This editorial is being re-run due to an error last week with the newsletter. It was originally published on April 6, 2010.
We're sold.
If we go to PASS, or other SQL Server events, we are SQL Server professionals. We chose to work with SQL Server, and for the most part, I think we enjoy our work. We get excited about the product, because it has cool features, but mainly because it gets things done.
And we want to get better at getting things done.
That's why we attend sessions at TechEd, the PASS Summit, SQL Saturday, and other conferences. We don't go to get sold on SQL Server; we're already sold on SQL Server. We go to presentations to hear how other professionals have solved problems, how they actually use the product in real situations, or what things NOT to do to our instances. Don't be afraid to present issues with the product. Warn us what we should not do as much as you might let us know what we should do.
What I like to see from Microsoft employees are deep dives about how some internal feature is programmed. I've seen Slava Oks talking about NUMA and schedulers or Bob Ward digging into a common support issue giving great presentations that excite people. I've enjoyed hearing about how Project REAL, or similar efforts, actually worked and what tweaks/settings/turbo switches were flipped. It's exciting to hear what types of large scale problems Microsoft IT is solving for an extremely large, global company. That's what I like hearing about.
When I want is information that I can't easily find on my own.
What I don't want to see are contrived demos that show off a feature that's new without a real world application. I don't want to hear how spatial data is great without a real live example that a significant percentage (>10%) of customers could use. And I don't think that the majority of people coming to conferences want that either. They want real, interesting examples of the product solving problems. Of the product getting things done.
Please, Microsoft, stop marketing to us. We're sold, we're not changing to Oracle or any other platform, and even if we wanted to, almost none of us attending sessions at an event even influence that decision. It's above our pay grade.
Steve Jones
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