Get Out The Vote

It’s actually kind of cool that SQL Rally voting for the pre-conference seminars and voting in the real(ish) world in the USA are coinciding. I’m in the running for the pre-con AND I’m volunteering for an actual election campaign for the first time ever.

Volunteering for the campaign is hard work. We’re walking around neighborhoods dropping off literature, which is actually enjoyable. We have to cold call people, and if you’ve never done it, it’s rather hard to describe. I did telemarketing for about 9 months in my youth, so I had a sense of what was coming. I wasn’t prepared for some of the more interesting suggestions (anatomically impossible suggestions) that I was going to receive, but there you go. Luckily, to try to get out the vote for SQL Rally, I just have to blog a bit.

Voting is almost closed, so if you haven’t voted, you really should. Polls close on Tuesday, November 2nd, at 8PM PST, about the same as the real(ish) elections.

Personally, I would like you to vote for my session. I’ve already detailed what I think you’ll get out of the session and what the session is going to be about. I haven’t mentioned why you might want to listen to me blather on about the topic of Query Performance Tuning.

In more than 20 years spent working in IT, one of the most common comments/complaints/squeals I’ve heard is “Why is the application so slow?” There are lots of possible reasons, and I’ve worked before to fix many of them, bad code, poorly written UI, improper network configurations, weak server set-ups, or the database. When it comes to the database, the number one problems, and I wish it were otherwise, are usually the code or the indexes. The fact is, they’re related. You have to lay out your indexes in support of the queries that will feed data to your applications and you have to write your queries in such a way that they’ll take advantage of your indexes. That’s why I was very excited to write the book “SQL Server 2008 Performance Tuning Distilled.” Not only did I get a chance to write about something I enjoy doing (and I really do like tuning procedures) but I got a chance to stretch my own skill set and learn new stuff. I’ve also spent lots of time presenting on this topic to user groups, at the PASS Summit, at Connections, and online at 24 Hours of PASS and other venues. The idea of the session I’m putting on is to attempt to get as much of that learning and experience as I can into one day and hand it over to you the attendee.

Ah, but will you be an attendee? What is SQL Rally you may also be asking yourself (or not, but this is my blog, I get to put thoughts in your head). It’s actually hard to describe. First off, it’s being hosted by the PASS organization. But it’s not a replacement for the PASS Summit. Instead, think of it as a scaled down Summit. Or maybe think of it as a scaled up SQL Saturday. Either way, it’s going to be a multi-day event in the spring of 2011 that will pack a ton of SQL Server, and related, learning into just a few days. It’s taking place on the East Coast so it should be a little cheaper to travel to, it’s shorter than the Summit, so you won’t be gone from work as long, but it’s still going to feature many of the same SQL Server experts you’d expect to see at the summit, just in a smaller, less expensive setting. In other words, vote for my session or not, you should go.