If my blog history is correct the last time I presented at oPASS was January 2012 – that seems like a long time ago! I’ll be back at oPASS in April doing two presentations (to make up for missing 2013!):

Building A Learning Plan

What should you learn next? How do you decide which topic is the most valuable? Once you pick a topic, how you much time and money should you spend learning it? Where do you go to learn – web, class, video? None of those are easy to answer, but there are answers! This presentation will show you how to build and use a learning list to decide what to learn next, and it will take you through building a learning plan for the topic you pick.  It’s a powerful approach that will move you ahead and make you feel like you’re in control of your destiny.

Credit Card Security For the SQL DBA

Are you storing or planning to store credit card numbers? If so, you need to learn all you can about the requirements for PCI compliance. We’ll cover how PCI works from the requirements to the final audit, and everything in between that you’ll need to know something about. We’ll talk about encryption, key management, logging, alerting, administration access, granular permissions, tokenization, and as much more as we can fit into an hour. It’s a complex topic, but that just makes it more interesting!

The first one about learning plans is brand new material, the follow up to my talk that I’ve done for years about professional development plans and another step towards packaging it as a half day seminar later this year. Credit security is a fun but difficult topic, I’m still working on narrowing my focus to things the DBA needs to know while still providing the context for why.

If you’re in the area I hope you’ll attend. Final event date/time and registration at http://orlando.sqlpass.org/.