As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I had two sessions at the PASS Summit this past year in which I spoke. The first session went great, but the second was even better.
The second session was as the last time slot on the last day and I didn’t expect to see anyone in the room. I had made a couple bets that there would be 10 or so people in the room. I was wrong, dead wrong. The room was packed and the official count was 122 people in attendance.
The second session was Extended Events, Work Smarter Not Harder:
There are many ways to performance monitor your SQL Server environment. In this session we’ll review Extended Events, which is one of the newer SQL Server monitoring platforms. Learn the ins and outs of how to get detailed information on the errors and events that occur within SQL Server and how to dig into the information. With a few T-SQL statements, issues that could take weeks to research can be investigated in minutes.
Overall Ratings
As with the last session, the ratings for this session were pretty good. All of them were above 4.5; which means @dancem0m buys me a free lunch at Fogo de Chao. I should tell her that. In all seriousness, though, I like where the scores landed, I think the practicing and experience in presenting is paying off.
| How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills? | 4.66 |
| How would you rate the Speaker’s knowledge of the subject? | 4.80 |
| How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session? | 4.77 |
| How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials? | 4.58 |
| Did you learn what you expected to learn? | 4.72 |
Commentary
Of course, I like comments. They help provide some context for the scores. And the comments from this session were pretty good.
Did you learn what you expected to learn?
- Great job – Thanks
Great session by Jason. Excellent presentation – Thank you! Not sure Yes I - Think it was a little more advanced starting out but eventually made sense
How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session?
- Spot on!
How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials?
- Should’ve been a spotlight session – Oh, the demos I could have done with 15 more minutes.
- Could have been much longer
- He didn’t have all his demo scripts but this was a minor detail – Yeah, one of them was missing. Found it afterwards – somehow got dropped from the project.
- Really found the demos helpful
- Awesome xml to file folder comparison
- nice slides, I liked the puppy w/rose – Hehe, so do I.
- graphs were really helpful
- Good example of transaction log shrinking
- Truly superb
- like the consultant perspective – Glad to hear this one. Sometimes I wonder if this works well.
How would you rate the Speaker’s presentation skills?
- Talks too fast sometime – As I mentioned before, I do this. I blame Minnesota and a topic that really excites me.
- Speaker tended to speak rapidly and disjointed (meaning tended to digress rapidly on and off topic). Needs a more paced and focused approach. – I do tend to do this. May be worth while to bring back the crib notes I used to keep on the podium.
- A little too many jokes which took away from the overall – Yeah, there were more than usual. Not sure where they all came from either. In my defense, I had a great time.
- Quality
- Engaging
- very confident speaker, great humor – And then there’s the other side of the coin.
What will you take away from this session?
- Ability to use XEvents in my environment.
- Just as with Jason’s experience, I now have something I can use right away.
- Love the out of the box stuff and examples.
- Will start working on extended events immediately!
- Makes monitoring much more easier
- good stuff
- good info
- What I need to get started in use of XE
- The need to push organizing harder to move from sql2000/2005 to sql2008r2
- external events are a viewable and accessible troubleshooting tool
- Something to study so I can use it later
- everything
- I will implement this on Monday
- Deadlocks are part of the black box trace
- homework to review the x events
- cool things to try
- that I really need to start utilizing xevents n shorten troubleshooting processes
- buy the SAN admin lunch and a beer
- I’ll have another hard look at extended events
- more testing, look at implementing this immediately!
- Use extended events!
- Super awesome ammunition for arguments
What would you change to improve the overall quality of this session
- nothing. Excellent session with tons of practical examples
should start with very simple demo/example. Talk at first lost me took awhile to figure out what was talking about and how it could be useful - great presentation
- very neat. can’t wait to try it. You are odd
- do a demo first! Had no idea what he was talking about for the first 15 minutes – I’ve done this in the past, the trick is finding the right demo. May need to give this another shot.
- Don’t know!
- All good.. well done as always
Summary
It’s extremely gratifying to see all of the positive feedback. And the criticisms above are justified, they are definitely areas that I try to work on. The jokes part – it’s all about balance and very tricky. If you haven’t looked at Extended Events, take a look at the session on the Summit DVDs, let me know what you think. Thanks again to every one that attended.
Related posts:
- PASS Summit Evals – Plan Cache Querying
- PASS Summit 2011 Session Materials
- Speaking At The PASS Summit
