I’ve always appreciated how Andy Warren (blog| twitter) operates in the most transparent manner, especially as it relates to his role as a director for the Professional Association for SQL Server. For example, Andy’s latest blog post about prepping for the SQLRally, to kick off in less than 30 days, is insightful and gives you a good idea of the sort of work a strong director for PASS needs to put in. I also enjoy how Andy more or less thinks out loud and offers you the chance to provide your input. In that latest blog post, he was mulling different after hours entertainment options, giving you a chance to pipe up with your opinion if you had one.
Learn from My Mistakes
Times running out for the early registration discount. Save $50 by registering before the end of the week! And while you’re at it, register for my full day, pre-conference seminar on learning leadership and management skills especially tailored for the IT professional. Here’s a quick run-down of the topics we’ll cover in my pre-con:
Earning the respect of your team
A deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals
Specific skills to lead database professionals competently that broadly fall into the categories of:
Coaching team members to effectively meet goals and deadlines
Facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions
Promoting communication within the team and with management
Keeping teams and projects on task and within scope
Dealing with difficult team members
Practicing good team time management techniques
Read all about the goals of the session here. If you’re coming to my session, I’d love to hear your thoughts ahead of time about challenges you’re facing!
Personal Experience, Personnel Experience
Also, just a word about my bona fides. I’ve had a lot of leadership and management training over the years, but like many professionals I consider my on-the-job experiences to be the most valuable.
On the education side of the equation, I received a bachelor’s degree in the school of management back in the 1980′s. I’ve also gone through the Center for Creative Leadership‘s leadership training curriculum, the Blessing and White Management Training curriculum, and SmithBucklin’s not-for-profit governance and organizational strategy training curriculum. On the experience side of the equation, I led small dev and admin teams of 3-7 people starting way back in the early 1990′s. In the late 1990′s, I started taking a more strategic direction with my skills as the manager of information architecture at the firm where I worked as well as taking a role as one of the founding directors of PASS. In the early 2000′s, I joined Quest Software as our initial SQL Server product architect and spent several years leading the team to a over 50 individuals in a half dozen teams in as many disparate locations around the world.
A Few Words About Community from SQLBits8
The more I go, the more reasons I find to go back to the SQLBits conferences held around the UK. The starting image isn’t very flattering, but here’s a fun little interview put together by Andrew Fryer of Microsoft:
The 2011 PASS SQLRally is just about one month away and it’s high time I highlighted some of the important things you’ll be hearing about in my precon seminar Leadership and Team Management Skills for the IT Professional. Just to set the context, many of us IT people got to our lofty career positions because of our keen use of technology. It takes a lot of smarts to get where we’ve gotten, but they are a very specific set of smarts that can’t always be used in every business setting. And, since so many of us have topped out in our potential salary as long as we stay in the trenches and the only do technology work, a lot of us are starting to eye those middle manager positions so that we can continue to see our career grow. The only problem is that all of those skills that enabled us to become top tier technologists don’t transfer into the management arena.
I’ll be teaching a wide variety of soft skills and specific management checklists to help you survive those early transitional days. And if you’re not a manager? You’ll still want to attend because the wide variety of communication skills we’ll cover will help you stay on top of many other real life situations, from leading the local Girl Scout troop to taking a role on the local PTA organization.
You can read the full and pedantic session description at the link I provided up above. But here’s a list of Five Funny Things You’ll Hear in the Precon:
“Here’s where we get out the whips and chains…”
“In this section, we’re going to learn how to manage our managers…”
“And then I was, like, OMG. And she was, like, LOL. And her cousin was, like, ROFL. But then I was, like, meh…”
“Darth Vader would be proud…”
“The beatings will continue until morale improves!”
And one bonus:
“That’s what she said…”
Did I put these in context, heck no! But it’s a fun session, with some practice labs and LOTS of content to help you make that transition from full time technologist to part- or even full-time leader!
Wow – what a great trip through Europe! SQLBits8 was in beautiful and sunny Brighton, which everyone local to the area assures me that it’s not usually either. The crowd was large and enthusiastic.
We did two rollickin’ fun lunch time vendor sessions, one being the SQL Pub Quiz. (I’ll tell you about the other one tomorrow in a separate blog post). We used a bingo pub quiz approach and, I have to say, a form of bingo I’d never before seen in my life. We managed to extract quite a bit of fun out of it any way, presentation hiccups and all.
Our giveaway winners were Mark Dodd (at top) and Dave Wimbush (at bottom). Congrats!
MVP Rob Farley Channeling the Inner Viking at SQLBits, Oct 2010
SQLBITS
One of the top highlights of my year is when I get to visit the great cities of Europe and meet with the great IT professionals there. Last October, I was able to visit several cities in Europe, including my first ever stop in Stockholm and Malmo, Sweden. Last year’s SQLBits event was in the lovely city of York, England.
The Level of Attendees Has Come Up a Notch. See?
This spring, in fact the next two weeks, I’ll be on a whirlwind junket. In just a few hours, I fly out to London and then drive down to Brighton for a couple days of SQLBits. SQLBits has a great lineup of speakers and content this spring.
I’m looking forward to many of the sessions going on as well as the innovative CIO-oriented event that will include facetime with Fusion-IO executive and industry legend, Steve Wozniak.
This Crew Is Crazy!
Our lunch time sessions on Friday and Saturday are ALL ABOUT FUN! If you attended last year, you’ll know to get there as early as you can because it will be standing room only. Bring a good horror story to tell about your experiences in IT because we’ll have some fun prizes to hand out as well.
Of course, the biggest fun for me is time spent with other SQL Server people. Lots of great speakers and Microsoft SQLCAT team members will be on hand, too numerous to name them all, in fact. And of course, I always enjoy a visit with my colleagues at Quest, such as Iain Kick (at left).
We were so inspired by winning a Trivia Pub Quiz that we decided to do one at SQLBits!
DUBLIN
After SQLBits, I head out for a day long session in Dublin on Monday, April 11th with my old friend Niall Flanagan at the Microsoft European Development Centre, South County Business Park, County Dublin starting at 09:30 am. If you’re in old Eire, I hope to see you there! Registration details are HERE.
COLOGNE (KOLN)
At the conclusion of the Irish event, I head directly to the airport for a flight to Cologne, Germany. The next day, on April 12th starting at 09:30, we’ll do another day with the expert. The agenda is a bit different, but all the details including registration are available HERE.
MALMO
My final stop before heading home is on Wednesday, April 13 in Malmo, Sweden. The user group in that area is lead by the very talented Johan Ahlen, whose blog is located HERE. I especially enjoyed his posts about FileStream late last year. I’m looking forward to more good sessions and, again, to learning as much from the attendees as they do from me. Be sure to register for the event HERE.
Last year, some of my friends from Quest Software attended Hadoop World in New York. In 2009, I never would’ve guessed that Quest would be there with products, community initiatives, as a major sponsor and with presenters?
There were just under 1,000 attendees who weren’t the typical devheads and geekasaurs you’d normally see at very techie events like Code Camps, SQL Saturdays, Cloud Camps and or even other NoSQL events such as the Cassandra Summit. We’re talkin’ enterprise customers with active Hadoop projects underway.
Some observations from the show that may be of interest to you:
- Hadoop World was a trending topic on Twitter during its duration.
- Hadoop has “arrived” with an average cluster of 66 nodes weighing in at 114TB. (For the philosophers among us, how much does a terabyte weigh?) The most famous Hadoop cluster is FaceBook with a trifling 30PB in storage – that’s petabytes. That’s more written information than has ever been written by man, cumulatively, including the Advice on Men column from Cosmo Magazine. Unfortunately, that’s only a few hundred thousand pictures of teenagers pursing their lips at themselves and holding a digital camera while standing in front of the bathroom mirror. They’re expecting about 60PB by the end of 2011.
- HP was there, creating a lot of buzz, from a hardware perspective. Quest was there as the leading independent tool maker for cloud apps.
- Oracle OraOop got attendees pulse’s racing, since many want a high speed, scalable connector between Oracle and Hadoop to fill a necessary gap. I’m not sure if there’s something in place for SQL Server and I’m not currently aware of any high-speed connectors built in to SQL Server Integration Services.
Some other good coverage to check out about the show as well:
All of this is very important because NoSQL in general and Hadoop in particular are picking up speed and momentum. Even if your organization isn’t using NoSQL technology today, chances are very good that your CIO will be asking you for details on how and when it should be deployed. And if you don’t think it should be deployed, the natural response of the CIO is “Why not?”. So you’d better get your ducks in a row, Mr SQL Server DBA.
There are lots of great sites to get Hadoop information, but I invite you to take a gander at Jeremiah Peschka’s (blog | twitter) blog for much NoSQL goodness. Start with Jeremiah’s blog post here, and ignore all indications that you might be in a biker bar or a San Francisco tattoo parlor. That’s just Jeremiah’s style.
His Hadoop writings are here, though lately he’s been writing a lot about RIAK - which sounds like a euphemism for vomiting, as in “Jeremiah spent a lot of time riaking after chugging that bottle of cough syrup.”
One thing I really enjoy about the SQL Server community is its vibrancy. I’ll give you details on the SQL Server community’s explosive growth in a moment, but let’s start by comparing Microsoft SQL Server’s user community with those of other significant database platforms. [READ MORE]
My session is entitled Leadership and Team Management Skills for the Database Professional. If you’ve ever attended my 1-hr professional development session at the PASS Summit, which has scored highest in the professional development track, then you’ve seen a preview of what we’ll be covering over the course of the full day.
During the session I will discuss how most IT leaders earned their promotions based on technical competency, not on leadership or managerial skills. Technical leaders rarely advance into leadership positions with the complex mix of social and soft skills that best facilitate their success and the success of their teams. Successful IT leaders require a combination of:
Earning the respect of your team
A deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals
Specific skills to lead database professionals competently that broadly fall into the categories of:
Coaching team members to effectively meet goals and deadlines
Facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions
Promoting communication within the team and with management
Keeping teams and projects on task and within scope
Dealing with difficult team members
Practicing good team time management techniques
I have three main goals for the session.
1.Developing skills which promote an understanding of your own personal motivations and what motivates the IT professionals on your team.
2. Developing skills which enable you and your team to meet goals set by management.
3. Developing the specific skills needed to lead a team of technologists.
As a way of recognizing and thanking it’s contributors, SQLServerPedia is holding annual awards for the best blog posts syndicated on the site from November 2009 – October 2010.
Editors Iain Kick (blog | twitter), Jeremiah Peschka (blog | twitter), and myself have scoured SQLServerPedia.com to find the most informative and useful posts across a wide range of categories that were posted over the last year.
Voting opens today (November 1st) and closes November 8th. Winners will be announced by e-mail, on the site and at the Quest hosted cocktail party at The Tap House Grill, Tuesday, Nov. 9, at 8 p.m. PT. If you are attending PASS, please come along and enjoy a drink. It will be a great opportunity for me to meet you in person. Winners will receive a badge to place on their blog site and a statue award for your desk/car/top of your house!
Cheers!
-Kev
I won it myself!
P.S. Current or former Quest and ISV employees are exempt from the contest.
