I’ve been thinking for a while about what to submit for this year. I knew I wanted to have one be about PCI and security because I enjoy the topic and have some experience I’d like to share. Career planning is always interesting to me. As is mentoring, networking, SQLSaturday, writing, and a few more things. I was trying to decide on a topic (or topics) that I ‘m really  passionate about and that I thought would have some decent appeal to the Summit attendees and would break some new ground. I didn’t look at what had been submitted already and I didn’t do any polling, just me driving to work and back thinking about it. The only notes I had for this year is that I wanted to submit new topics (because not-new topics seemed to get axed last year) and I wanted to include a lightning talk.

Here’s what I finally decided on (the first three are general sessions, the last two are lightning talks):

In many ways it’s my least favorite kind of writing because it’s marketing copy. Titles need to be good, but easily can be too cute – maybe “target” is? Turbocharge still doesn’t seem quite what I wanted, but I wanted to convey something about being better than average without saying it.

I wrote the abstracts offline, but I still hate doing the final review in the miserable text boxes on the submission form.

SQLChecker is the one that I’m still not sure about. It’s a home grown solution to do some things the way I wanted and it’s been surprisingly effective, but PBM (when combined with the EPM Framework) could do most of it. It’s a technical talk, sort of. Definitely code and queries,but it’s really about the idea of evaluating state on demand and being able to easily compare that with an earlier run. We’ll see. I’ll probably present it locally regardless, it’s a good conversation to have.

My favorite if I could pick would be a toss up between the one on credit card data and the one on learning plans, but I’d probably go with learning plans.

I resisted – barely – putting in an early April fools joke as a submission. Not sure if it would amuse or annoy (both) the review team.

Now the long wait for the news about who gets a slot and who doesn’t. I don’t envy the teams trying to pick through what will probably be 500 or 600 entries to get the best possible assortment for the schedule. Best of luck to all who submitted!