Speaker of the Month: November 2014

I have been very remiss in my blogging of late. Apologies.

One thing I haven’t blogged about is Speaker of the Month. I’m behind. So, I’ll be posting two of them over the next few days in order to catch up.

First up, Speaker of the Month for November.

I went to quite a few events in October, but I actually didn’t get to see too many sessions. However, the few I saw were actually quite good. Speaker quality is just going up and up. I finally got to see someone present that I’ve known for years and years, but just never had the opportunity to sit in on a class. Well, I sat in on one, and this is the result. My speaker of the month is Kathi Kellenburger(b) and her presentation, Writing Better T-SQL Queries with Window Functions.

Kathi is just great. If you’ve ever met her in person, she’s this quiet, unassuming woman. She’s like your favorite Aunt, maybe why her nickname is Aunt Kathi. But when she’s presenting, she takes total charge of the room. You know who the presenter is. She spoke without a microphone and I didn’t realize she could project like that, while sitting. The content of the session was great. She mainly worked in the code and through examples, but she had just enough slides that there was some content documentation to guide people through the lessons. Awesome work. Her examples were extremely illustrative of the points she was making about window functions. I picked up a few things and was reminded of several things that weren’t at the front of my brain any more. I loved it.

Everyone can improve a little. While Kathi presented a tour-de-force, I found a couple of things I didn’t like. She had a series of graphics about this guy on set of stairs, that just didn’t work for me. I don’t have a good suggestion on how to improve it, but it just didn’t hammer the point home well for me. Kathi also had more material than she could cover in the time. Now, that’s a mixed bag. I’d say it’s better to have too much material rather than too little. But, I’ve heard people complain that they didn’t get to see X, or Y, or Z, because of time constraints when, in fact, the presenter intended that material as padding in case the session ran short. I guess in order to avoid the complaints, maybe put the padding after the final slide so you can go to it, but only if needed.

However, as you can see, if those are my complaints, one slide graphic didn’t work, and she had too much great material, how amazing was this presentation? Exactly.

This is extremely useful material. I strongly recommend tracking down Kathi and checking out this session if you get the chance.