One of the things I discuss in my Successful Technical Speaking class (it's a

free class, usually once a quarter) is to take the results of the attendee

evaluations with at least one grain of salt. I've come to pay less attention to

the overall scores (assuming I didn't totally blow it) and look at the comments

for places where I can learn. It's one thing to say that, but another to

experience it, so today

I'm going to share the results of my presentation at the PASS 2007 Summit. Read

how I did and think about how hard it is to reconcile the comments!

Thank you for your participation at PASS Summit 2007. 

Enclosed is your session evaluation for session DBA-201-S: Transactional

Replication for Beginners: Andy Warren.

The total number of attendee responses for this session

was 22.

• Overall your session was rated as 3.45/4.
• Quality of the information/content was rated at

  3.45/4

• Quality of the speaker was rated 3.36/4
• Accuracy of the session description was rated

  3.54/4

• Amount of time allocated to cover the topic was

  rated 3.36/4

• Quality of the presentation materials was rated

  3.31/4

Additional comments about your session are as follows:

 

Great presentation.  more on monitoring in a future

presentation would be great

Great flow for the questions and answers....loved it

Great job...just lose the Bluetooth!

Speaker knew his topic and was able to speak from

experience.  Was also a very good speaker.

The presenter jumped from subject to subject way to much

and spent the majority of the time answering questions. I thought this

was a beginners session and not a Q & A session.

Speaker got a little side-tracked with questions durring

demos and it was very difficult to follow the demo.

Great job presenting the basic concept behind replication

setup and then illustrating it with examples

I would like to see a part two for this subject.

Wanted to know more about when to use the various

replication methods.

Andy is an excellent presenter that should be invited back

next year

This was a great session.  Exactly what I was looking for.

Great presentation, replication is no longer a black box.

Hey, you warned us it was a really basic overview of

transactional replication, so I really can't complain.  I'm one of those

folks who uses it, but doesn't feel really comfortable.  So here's my

vote for a more advances session in the future to address t

Even though this was for beginners, I appreciated Andy's

answering more advanced questions, too.  I'm a first-timer and went to

this session because I've found some of his articles while doing Yahoo

searches.

Somewhere in a previous blog I mentioned that the session went well and I had

an unusual number of questions which I attributed to having the word "beginner"

in the session title which I think loosened inhibitions. I went with the flow

and took most of the questions, but as you can can see the audience was split on

that being a good thing or a bad thing. The most embarrassing comment is about

the bluetooth. I have a list of things to do prior to speaking (turn off email,

instant messaging, phone) but totally forgot about the headset I use and I

imagine the little blue light was annoying to some. Good lesson to learn. So

what do I change if I give the presentation again next year? I like the idea of

doing a second session that would be more advanced, but I also like the idea of

maybe doing a pure Q&A session, maybe teaming with a couple other people to

offer a broader range of experience. As far as the questions during the session

I would probably do it again, preferring to interact with the attendees as much

as possible while still trying to stick to the overall timeline.

You can see the Top 10 sessions by category at

http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/Pages/default.aspx.