Speaker of the Month: October 2015

Working on my third year of “Speaker of the Month” posts now. The good news, I haven’t run out of people to award it to. Most months, if I’ve been able to go to a community event or two, I have three or four candidates.  Same this month.

Speaker of the Month for October 2015 is Rob Volk and his presentation, Revenge: THE SQL, at SQL Saturday Las Vegas.

What can I say about this presentation? Let me start by saying that you never, ever want to make Rob angry. Next, I think Rob needs a hobby that will help him turn his mind away from EVIL. Next, Rob has to be one of the smarter people that I know. Next, Rob is very funny. Oh yeah, and there was a presentation about all sorts of evil things you can do with SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio. Rob’s delivery is excellent. Actually, I wish we had recorded that session for several reasons. It was good. More than that though, Rob had a room full of MVPs and presenters and… well, we kind of went after him. It was like it didn’t matter. He worked it right into his presentation and went through everything. I learned tons of stuff, much of it not necessarily useful for my production servers. All the things Rob presented did give you great illustrations about some of the internal workings of SSMS, SQL Server and Robs twisted imagination.

The only critique I can offer Rob is that he has so much material to deliver that he might want to trim it just a little. We drilled down on a couple of questions which seriously impacted how much he could get out. Is having too much material a really bad thing? Not necessarily. You just want to make sure that you hit the most important stuff and that you have time to reemphasize what the most important stuff is. That’s it though. It really was a masters class on how to do sessions right.

Thanks, Rob. Oh, and by the way, stay away from my machine.