Since quite a few PASS 2009 speakers have gone public with their speaker evaluation scores, I might as well do the same. Session attendees were asked to rate the speaker and session in six areas, with a rating of Excellent = 5, Good = 4, Average = 3, Poor = 2, and Very Poor = 1. I had 65 people turn in evaluations (out of about 250 attendees).
For my DBA-514 - Dr. DMV: How to Use Dynamic Management Views to Monitor and Diagnose Performance Issues With High Volume OLTP Workloads session, here are my average scores by question:
How would you rate the usefulness of the session information in your day-to-day environment? 4.46
How would you rate the Speaker's presentation skills? 4.12
How would you rate the Speaker's knowledge of the subject? 4.61
How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description, and experience level to the actual session? 4.31
How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session? 4.31
How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials? 4.31
It looks like I did pretty well for usefulness of the session and my knowledge of the subject, but I could stand some improvement in the presentation skills area. There were 68 presentations in the DBA track, and my average scores were pretty much in the middle of the pack for that track. I don’t feel too bad about that, especially since PASS 2009 was the first time I was a speaker at a major conference. There was some tough competition in the DBA track, with eight of the top ten sessions in the entire conference coming from the DBA track (including people like Kimberly Tripp, Paul Randal, and Buck Woody).
Still, this gives me more motivation to improve, and try to make the top ten list the next time I get a chance!
