One of my favorite events of the year is the SQL Saturday in Silicon Valley. They’ve had four of them and I’ve gone to three (had to miss last year, scheduling conflict). It’s a fantastic event and Mark Ginnebaugh (b|t) does a great job putting it together. In fact, this year, we got to listen to Ross Mistry and T.K. Rengarajan have a “fireside chat” for the keynote. For those who don’t know, Mr. Rengarajan is just a VP at Microsoft. Yeah, he simply runs the ENTIRE FLIPPING AZURE DATA PLATFORM. That’s all. They had a few demos and showed us unreleased code and new versions of SSMS not yet available publicly (including functionality around Query Store and execution plans, my little heart was going pitter-pat). Anyway, if you missed it, you missed it… So… Speaker of the Month.

I am choosing Vicky Harp (b|t) and her presentation, Care and Feeding of Your System Databases.

This was a very good presentation and Vicky is a very good presenter. She presented without a microphone, even though one was available. Sitting in the back corner, I could hear her very clearly. She made excellent eye contact throughout the presentation. She used her slides as guides for what she was going to talk about. She used Zoomit appropriately and frequently. I learned a couple of things during the presentation. Vicky demonstrated excellent knowledge of the subject matter, fielding every question. Largely, I’d say this was almost a class in how to present properly. And, I think it’s a good choice because system databases are kind of easy to ignore, yet, there’s important stuff there that Vicky addresses well.

Feedback I’d give Vicky, number one, repeat the question. She handled all the questions so well. I mean she really knows her stuff. But, she didn’t repeat the questions and some of the people asking didn’t have booming voices, so despite it being a small room, I was guessing context based on Vicky’s answer (which, was easy since her answers were so good). I also thought some of the examples were overly simplistic. We might have hit more of the material in more depth by skipping a couple of the really simple examples.

I understand Vicky will be recording this for SQL Server World Wide Users Group. Not sure how to get that, but it’s absolutely worth a listen.

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