For the month of November I was at the PASS Summit and Live360, so I didn’t get to find new speakers to see (heck, I didn’t get to see any sessions at Summit this year). But, that didn’t mean I didn’t get to see great speakers. I did (Rimma! Rimma! Rimma!). Live360 had some amazing presentations. I do like the mixed events like Live360 because I enjoy crossing into dev sessions as well as database sessions.

My speaker of the month for December 2014 is Bradley Ball (b|t) and his session “Inside the Query Optimizer”

Oh, before I go any further:

HEY BALLS!

Sorry, but Brad had us do that at the start of the session. I figured I’d just carry it on. Anyway, wow. What a great session. Brad’s delivery is just awesome. He’s light and funny, but hits the points he means to hit and hits them well. I really loved the partitioned view example to illustrate simplification within the optimizer. Like I do with most of my speaker of the month sessions, I learned a few things. I also heard things that are driving me to do some research to help further my understanding. That right there should be one of the criterion for what makes a great session. Everything worked. His jokes were funny, but not overwhelming the content. As already noted, the demos supported the content extremely well. It was great.

Improvements… Yeah, a couple, maybe. I loved the way Brad presented, but, it had a feel as if he was speaking really fast. I don’t think he was, or maybe I just heard really fast, but you might try slowing down slightly. Again, more of a feeling than a real criticism. Brad had more scripts and material than he had time for. Like with my last winner, I can’t say this is a problem. But I’ve heard people complain about it. Again, you might try hiding some of the stuff and only pulling it forward as needed.

If you want to learn about the optimizer, come see me speak… kidding! Seriously, you won’t go wrong attending this session. You’ll walk away with a smile on your face (Brad’s funny) and more knowledge in your head. It’s a winner.

Side note: The last two winners are both established speakers who do this all the time and are therefore awesome. Isn’t this supposed to be about helping build up new speakers?

Yes.

I’ll try to do better. But this will happen sometimes.

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