Bill Graziano (main man at SQLTeam.com, consultant, and VP of PASS) was in town recently to speak at both the Orlando and Jacksonville user groups as a guest of our company, End to End Training. If you attend a user group you know that gettings speakers is tough, and that for whatever reason local speakers are not as interesting as speakers that visit from other places (Bill is from Kansas City). It was a marketing expense for us of course, we got a 30 second sound bite during his presentation, but it was also some good karma on a number of levels and in Orlando actually drove our attendance to a new record, 28 people!

His presentation was "What I Wish Developers Knew" and if you're a DBA you can easily understand how you might build such a presentation after a few years of fixing 'mistakes' by developers. Bill made it an entertaining evening by not just talking, but by showing scenario after scenario with things like error handling and transactions and challenging the attendees to figure out what would happen in each case. As always there were some really good questions from the audience and Bill did a great job at handling those too.

We wrapped up the session with a general discussion of SQL topics and got one really really great question - why don't DBA's and developers get along? Bill & I had slightly different takes on it, and I plan to explore it in more detail in an article soon because it really is a discussion the entire industry should have. We also got to talk about the recent PASS Summit and answer some questions about how it compared to VSLive, Teched, etc.

For those wondering Bill didn't charge us for the trip down, we just covered his expenses - so it was 3 days of lost revenue for him while he did his thing supporting PASS and the local chapters. If you can find the budget for travel, call Bill, he's a great guy, great speaker, and the members will enjoy his presentation.