I’ve been a little remiss on this. I just haven’t been getting out to see people speak for a while (no travel is nice). However, I’m back in the airplane seats again, so these blog posts are off and running again.

Speaker of the Month for February 2016 is Jason Hall (b|t) for his talks on SQL Cruise. Jason covered two topics, TempDB and SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. I missed the talk on TempDB, but I heard it was great. I was there for his presentation on Plan Explorer. Excellent stuff. I had never seen Jason present before. In fact, I didn’t know he did presentations. He does. He spoke really well to the crowd. He knew the material down (not surprising since he’s been responsible for developing the tool) and handled questions extremely well. He kept great eye contact with the audience and his slides were clear and easy to follow. The demos were interesting and illustrated each point well. It was a great and informative session.

Feedback… Jason knows this topic. He demonstrated that knowledge extremely well. However, he came off as less than confident in that knowledge. I think by presenting just tons and tons of knowledge he blew away the room, but if he’d had less time to overwhelm us, he might not have succeeded. If you know the topic, stand behind it. If you’re unsure if you know the topic, pretend you know the topic. Fake it til you make it actually does work. Now, you have to be able to back that up, as Jason did, ably, but still, come at the session with confidence. Your confidence will communicate to the audience.

I’m sorry I missed the TempDB session. I can’t wait to see what else Jason presents on in the future.

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