12Oct 2014 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Navel Gazing

Professional Development
I love negative feedback. Well, not really. I love constructive feedback. I love the feedback that gives me things to think about. Am I presenting the right material? Am I presenting it in the right way? Can I improve? But, in order to get constructive feedback, people have to tell you that something you're doing, or not doing, isn't working. That's frequently taken as negative feedback, but it isn't. Let's explore this. If there's a feedback form for a session. It says that 1 is bad, 5 is great and you put a 1, or 2, you didn't like the session. But, if you don't leave a comment, that's just negative feedback. If the comment is something along the lines of "You suck." That again is negative feedback. But, if you say…
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28Aug 2012 by Grant Fritchey 34 Comments

Please, Call Me Richard

Professional Development, T-SQL
I presented a session at the SQL Saturday event in Oklahoma City last weekend. The event itself was pretty good. The organizers put everything together pretty well and the venue was quite nice. Plus, since I grew up in Oklahoma (Tulsa), it was a chance to go home. The event was good, but my presentation went a little downhill. The name of the session is "Top Tips for Better Stored Procedure Performance." I should rename it to just say "T-SQL Query Performance" because it's not focused on stored procedures, but on queries. The presentation is 1/3 talking about how you write your queries, naming syntax, formatting, etc. The second 2/3 is all about common mistakes made in writing T-SQL such as using NO_LOCK everywhere, nesting views, joining and nesting multi-statement…
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13Jan 2012 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Friday SQL Nugget #1

Professional Development
Gee thanks Jes (blog|twitter). Just what I wanted, a little extra work on a Friday afternoon. I used to like you. We have a tagging theme started by Ted Krueger (blog|twitter) who I also used to like. The theme is: Deciding that I need to delete and start all over Lordy I hate this one. See, I find it easy to decide that I need to delete and start all over. My challenging task is persevering. But… here’s the rub. Because my challenge is persevering, I have a tendency to try to persevere when I really should be throwing in the towel. I don’t have a technical example of this ready at hand (I did mention it was the afternoon on a Friday, right?), but I do have a presentation…
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19Dec 2011 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PASS Summit 2012 Evaluation Results

PASS, Professional Development
I say it all the time because it’s worth repeating, feedback is a gift. Good, bad or indifferent (well, not indifferent), feedback is a wonderful gift. Any time you appreciate a speaker, give them feedback. Any time you think a speaker could improve, give them feedback. Any time you hate a speaker, give them feedback. It’s really the best thing you can do. With that in mind, I have a huge stack of gifts in front of me here, the evaluations from the PASS Summit.Thank you very much to each and every one of the 160 different evaluations I received. I presented three times at the summit, once on a pre-con with Gail Shaw called “All About Execution Plans,” one time in a spotlight session called “DMOs as a Shortcut…
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27Jun 2011 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Presentations in Action

Misc
The first book I read for my 12 goal oriented books was Jerry Weissman’s Presentations in Action: 80 Memorable Presentation Lessons from the Masters. Up front, let me say, this book met my expectations. I expected to see a lot of things I already knew. I expected to learn a few new things. What I didn’t expect was more books for my reading list. The book is broken down into 80 little stories and these are grouped into five sections talking about Content, Graphics, Delivery Skills, Q&A (dealing with it, not your questions), and Integration. The sections made a lot of sense even if a couple of the stories felt like they had been sort of shoe-horned into the section. Most of the stories made a lot of sense, and…
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28Mar 2011 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

SQL Saturday #67 Wrap-up

PASS
Just… Wow. What an event. What a great group of people. I’m just so lucky to be involved with fantastic individuals like these. Thanks for having me out to play everyone, I really appreciated it. SQL Saturday #67 started for me with my second FreeCon (follow the link for details on the first one). Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) put together another great session where we spent a lot of time talking about blogs and blogging as well as swoops through other topics. We, by the way, is like a who’s who of great SQL Server people. I’m not going to post the list just in case everyone doesn’t want to be outed. However, I found the event extremely useful. I have a ton of notes and action items for myself and…
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22Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Content Survey Results

PASS
The results of a survey conducted by the PASS organization have been posted (thanks to the Board for all their work, again). Since getting to speak at PASS is a competition, I really shouldn't be pointing this out, because I'd like to speak again. However, if you're trying to decide whether or not a detailed discussion of Windows Server 2008 Collation would be more interesting to the attendees than a session on Filtered Indexes (it wouldn't) you can go check it out on the survey. It should help you make better choices for what the attendees want to see. Of course, if everyone runs off and submits sessions on the same four or five topics, that's going to open up others. Regardless, this is a service to the attendees because…
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