge crowds even after we ran out of swag.  And, in case you didn’t detect the important part of the previous sentence, we ran out of swag! That’s right we gave out everything on day 1 of a 3 day event.  I nearly freaked the freak out. What is going on here, folks?  Haven’t you heard that there’s a recession going on?

BASTA! SQLCON.NET

September 26 to 29; Mainz, Germany

This big developer and admin conference runs from September 26 to 29 in Mainz, Germany.  I’ll be delivering at least one session and hobnobbing with Quest customers, friends, and in a very weird twist, my oldest daughter Emily, who will be in the Rhineland at the exact same time on a graduation present I’d been planning for her since graduation in June.

SQLBits – Query Across the Mercy

September 29 to October 1; Liverpool, United Kingdom

One of my favorite conferences of the year! The organizers are great. The speakers are great! The attendees are great!! The venues are great!!! The lunches are … um … adequate.  I’m doing all an new session on SQL Injection attack, this time with LOTS of demos kindly written by an attendee at one of my sessions in Cologne.  He like the session so much, he decided to build demos to go along with it.  (Thanks again, Volker!)

And if you’ve attended before, you know how much fun our now traditional IT Horror Stories and IT Bingo Trivia sessions are.  Make plans to attend these standing-room only sessions, before the fire marshal kicks us all out of the room for overfilling it.

The PASS Summit

Seriously.  This is the one.  If you can attend only one SQL Server training and community event in a given year, this is the one.  Over 150 sessions and pre-conference seminars.  Most everyone who is on the list of “who’s who” in the world of SQL Server and Microsoft-related data management and development will be in attendance.  And a large number of the Microsoft R&D team that builds, documents, and supports SQL Server will also be there.

Plus, more details to come on these events: Netherlands SQL Saturday, Belgium SQL Server Days, and SQLRally Nordic.

I hope to see you there in person!

-Kevin

-Follow me on Twitter!

A while back at a SQL Saturday in Indianapolis, I was enjoying the WIT panel discussion listening to the panelists discuss their  upbringing and how they became a success in the field of technology.  Their stories were, in some ways, similar.  They were smart.  They weren’t scared of math.  They had an important mentor who supported them and encouraged them that they could accomplish any goal.  They endured struggles such as financial hardship that, while difficult to overcome, also refined their desire to become successful in their careers.  Some of the women who had to deal with men of the previous generation even had to overcome blatant chauvinism.

But then another similarity among the panelists, just a hunch really, struck me.  I had to ask, to confirm my idea. “How many of you were a bit of loner or at least weren’t heavily influenced by your friends’ opinions before your professional career?  Because with my own daughters, it’s their friends who they want to please.  And they’d punt right away if their friends teased them about being good at math, or choosing a technical career, or anything else I can think of for that matter.”

It was pretty much unanimous.  All of the panelists were loners or had a very small social circle during their formative years.  Now perhaps I’m speaking from an inaccurate assumption, but most of my daughters are tight with their friends.  And friends mean a lot to them, perhaps more than any other aspect of their social lives (like their family).  So if their friends tell them that being interested in technology will “geekify” them, then they’d drop it like a hot potato.

So I wanted to put this question out to my female friends in the IT world.  Were you in a big circle of friends during your developing years?  What importance did you place on their opinions?  Did they give you any flack for going in to IT or doing well in technology related classes?

It seems like the days of overt chauvinism are behind us here in the US.  But I wonder if we need to start earlier with our daughters among their own peer groups to support them for a future in technology.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

Almost all of the speakers are friends.  Many are Microsoft MVPs.  So it’ll be great to catch up with these fine folks and, I hope, get a chance to meet many attendees.  I’ll be doing three of my favorite presentations: SQL Server Internals & Architecture, End-to-End Troubleshooting for Microsoft SQL Server, and Top Ten Most Crucial DBA Mistakes.  As I write this, I realize that I’ve got to get busy and post those other slide decks in the slides section of my website!

I’ll also be visiting a few customers for the two days before hand, signing a few books, and otherwise trying to be productive.  In the parlance of my employer, that means helping with sales.

Next month, on September 17th, I’ll be speaking at the Atlanta SQL Saturday #89.  I’m presenting just one session at the event itself, though I’ll be hanging out at the Quest booth much of the time. If possible, I’m also going to spend as much time as I can in Bob Ward’s sessions.

In addition, I’ll be presenting a full day pre-conference seminar on Friday, September 16th covering all sorts of SQL Server performance tuning and optimization content.  There are only a few seats left, so if you’re so inclined REGISTER HERE ASAP.  All attendees will be getting a big goodie bag with posters, a signed copy of one of my books, and a T-Shirt.

Atlanta is an easy 4-hour drive from Nashville.  And the weather is usually great in September.  So this should be a fun event in every way!

Follow me on Twitter.

-Kev