06Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month, December 2013

Professional Development
This will be my fifth speaker of the month post. Do a search to see the others. I try to find speakers that people may not have heard of who are out there, working hard, doing a good job. But, sometimes, I'm going to see a presentation by someone who is a community speaker, and... well, it just might stand out so much that I don't have a choice but to award them (remember, my contest, my rules, and the rules are utterly arbitrary). The speaker of the month is Ami Levin (b|t). The session I attended at SQL Saturday Dallas was called Physical Join Operators. It was all about hash match, loop and merge joins. Stop yawning. I'm into that sort of thing. What I expected was, hopefully, an…
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04Nov 2013 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Speaker of the Month, November 2013

Professional Development
Yeah, I'm a couple of days late. Tough. My blog. My rules. Speaking of rules. Speaker of the Month is chosen by me based on my whims, interests and the direction of the wind on every other Tuesday at 3PM. No whining. I saw a ton of excellent sessions during the month of October. I was at SQL in the City, SQL Saturday Charleston, and the PASS Summit, so I had an embarrassment of riches to choose from. One session stood out. It's on a topic that, frankly, I find incredibly dull. But not this presentation. Without further ado, for November I'm picking Chris Bell (b|t) and his presentation, Indexing Encrypted Data (oh stop yawning, this is good). Chris went to town on the slides. He's clearly very carefully built…
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04Oct 2013 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Speaker of the Month, October 2013

Professional Development
This month I saw several good speakers talking on a variety of topics. Making this choice was hard. I'm really glad people don't know who I've decided not to pick because I would be singularly unpopular. The rules for speaker of the month are simple. This is an utterly arbitrary and random decision made by me based on criteria that crosses the gamut from careful evaluation of speaker skills, to reading chicken guts, to the random coin toss. In short, I pick, my way, no whining. But, I really, really want you to have a blog (or something like it) that I can point people to. That said, I'm making an exception this month (see arbitrary and random above). I'm doing this because I really enjoyed the session, Stop That,…
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06Sep 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month: September 2013

Professional Development
This is my second post in what I hope will be an ongoing series. You can see the rules for this, such as they are, and the last winner here. I didn't travel this past month, so I'm pulling my speaker of the month from a session that was recorded at 24 Hours Of PASS. I love the topic of database design. I love the topic performance tuning. So, my speaker of the month is Audrey Hammonds (b|t) and her session Design Matters! The Performance Impact of Database Design. I've known Audrey for a few years now, but I'd never sat through one of her sessions. What's wrong with me? I don't know, but I finally did and I'm really happy that I took care of it. I loved how…
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