DATA:Scotland 2019. Unleashing the Guillotine!!!

Friday 13th of September will be my first ever appearance at a conference as a speaker at DATA:Scotland. Needless to say I cannot wait and I'd like to thank the organisers, selectors or whoever it was that drew out the short straw that is me.

I'll be presenting my intriguingly titled 'Guillotines, Sat-Nav and the Query Optimiser' session which I presented at the Manchester and Leeds User Groups earlier this year. The user groups have proved to be a really useful experience as some of the questions that were raised from the audience I've taken onboard and added in, basically I've been stealing their ideas.

My session starts at 12 which unfortunately for me is when my daily caffeine intake usually starts to wear off right at the same time I start to get hungry so I might take up a flask of espresso and a couple of wagon wheels to keep me going. I'll be in conference room 7 which also happens to my lucky number, so that's good news.

Something very new to me is that there will be presenters presenting their sessions at the same time as me and as such I need view these SQL superstars as, well, the competition I guess. I'm not entirely sure what tactics to deploy to get people to come and see me instead; media smear campaigns, good old fashioned kidnapping or perhaps just go really heavy on the propaganda...a bit like this blog post.

The truth is I'm very much overwhelmed at seeing my name up there on that schedule surrounded by people who in all honesty I hold in the absolute highest regard, and I also promise not to kidnap anyone (is their an emoji for fingers crossed behind your back?).

So what can people expect? Well at the moment we're in the midst of an amazing shift in the technical landscape. We've got all this funky cool new stuff like AI, the cloud, containers, Kubernetes etc etc etc and obviously I thought not to cover any of that. No, apparently vintage is all the rage these days so I'm jumping right on that bandwagon!

It may be old school but the query optimiser to me is like the magic box of SQL Server. We all throw queries at it and it goes off and does what it does, that's the beauty of it but at the same time we don't often get chance to open the box and have a good root around - and that's where this session comes in. So I'll be covering how the optimiser works, some of the magic tricks that it performs, how we can use SQL to keep a very close eye on what the optimiser is doing and of course how to break it!

It's worth adding that I will also be trying my best to seamlessly link the query optimiser to guillotines and satellite navigation - that'll teach me to come up with a great title before the actual presentation. I say that but I am currently working on a new session called "fixing your availability groups with sticky back plastic", take note Blue Peter (is that even still on?).

As well as the actual learning stuff (which I promise, there's plenty) there's a few ice breakers in there which I'll not give away right now and there's a good sense of humour throughout, which is mostly directed at the expense of myself.

So if you are attending DATA:Scotland all that's left is for me to beg, plead, perhaps even bribe you to come along to my session; if you choose otherwise I'll not hold it against you...and if you're not attending but stumbled on to this post by accident then thanks for reading if you got this far!

Blogging and Burnout

A short time ago I called it a day on my blog SQL Clarity - the blog is still there as I'd say there's a few interesting reads on there, although clearly I'm biased. I'm not entirely surprised that it didn't take too long for me to start blogging again, so here I am with a revitalised approach to blogging and a brand new blog too.

I covered the "why I stopped blogging" in the last post on there but actually looking back that was the tip of the iceberg. In short I was juggling way too many things and heading towards burnout and a few things definitely had to give.

Now I could go on and write a piece about burnout (as the title may have led you to believe) but as it happens there's an excellent article wrote by Kendra Little that for me really hit home and provides some seriously sound advice too. I recommend that absolutely everyone gives it a read.

Over the last couple of months I've had some time away, enlisted some help on the consultancy side of things and refocused my efforts on where they needed to be. I cannot emphasise just how much a complete step back has helped even though at times it's seemed like it's completely the wrong thing to do, again - read the link above.

I started a brand new blog because I wanted something a bit different this time. SQL Clarity had lots of aims at the beginning and some were achieved but some definitely got lost along the way. With that in mind this blog isn't aiming to do that much (I know, I'm selling it well) beyond putting down my thoughts and experiences as I go along with whatever I'm doing.

In September this year (Friday the 13th, typical)  I'm speaking at DATA:Scotland which is my first time speaking at a conference. I've really felt compelled to write about this experience so I'll definitely be putting up posts about this in the near future and in many ways this has twisted my arm into blogging again...but not in a bad way!

I'd also like to say a thank you to my mentor for the conference which as I'm a first time speaker I get to spend time with. I'm not sure if we can "go public" so I'm going to call them Person X, which I actually kind of like and might stick with from now on. Speaking to them has been so useful (even though I've been stretched for time admittedly) but their input has helped way beyond the presentation and for that I am very thankful.

And on that note, I'm calling it a day - for this particular article. Extended thanks to anyone who reads this and until the next time, take care.