Be Explicit and detailed

This is not a competition won by luck. There are no dice rolled, no coins tossed, no numbers drawn from a hat.

As an entrant, you need to convince the judges that you (or the person you are nominating) are the best of the best. The only thing that you can use to do that are the answers on the entry form.

The more the better (within reason). To give an idea, last year the answers to one question (What’s the hallmarks of an exceptional DBA?) ranged from one word to half a page. Which of those two do you think the judges rated higher?

If you can, get a colleague to read over your answers before submitting them. Ask them for their opinion, ask them if there are any pieces that they’d change or add to show you (or the person you are nominating) in their very best light.

Spell check

Please, please, please run a spell check and grammar check over your entries before submitting. This goes double if English (or American) is not your first language. There is nothing that makes an entry look bad more than por speeling thet teh jugdes mast spand tyme desifering.

No, not all of us speak English fluently, but there are enough grammar and spell checkers available (hint Firefox includes one if you download the dictionary) that not bothering shows a lack of interest and professionalism. Besides, if the judges can’t work out what you’re saying, they’re not going to rate your entry highly.

On this point, watch the l33t speak and SMS/twitter style word-shortening. They’re harder to read that fully written out words, and space is not at a premium for these entries. Again, you should be trying to show that you are a professional, much like you would when writing up a CV.

Watch the humour

What’s funny for one person may be annoying or offensive to another. A joke about ‘cleaning up after those incompetent developers’ may not be funny to a judge who is a developer or comes from a development background. Again, keep it professional, imagine that these answers are going to be seen by the CIO/owner/MD of the company you work for.

Along the same lines, funny answers aren’t. One entry last year, for the question “Why do you deserve to win?”, gave as an answer “No idea ”

Well dude, if you don’t know why you should win, I sure as hell don’t.

In Conclusion

If you’re planning to enter this competition, you have one chance to make an impression with the judges – your answers. Make it the best impression that you can.

This month, Richard Sweetnam, one of Microsoft SA’s Premier Field Engineers will be presenting on Tips and Tricks for Management Studio.

Hope to see you all there.

The meeting will be in the usual location – the Johannesburg Microsoft offices, 3012 William Nicol Drive, Bryanston. 18h30 on Tuesday the 20th October. I’ll be presenting te a session entitled “Lies, damned lies and Statistics”. This session will also be presented in 4 weeks  time at the PASS Summit in Seattle. Consider this a sneak preview.

Please let me know ASAP if you are coming. We need accurate attendance numbers or there won’t be enough cake.

The interview is available on the TechEd Online site. I’m interested in what people think, am I on the mark or completely in the wrong ballpark?

This month, Theo Potgieter will be presenting a session on lessons learn in deploying, maintaining, optimising and scaling a merge replication architecture

Hope to see you all there. Please let me know if you’re coming, I need numbers for catering purposes

The first session I attended (well, part thereof) was Greg’s discussion on Spatial data. I would really have loved to see the entire thing, what I did see of it was exceptional, but I had to set up for my own session, and it was very difficult to listen to both Rick and Jacob going over last minute details and listen to Greg discussing geometry and geography. I’ll be sure to catch the entire thing once the sessions are available.

My session on indexes went quite well, with a good number of people attending. However it appears from some of the things I’ve read today that I totally messed up the explanation of order of columns in an index and confused the issue more than clarifying it. I think this presentation needs to go back to the drawing board. It works well enough with a small group of people in an interactive format, but not as a straight-up presentation with larger groups. Maybe some more diagrams would help, or more examples. I need to give some thought into what would work best.

Grant’s session on Performance Tuning was excellent, had me laughing at regular intervals, which was bad, I was watching it on my laptop at a local coffee shop. Other patrons must have thought I was crazy (and maybe they’re right). Grant got an infection of the demo-gremlins, but someone had to so that’s hardly a big problem.

Don’s discussion of database compatibility levels hit on all the important points. What is and is not affected by the compat mode, how keywords behave when the compat mode changes and what it doesn’t do to the database’s structure. I am curious about some of those ‘reserved for future use’ keywords. WHENEVER?

Steve’s presentation on better blogs was very informative. Some stuff I knew, some stuff I should have known, some stuff I am doing, some stuff I’m not. The webcam effects were amusing too. I do disagree on the hot-linking, but that’s an entire separate discussion.

Adam’s session on CLR was awesome. Nothing more needs saying, except that I want to play around with the code for some of the stuff he showed.

Kalen dug very deep into the transaction log in her discussion on Simple Recovery, showing how log truncation behaved on the three recovery models, how bulk operations behave and how log backups work (or don’t). After that I have to say that there’s not much that’s simple about simple recovery.

The last session I managed to stay awake for was Andrew’s presentation on wait stats. I’ve used wait types and wait stats quite extensively before, mostly due to a presentation that Andrew did a couple years ago at PASS, so this wasn’t completely new. Still some useful takeaways. I’m surprised by just how many wait types are in SQL 2008. Over 450. Interpreting all those cannot be fun.

All in all, this was a whole lot of fun. I do hope that this becomes an annual event. It’ll certainly go a long way to persuading people that PASS isn’t just the annual summit.

You can see all the sessions and speakers, and register for the event at the official site.

If anyone’s wondering why I’m announcing this so late, I wanted to do some tests of bandwidth to make sure that the local connections could handle Live Meeting before publically committing to this.

This month, James Pheiffer, who recently joined the Premier Field Engineers at Microsoft, will be presenting a session on Performance Monitoring using Perfmon and PSSDiag

Hope to see you all there. Please let me know if you’re coming, I need numbers for catering purposes

Visit the Exceptional DBA website from Monday to see who the judges picked as the most exceptional of the candidates and to cast your vote for the candidate you feel is the most exceptional.

May the best DBA win.