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 WaitingĂ‚Â – 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 70 or so people. But, he bravely soldiered on and gave the presentation in English. And it was a good presentation. He had very good slides. I especially loved the triangle that showed the relationships between the generic types of waits. It really summarized the topic extremely well. His delivery was extremely clear. He used Zoomit appropriately. The demo’s were well constructed and really showed off the points he was driving home. And I was impressed with his approaches. Baselining in order to “know what’s normal” is exactly how I put it. The solution to parallel execution isn’t MAXDOP, but the Cost Threshold. It was an excellent presentation and I loved it. Even more so when you consider it was his very first time presenting.
Nothing is perfect, unfortunately. I talked to Enrico after the session and shared these critiques. First, it was short. He ended about 20 minutes early. Believe me, I know the feeling. I too ran out of material my first time presenting at the PASS Summit and had to spend 15 minutes making stuff up on the spot. We talked about it. Enrico has some great ideas for expanding the session out a bit. He also had some small fonts on a few of the slides, which made things hard to see, especially for old blind guys like me.
It was a very good session, again, doubly so because it was his first time presenting. I was quite blown away by Enrico and his presentation. Nicely done.