A great benefit that I get with my job is that I get to travel all over the place to see people present. This means I can expand out beyond my own country to see good speakers. That’s the case this month. My Speaker of the Month, with all the glory it entails, is Rob Sewell and his session “Using PowerBI With My DBA Database” delivered at SQL Relay Cardiff.
Rob delivered a very interesting, useful and entertaining session. It was all about how to gather data about your databases and their behavior and then put it into different types of reports in order to be proactive about stuff within your managed environment. I loved the way he put his slides together, the graphics and the lack of bullet points. His presentation style was awesome. He used Zoomit well enough (more on that in a moment). Some of his comments were fun too, “Sing Merry Christmas backwards” was one of my favorites. I also liked how, despite showing us a great set of scripts, he said, right out, “If you run these scripts without testing, it’s your fault.” Excellent stuff. I also appreciate his practical advice on setting up this type of monitoring, “Do what you need to do.” It was just an excellent presentation.
I talked to Rob about the one piece of advice I had for him. He asked repeatedly if we could see, and then would zoom in. He was clearly concerned, and did a good job. But after he asked a couple of times, I thought he should just assume that things were in fact a little hard to see and should just zoom. It’s a safe assumption a lot of the time. Nothing wrong with asking, but if you ask more than once, you have your answer.
This session was very useful. I strongly recommend it and Rob.
Thank you for the post and for the feedback. I hadn’t realised how often I checked people could see and will take that forward.
Hey Rob,
Don’t take it badly. It was a fantastic presentation. I have to find SOMETHING critical to say. That stood out a little. You did an awesome job.