2014 - Page 2 of 8 - Grant Fritchey

12Oct 2014 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Navel Gazing

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,Â or 2, you didn't like the session.Â 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…

09Oct 2014 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month: October 2014

Professional Development

I saw a whole bunch of great sessions last month. I was all over the place from Las Vegas to San Diego and then Antwerp and Utrecht at Connections, two different SQL Saturday events and SQL Server Days. The speakers just seem to keep getting better, making this more difficult. But, I was privileged to see someone's very first time presenting and he did a great job. My speaker of the month is Enrico van de Laar (LinkedIn, Twitter) and his session No More WaitingÂ - An introduction to SQL Server Wait Statistics. Let me say up front, I messed up his plans when he asks right at the start "Is there anyone here who doesn't speak Dutch?" and I was the lonely hand going up in a room of about…

02Oct 2014 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

The PASS Board: #passvotes

PASS

Ever been in a fight? Ever been in one that's not completely going your way? I've done this and seen this in the martial arts and, unfortunately, on the street. As you start to lose the fight, you tend to fold in on yourself. It's a natural reaction. You're protecting the vital organs from injury. But, in a fight, it's actually the wrong thing to do. This is referred to as the defensive crouch. Watch some videos of MMA or fights on the street, or even boxing matches. You'll see it quick. I think the PASS Board is in a bit of a defensive crouch right now. I am running for the board. And I have pledged myself, both to myself, and to the PASS organization, to run a positive…

27Sep 2014 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

PASS Votes… A little bit more #passvotes

PASS

I am putting up an abnormal Saturday morning blog post in support of the actions taken by the PASS Board last night. The story so far... In order to eliminate all the excess ballots (I received 5 one year although I only used one) being sent to eligible members of the PASS organization, a requirement to update your profiles in such a way as to firmly establish one each was implemented. Great idea. Unfortunately, somehow, the communication just didn't make it out to everyone. And, some people didn't quite get their profiles updated the right way. Suffice to say, when the ballots when out on the 24th, there were a lot of very disappointed and frustrated individuals, many of them long-time and dedicated members of the PASS community. The Board…

26Sep 2014 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Development, Leadership, Age

Professional Development

While I was at the VMWare HQ getting some amazing training a few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to meet a large number of "C" level people from that organization and Pure Storage. In addition, they had multiple development and project management leads come and talk to us. All the attention was nice (but it was the information we were receiving that was truly awesome). But part way through the second day I realized something. I was sitting in Silicon Valley. I was talking to, effectively, the captains of industry and their chief lieutenants. And many, most, of them were at or near my age. Wait a second. I thought the Valley was run by teenagers? I'm constantly told that older people are getting squeezed out of technology by…

24Sep 2014 by Grant Fritchey 20 Comments

Thoughts on PASS Board Nomination Process: #passvotes

PASS

Having very recently gone through the nomination process for the PASS Board, I thought I would share a few things about it. Overall, it was a great experience. I feel that I really had to stretch to meet everything required of me. It was quite difficult to put together all the campaign material. Deciding on who to ask to give you recommendations was also very difficult. All, very much, as it should be. We're talking about stepping up to run for the board of, essentially, a multi-million dollar corporation. It should be hard to do that. The interview process with the Nomination Committee was also no picnic. Most of these people had already served on the board, so they knew exactly what you, the nominee, was going to get into,…

23Sep 2014 by Grant Fritchey 8 Comments

SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

SQL Server, T-SQL

The latest update to my book, SQL Server Query Performance Tuning was released last week. This is the fourth edition of the book, and the third edition that I've been responsible for. At the urging of my editor, Jonathan Gennick,Â I haveÂ completely restructured the book for this release. The chapters have been broken up and rearranged so that they're smaller, more easily consumed. Yes, I've worked with my technical editor, Joe Sack, to add lots of new information and to ensure that the existing information is more accurate and more useful. But, we've also added new chapters on topics that weren't given enough attention in the previous versions of the book, such as parameter sniffing. It can certainly seem like these book releases are just some incremental changes on top of…

22Sep 2014 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Communication and the Board: #PASSVotes

PASS

The whole idea behind PASS is to build a community of people who can assist each other in their daily work lives. PASS succeeds at that wonderfully. Further, PASS, the organization, tries extremely hard to let you know what it's doing and how it's doing things. You can read the PASS Blog to get all sorts of good information. One of my recentÂ favorites was this great summary of how the Summit speaker selection process was run. I think it's a positive thing that the organization is so open. I intend to take it one more step. If I get elected (huge "if"), I'm going to make a point of blogging about, well, the stuff I end up doing. No, I'm not going to be the official mouth-piece for the organization,…

19Sep 2014 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

A Manager or a Community Person: #PASSVotes

PASS

I am running for the PASS Board. You can read more about what I've posted and what others have to say here on this page. Today I want to ask you a question. Should someone on the board be a manger or should they be a community person? Let's avoid the easy answer of both for a moment, not because that's the wrong answer, but because it's the right one. Clearly you need a mix of these skills to be on the board. But, where you fall on my simplistic question could determine the kind of person you want to vote for on the board. Let's discuss it a bit. According to Wikipedia (deal with it),Â a board of directors is "meant to oversee the activities of a company or organization."…

17Sep 2014 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

I Am Running For the PASS Board of Directors: #passvotes

PASS

This year, I submitted my application to run for the PASS Board and it was accepted. This then is my announcement to all of you and the beginning of my campaign for election. My name is Grant Fritchey and I'm running for the PASS Board. It's traditional to either make all sorts of promises for the things you're going to do or to attack your opponents. I'm not going to do either. I don't have any grand promises to make. I'm not going to attackÂ my opponents because I know and respect them. I'm voting for James Rowland-Jones myself and so should you. Let's do this instead. Let's talk about PASS, you, me, your career, mine, and how PASS can change your life. PASS changed my life for the better. Like…

Year: 2014