Search results matching tag 'professional development'

Why I present

rob_farley — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:09:13 GMT

Louis Davidson just asked me why I write, and now Bob Pusateri (@sqlbob) is asking me why I present, which is his question for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday.

If you didn’t follow the link to see his actual question, you’ll need to know that he actually posed the question “How did you come to love presenting?”

Well, sometimes I don’t, but on the whole, I have to admit that presenting is part of who I am, and I miss it if I’m not presenting. It’s why despite being a PASS board member (that link will only seem relevant if you’re reading this while I’m still one) and having plenty of reason to NOT present at the PASS Summit in 2013, I’ve submitted the maximum number of abstracts for consideration. It’s why I want to be teaching more, both online and in the classroom, and so on.

It’s not that I think I have anything important to say (although I do only ever teach / present on things that I think are important).

It’s not that I think I’m good at presenting (my feedback scores beg to differ).

It’s not that I’m comfortable presenting (I still get ridiculously nervous most of the time).

I’m just addicted to it.

It’s a drug – it really is.

I spend my time walking around the room, or around the stage, explaining things to people, watching for those moments when the audience gets it, and... well, I’m addicted to it.

If you watch http://www.sqlbits.com/Sessions/Event5/Designing_for_simplification, you’ll see a few things. I was in Wales, and had started with the few words in Welsh that I know (but that’s been edited out – hopefully when I thought I was saying ‘hello’ I wasn’t actually insulting anyone). I nearly fell off the stage. I broke the microphone. I typed some things wrong in my queries. People complained that I didn’t say anything significant…

But around 33:10 in, you hear the audience almost start clapping. IN THE UK (where people don’t clap for presentations). It’s a moment where people see something they weren’t expecting, and (hopefully) realise the potential in what they’ve heard.

Phil Nolan wrote nicely about me on his blog, and said “Those of you who know Rob Farley will know he’s a funny guy with an enormous armoury of shockingly bad jokes.” More importantly though, he wrote “His design tips challenged a number of our ideas and meant I took away many valuable techniques,” which helped me know why I present.

…because it’s not about me, it’s about you. I present because at least one of the people in the audience will benefit from it. And that’s addictive.

@rob_farley

Continued Work Pays Off in the IT Leadership Space

KKline — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:01:00 GMT

I was surprised and honored to be mentioned by leadership expert Evan Carmichael as one of the top leadership Twitter experts for March 2013. Not only did I make the top 100, I came in at 12!

If you weren't aware of my leadership training specially geared for IT professionals, check out ForITPros.com, as well as my DVD and stream media training Leadership Skills for the IT Professional.

-Kevin

-Follow me on Twitter!

Why should you bother with the PASS BA Conference this April?

rob_farley — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:09:40 GMT

I mean really? Why should you spend some of your training budget to go to this thing?

Suppose you’re someone in the PASS Community who mainly looks after people’s data. That could involve database administration, performance tuning, helping developers write queries, that kind of thing. What part of “Advanced Analytics and Insights”, “Big Data Innovations and Integration”, “Data Analytics and Visualization”, “Information Delivery and Collaboration” or “Strategy and Architecture” is relevant to you? It sounds all well and good for the BI team, who’s thinking about cubes and models and report subscriptions and Power something, but that’s not you.

The problem is that as data professionals, we’re no longer just database administrators. The world has become more demanding than that. Maybe it’s because of the financial difficulties that the western world has been facing. Maybe it’s because we’ve out-grown our jobs as database administrators. Maybe we’re simply being asked for more than we were before.

Now more than ever before, if you’re a data professional, you need to be thinking about more than just transaction logs, corruption checking, and backups. You need to be thinking about the overall data story. You can tune your databases to cope with the large amount of data that’s pouring into them, as more and more systems produce consumable data. You can work with your developers to help them understand the significance of indexes to be able to get the data out faster. But is this really enough?

Today, we need to be strategic about the data. An increasing number of companies are moving their data to the cloud, where the need for database administrators is not quite the same as it has been in the past. There are a number of tools out there to allow you to manage hundreds, even thousands of database servers, putting pressure on you to be providing more from your role.

And then you get asked into meetings! People more senior than you asking about what can be done with the data. Can you offer more than just a comment about how much they can trust you to make sure their data is available?

This is why you need to be looking at things like the Business Analytics Conference. It’s because you need to know how to make the data that you look after more relevant to the organisation who entrusts you with it. You need to know how to get insight from that data. You need to know how to visualise it effectively. You need to know how to make it visible through portals such as SharePoint.

And you need to know WHY these things are important.

Either that, or you need to call in external consultants, who can provide these kind of services. You know how to get in touch. ;)

@rob_farley

PS: I should mention that I’m on the PASS board, so I see a lot of stuff about this conference. I’m not part of the organising committee at all though, and have been remarkably separate from the whole process. I do consider that this conference is about helping people achieve more within the data space, and that’s something I think more people should be taken advantage of.

Demo Mastery for the Technology Evangelist

KKline — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:02:00 GMT

In the same way that the finest presentations involve much more than the simple relaying of information, the finest software demos are much more than just presenting features.

REMEMBER: The goal of a demo is to INSPIRE the audience to use the software/technology, not to teach them every nuance of software/technology.

I've spent the last 10 years learning how to give good presentations and to give good software demonstrations. Here are several tips to take your software demonstration from informative to masterful:

1. Know your audience

Whenever you start a demo, make sure you have a good idea what the audience is interested in. That way you can focus the attention of the audience upon things that actively engage their imagination. You really, really want the audience to be thinking about how they're going to use the software that you are presenting. If it if you're not presenting on something that they're interested in, they'll mentally disengage. In some cases you'll even see them open their laptops and start to answer emails. That's the last thing in the world that you want to happen.

In many cases, I'll begin a presentation by asking my audience to tell me more about themselves. I want to know how much of their time is spent as a developer, as a DBA, as a designer. If nothing else, I can change the sort of examples that I use to be tailored specifically to the audience that are presenting to.

Truly bad software demos have problems. The code doesn't work. The beta software crashes. The screen shows the dreaded blue screen. But that's one thing. What you really want to avoid, is the truly mediocre software demo. The quickest path to a mediocre software demo is to simply show every feature and explain each in as much detail as you can. It's like those games that sit in our closet that no one likes to play. Most all of these games are ones in which one person takes a turn while everyone else waits. No one has any fun except for the three or four minutes in which it relates directly to them.

2. Start, but only start, with an agenda

It's always a good idea to inform your attendees of what you would like to present. What you present the agenda it's a great idea to confirm that this agenda is what the audience is looking for. Before I learned to do this on a regular basis, I found that my presentation might contain two or three lengthy sections of my software demo which were completely uninteresting to the audience. The customer is really numbed by this waste of time. It's far better to tell the audience what you are going to tell them.

Here's my routine when I start a demo. Confirm that your agenda is of interest to them and recheck the time constraints of the meeting. Then, get to what they are interested in. This flexibility also provides you the opportunity to inject other software demonstrations that are much more pertinent to your audience. Audiences love a presenter who can think on their feet and are flexible to the interests of the audience.

3. Skip the lengthy intro

This is a aspect of demonstrations and presentations that I struggle with. I worried a lot that I hadn't demonstrated enough credibility with my audience. And so for many years of my technology evangelism role, I spent a lot of time telling the audience about myself and about the company. What I found over time though, is that audiences actually give you an initial dose of credibility. It's up to you to maintain and even enhance that credibility through a strong demo and a good presentation. Better to have a very short introduction and get straight to the meat of the presentation.

Call out - Mouse Cursor Movement: It's especially important to remember in online demos that there is usually a great deal of latency between what you do on your screen and what your audience sees on their screen. So it's important to remember to MOVE YOUR MOUSE SLOWLY AND THOUGHTFULLY! I've sat in online webcasts, and even in in-person events, where the mouse literally disappeared on one section of the screen and reappeared elsewhere because the presenter was moving their mouse cursor here, there, and everywhere. If you want the audience to see what you're doing with the mouse cursor, keep it slow.

4. Show what is pertinent

One of the most important things a software evangelist can do is to show the most important and pertinent take away of their software. Let's you are trying to teach an audience about the extreme ROI (return on investment) of a particular kind of business intelligence strategy, it's crucial that you figure out in advance what are the key takeaways that you would like your audience to remember. Typically in audience will only remember two or three very salient points about your demo. If the BI presentation spends the first 30 minutes showing how to build a report but never once mentions ROI, what do you think the audience will remember? Once you know what is pertinent to your audience and what you want the key takeaway to be, you should focus the rest of your energies on building an airtight demo that supports those takeaways.

You will see the inverse of this many times in a mediocre or poor demo. At the end of the demo the audience will feel like they have sat through product training, rather than a call to action that inspires them to use the product. I've sat through demos in which the presenter carefully walk through several different menus, tabs, and wizards. And after 30 minutes of that, I now knew HOW to use the software, but I still didn't know WHY I would use the software.

In the worst cases, showing everything that your software can do may leave the audience feeling that it is too complex, too detailed, or too overwhelming for them to use effectively. Remember that a software demo is not design to train the audience. A software demo is designed to inspire the audience to use your products.

5. Don't get sidelined

We usually get sidelined in our demos by two things: questions from the audience and "technical difficulties" a.k.a. bugs.

Questions from the Audience

It's usually a good sign if your demo is provoking questions from the audience. However, you don't want to demo to turn into free consultation to solve one person's problem. Nor do you want to turn into fact-finding for one very narrow set of interests or to become the arbiter of some sort of political dispute between factions in the audience.

When taking questions, remember to repeat the question to the audience. This ensures that you fully understood the question, that the questioner asked for what they meant, and that if there is any recording going on the question will be picked up by the recording system.

But my typical rule of thumb is to only spend a couple minutes on a single question and questioner. Once a single questioner goes beyond a couple minutes, you can usually tell if you're heading for the sidelines. It's at that point that I asked the questioner if we can take the question off-line and come back to it afterwards so that everyone else can benefit from the time that we have set aside right now.

Technical Difficulties

Another form of sidelining are bugs in the software and outright crashes of your demo environment. Many times this simply can't be avoided. This is especially true if you are demoing a beta version of the software. But there are couple important things to remember if you are sidelined by a bug or crash.

First, mention if you're using a beta and that it might not be fully stable. Also, be sure to mention that the software WAS stable when you prepared the demo. Second, test your demo after conducting a full reboot of your demo environment. I've seen many demos crash because the presenter made other changes in the environment but only tested for the software demonstration itself. Third, Don't draw attention to bugs that you encounter during the demo, especially if they're just cosmetic. It's important not to do things like slap your four head and exclaim "what the hell is that?" If it's a bigger bug that hampers or interferes with functionality, you might state that it's normal functionality is… XYZ. Finally, if you experience a major bug or crash, immediately disconnect the projector or the desktop sharing application. There's nothing worse than seeing a presenter struggle with the bug in front of the entire audience.

6. Hit the jackpot

All good jokes have a punchline. All good action movies have a climax. All good newspaper stories have a headline. Your demo needs to have a jackpot, where the audience can clearly and immediately see how your software pays off.

Let's say you're doing a demo of the new columnstore features in SQL Server 2012. You could spend a lot of time showing the conceptual underpinnings of a columnstore index. You could show the state was to create columnstore indexes, to modify them, to drop them. You could admonish the audience and ways to build read-write systems so that they can easily get data into and out of columnstore indexes.

But what's the real payoff of a columnstore index? It is incredible fast for a particular kind of scenario on SQL Server. So in this example, your jackpot is to show how difficult that scenario is under normal circumstances and then immediately show how easy and fast it is with the columnstore index. Bingo! Your audience is hooked. They immediately see why they want this. There inspired to start using it. Now, they want to figure out how to use it and want to know when and under what conditions they should use.

Are you an SC, technology evangelist, or technology presenter? What are your tips for a better demo?

-Kevin

-Follow me on Twitter

Hurray! I Have One of the Top 1% most vied LinkedIn Profiles

KKline — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:32:00 GMT

I just got this email from LinkedIn about my profile (that's http://www.linkedin.com/in/kekline in clear text).

Hi Kevin,

Recently, LinkedIn reached a new milestone: 200 million members. But this isn't just our achievement to celebrate — it's also yours.

I want to personally thank you for being part of our community. Your journey is part of our journey, and we're delighted and humbled when we hear stories of how our members are using LinkedIn to connect, learn, and find opportunity.

All of us come to work each day focused on our shared mission of connecting the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. We're excited to show you what'snext.

With sincere thanks,

Deep Nishar

Senior Vice President, Products & User Experience

P.S. What does 200 million look like? See the infographic

What does that mean? Two things: 1) that the much more famous actor of the same name is not very good at social media, and 2) I'm better at social media than I thought.

It means one more thing - I should be grateful for your support and interest. THANK YOU! Please let me know what else I can do to help you grow in your SQL Server technology skills, database & SQL skills, and IT leadership & professional development path.

-Kevin

-Follow me on Twitter!

What's It Like on a SQLCruise?

KKline — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:25:00 GMT

I always seem to get a question or two along the lines of "What's it like on a SQLCruise?" as I present at various conferences, SQL Saturdays, and user group meetings. Since we just finished up the 2013 Miami SQLCruise, I thought it'd be a good time to recap so that you can judge for yourself if you'd ever want to do it yourself. Personally, I think that Tim Ford (Twitter | Blog), together with his wife Amy, are doing better than ever in making the cruise both a top-quality learning experience and fantastic social experience. I've heard from many attendees that they learned enough in the first day or two to make the whole trip worthwhile and, keep in mind, some of these attendees paid for the trip out of their own pocket.

Loads of pictures at http://sqlcruise.com/cruise/past-cruises/sql-cruise-caribbean-2013/.

SQLCruise Content

SQLCruise is, first and foremost, a training event. On each cruise, Tim usually pulls together four or five very well known experts in the industry who, in turn present several hours training. Each day the ship is at sea is a day spent in class. Example of the agenda is on the lower right. When the ship is in port, it's a day of activity and adventures. Tim spends quite a bit of time coordinating with the speakers so that the curriculum is both unique and well tailored to the students.

But each and every night, whether at sea or in port, is spent in 'office hours'. For many attendees, office hours are their favorite part of the learning experience. Since Tim caps registration at 15 students, that means the students get virtually unfettered access to the experts. If you've ever attended a conference, you've probably encountered that common scenario where the speakers are busy with presentations and, at the conclusion of their session, are mobbed by attendees with questions. They're lucky to get 3-4 minutes of the speaker's time. On the other hand, the students get hours and hours to talk about whatever is on their mind. And since we're on a cruise ship in the tropics, office hours usually look like the image at top right. It's both very relaxing and very educational.

Another aspect of the content on SQLCruise that makes it unique is the amount of time spent on personal and professional development. The majority of attendees are not newbies. They're mid-career professionals who are doing well and their career and want to take it to a higher level. But as we often find, our earlier years in IT are spent learning how to be really good at the technology part of our career. We like technology and, sensibly, it's the immediate problem we face in day-to-day productivity. But as the years progress and we earn a few promotions, we come to find that rising in the ranks means a lot of communication and, gasp, office politics. The speakers, in many cases, have careers the students would like to emulate. This is where SQLCruise really shines. Imagine being able to pick the brains of senior technologists and managers in a friendly and welcoming environment. How great is that? In fact, many SQLCruise attendees (I know of several from each cruise I have attended) have used the professional counseling they received on the cruise to enact an energetic new phase in their career with big pay raises, exciting new jobs, high-profile blogs, and all sorts of other really cool things like that.

You'll have to suffer through excursions like Trunk Bay on St. John's in the US Virgin Islands.

SQLCruise Experience

Now that I've told you about the grueling educational side of SQLCruise, did I mention that we do all of this ON A CRUISE SHIP IN THE CARIBBEAN?!? The cruise ships are, if you will, an enormous Vegas hotel on the water. There are casinos, a constant parade of entertainment, live music, comedy, pools and water slides, discos and dancing, live game shows - the works. Ask Neil Hambly (Twitter | Blog) about the dancing!

Several of the sponsors also help to put on really fun contests and activities, some of which produce some really funny antics. There are fun scavenger hunts and other team relays which, if you can get over your inhibitions, are a ton of fun. Another aspect that makes the SQLCruise a unique experience is the fact that most attendees bring at least one other person, if not their entire family. That means that there are plenty of people for your significant other to hang out with while you're in class. Kids have built-in playmates, over and above the kids' activities that the cruise line keeps running around the clock. Lots of folks, including me, have also brought along a parent or several parents. They all have a great time and, in many cases, look forward to meeting their new friends again on a future cruise. Would it surprise you if I mentioned that most of the parents are not the type to start emailing each other as soon as they get off the ship?

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of SQLCruise for many attendees is that you're on a cruise ship in the Caribbean hundreds of miles from bandwidth. That means very limited connectivity. Although I've witnessed a student or two have to miss a class to put out some sort of fire back at the office, this is a really rare occurrence. In fact, it's much less common than what I've seen at the big conferences because you're so disconnected from all fast forms of bandwidth. Yes, there is an expensive sort of satellite connectivity on the ship. But your boss would have to be pretty desperate to keep you on the front lines while on one of these trips. Now I don't know about you, but my training events are always more enjoyable when I don't have the cares of the office weighing on my mind.

SQLCruise Instructor Allen White (Twitter | Blog) teaches about PowerShell for the SQL Server professional at right. Notice his casual but totally appropriate attire. Shorts, sandals, and comfy shirts are the norm even in class.

SQLCruise Cost

SQLCruise costs less than $200/day for the training. That compares to more than $300-400/day training costs of most commercial training centers who use the Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC). On the other hand, there's the cost of the cruise itself. But again, the cruise is all-inclusive for lodging and meals (but not alcohol). So, for me at least, the cost of cruise itself was actually a little cheaper than a standard, nice American hotel chain like a Hilton, Marriott, or Sheraton.

Another, less tangible benefit of the expense of the SQLCruise is that the instructors are never unable to answer your questions, compared to many training centers whose trainers have never actually had a career built around the topic they're teaching. It's a huge difference.

Finally, if you're weighing the idea of paying for a trip like this out of your own pocket, consider that training expense are tax deductible. In my experience, probably a third of attendees cover their own costs. In a few cases, employers cover the training and the attendee covers their travel expenses. And for the rest, their employers cover the cost. Check out the FAQ and other resources on the website for tips on convincing your boss that this is the right training for you. As an aside, SQL Sentry gave away a full registration to the event - winner Mickey Stuewe is in the center of the picture at right. Congrats Mickey!

It's a great event and a great way to spend a week. I hope to see you at a future SQLCruise!

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

MCM – I passed!

rob_farley — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:40:00 GMT

I was wrong – I passed the MCM lab last month.

I know I thought I’d failed – I’m still surprised that I passed. Maybe I managed to satisfy enough of enough questions. Certainly none of the questions were beyond me, as I wrote just after I’d sat it. But I do know that I left more questions in an incomplete state than I would’ve liked.

The things I hadn’t finished were mostly those things which I’d simply been caught by from a time-perspective. I didn’t feel like I was out of my depth at all, just that some things hadn’t worked the way that I’d expected. In real life I would’ve been able to solve them, and given a little more time, I would’ve been able to get through them too.

It’s why I wrote that I was confident I’d pass it on a subsequent attempt, although I’m quite happy to not have to do that. I’m still happy I told everyone I was taking the exams, and would do the same again. The study aspect is still something I’m not sure about. As much as I’d like to advise people to NOT study, I get that most people don’t manage to pass first time (even with some study). Heck – it used to require three weeks of intensive training in Seattle, and I was never going to do that (at least, not unless I was on the other side of the desk).

So now I’m a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server, to go with the Microsoft Certified Trainer cert and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award that I’ve had since 2006. I don’t know how many people around the world have both MCM and MCT in SQL Server, but there can’t be many. I need to deliver more training.

@rob_farley
LobsterPot Solutions

The MCM lab exam – two days later

rob_farley — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 20:59:38 GMT

Readers of my blog, or followers on Twitter will know I took the MCM Lab exam a couple of days ago. I let people know I was doing the exam, rather than doing the ‘normal’ thing of doing it in secret and hoping no-one found out until a successful result had been published.

Oh, and this post has been approved by the MCM program’s boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) as not-breaking NDA. Nothing herein should be seen to imply that a particular topic is or isn’t in the exam.

So how did I go? Well... I made a bunch of mistakes, I wasted a lot of time, I even left some questions incomplete, and so I assume I’ve failed. It’s a horrible feeling, I can tell you. I went in not knowing what to expect. I knew that I’d worked with SQL Server for a lot of years, and felt like I had a good grounding in all the various aspects of SQL Server that I might have to know – but on the day, in the stress of having a laggy remote desktop session, a Lync connection which had dropped out just beforehand, being told that ‘everyone’ fails first time but that I was probably going to be one of the exceptions..., well, I didn’t feel like it was my day.

If I’d had that day at a client site, it would’ve been fine. With extra time, I have no doubt that I would’ve been able to get through things. I could’ve raised questions when I didn’t feel exactly sure about what was expected. I could’ve pointed out how much I’d done to help address a situation and found out if they wanted me to continue hunting for other potential issues. I could’ve asked for more information. I could’ve written a document describing what I had in mind to solve the particular problem to confirm that the client was happy with it. You don’t get any of that in exam situations.

I found myself doing things the ways that work in the real world, but not having somewhere to turn when it turned out that the information was clearly not quite there, turning a simple situation into a trickier one. In real life, I’d’ve turned to the face peering over my shoulder and said “I thought you said it was that thing.” Instead, I wasted time looking for what it actually was.

I found myself making changes to databases that I wouldn’t make in the real world without first running those changes past someone, or at least making sufficient disclaimers along the lines of “I would recommend making this change, but there’s always a chance that something else will see the impact of this…”

Now, I think I could go into the exam, and even faced with a different set of questions, have a better picture about the style of thing that would be asked, and be better able to identify the danger-items – those things which could lure me away from staying on track. It’s not the same with consulting, because you can always ask as soon as you consider there’s a potential problem. Just like the mechanic who says “So, there’s a rattle… do you want me to spend some time looking into this? If so, is half an hour okay?”, I can ask my clients if there’s something which doesn’t smell right. In the exam, you don’t get that luxury.

If you’re going to take the exam, I would recommend the following approach:

Start by going through the questions, making notes about what they’re asking you to do and how much time it’ll take. Move the list of questions to the side, because switching from one window to another will simply take too long.
Once you’ve identified ones that you know will be ‘quick’, do them. But if one stops being quick, leave it and come back. You’re not in danger of leaving it unfinished completely – there’s 5.5 hours that you’ll be remoted in, and you’ll be coming back in about 30 minutes. But you don’t want to find that you spend an hour on something which you anticipated would be a ten minute job.
Whenever you leave a question, put it back in the list at an appropriate spot. If you think it’s still quicker than the question on XYZ, then fine, put it above that. But be ruthless about how long you spend on each task. If something doesn’t work the way you expect, do some troubleshooting, but don’t treat it as if your client depends on it. Your exam result will suffer more because you wasted time, than if you left it incomplete. You could end up finding that the XYZ question actually turned out to be simpler than you thought.

I hope I passed, but I really don’t think I have done.

I’m confident I blitzed quite a lot of them. There were plenty on the list that I moved through quickly, and others that took me longer than I expected, but I still finished. It’s just that there were a certain number that I assume I didn’t finish satisfactorily – simply because if it were my database that I had got a consultant in to fix, I wouldn’t’ve considered it complete. I mean, hopefully I hit the key things on some of those, but I can’t tell.

I know I definitely got some just plain wrong. The things that weren’t working, and I didn’t have time to get back to. I was getting hungry by the end of it, and was feeling stressed about the amount of time I’d wasted on other questions.

Assuming I need to retake it, I have to wait until 90 days after this attempt. That’s March 20th.

So what will I do between now and then? Well, I might check through the various guides about the things that stop things from working the way I expect them to. I’m not saying what didn’t work, but imagine there’s some technology that you’re familiar enough with. To use Tom’s example, peer-to-peer replication. I know how to set that up – I’ve done it before. It’s actually very straight forward. But if you do what you always do and you get some error… well, that might be harder to troubleshoot. In the real world there are plenty of ways you can troubleshoot online, but in an exam, it’s just Books Online and what’s in your head.

In that regard, Tom’s guide on what he didn’t do is useful. His “Don’t try to get every answer” is very important. But I would also point out that you should start to try them, in case they turn out to be easier than you expected. Just because it’s on P2P (continuing Tom’s example) doesn’t mean you won’t get it. Tom described shouting at the screen saying “Seriously? Is that all you’ve got?” – this is why you should try the ones that you figured would be harder. Don’t start with them, but a few hours in, don’t just focus on the time-wasters.

Tom described ‘not studying alone’. I discussed various things with people leading up to the exam, more so than studying per se. There’s another person who I know is taking the exam soon, and we’ve talked a bit about the various technologies. Like “How are you at TDE? What’s your clustering like?” – that kind of thing. He has environments set up where he's practising a bunch of tasks. I didn’t. I did skim through some of the videos, but not many, and it was really only skimming. I found myself being slightly interested in the video where PaulR demonstrates how to set up replication with a mirrored subscriber. I watched it a couple of times because something wasn’t sitting right – I figured it out though… in the exam you don’t want to be using scripts for everything (the GUI would be much better – not that I practised at all), but also, the error that he gets at the end… it’s because his script tries to remove the subscriber from the wrong server. In the GUI, he wouldn’t’ve had that problem (reminds me – I should mention this particular mistake to him, although I’m sure he knows about it and just doesn’t have an easy way to change the video). I didn’t end up watching most of the videos – even the ones on Resource Governor. I looked at the titles, and figured it would be fine to skip them. I listened to one on Clustering Troubleshooting in the car as I drove home from town, but just kept thinking “Right – I get all that… but is that enough for the exam?” I can’t say whether it was or not, but I can tell you that I didn’t do any further study on it. I also watched the Waits demo, and the slides on Log File Internals (but mainly out of curiosity about a different problem I’d had a while back).

I didn’t read the books. I’ve read a couple of chapters of Kalen’s SQL Internals before, but didn’t finish it. I haven’t even read the book I wrote recently (well, obviously the chapters I wrote – I read them lots of times).

Of Tom’s advice on what he did to pass (doing the reading, watching the videos, writing things down and teaching others) I really didn’t do any of them. But I do spend time teaching others in general. I’m an MCT – I teach from time to time (not as often as I used to), and that sharing aspect is important to me. I explain to people about how to tune their queries. I explain why indexing strategies will work for general performance gain. I explain why security is important, and the keys to avoiding SQL Injection. Even today I spent time explaining the roles of Replication Agents to someone (who later told me that they’d heard that stuff before, but it just made more sense when I explained it). Teaching comes naturally to me, and I’ve always done it. But I didn’t do any of that with this MCM exam in mind.

My advice on how to pass this exam – use SQL Server for fifteen years. It’s what I did. Studying might work for you too, and if that’s what you’ve done, then you may well get to leave the lab exam feeling a whole lot more confident about your result than me.

I actually did leave feeling very confident about my result. I’m confident I failed. But I also know that I could pass it tomorrow with no extra study – by avoiding the time sinks that are in there – and I wish I didn’t have to wait until March to retake it.

I’ll post again when my result becomes public, to let you know how I actually did.

Of course, I hope I’m wrong.

@rob_farley

MCM Lab exam this week

rob_farley — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:55:56 GMT

In two days I’ll’ve finished the MCM Lab exam, 88-971. If you do an internet search for 88-971, it’ll tell you the answer is –883. Obviously.

It’ll also give you a link to the actual exam page, which is useful too, once you’ve finished being distracted by the calculator instead of going to the thing you’re actually looking for. (Do people actually search the internet for the results of mathematical questions? Really?)

The list of Skills Measured for this exam is quite short, but can essentially be broken down into one word “Anything”.

The Preparation Materials section is even better. Classroom Training – none available. Microsoft E-Learning – none available. Microsoft Press Books – none available. Practice Tests – none available. But there are links to Readiness Videos and a page which has no resources listed, but tells you a list of people who have already qualified. Three in Australia who have MCM SQL Server 2008 so far. The list doesn’t include some of the latest batch, such as Jason Strate or Tom LaRock.

I’ve used SQL Server for almost 15 years. During that time I’ve been awarded SQL Server MVP seven times, but the MVP award doesn’t actually mean all that much when considering this particular certification. I know lots of MVPs who have tried this particular exam and failed – including Jason and Tom. Right now, I have no idea whether I’ll pass or not. People tell me I’ll pass no problem, but I honestly have no idea. There’s something about that “Anything” aspect that worries me.

I keep looking at the list of things in the Readiness Videos, and think to myself “I’m comfortable with Resource Governor (or whatever) – that should be fine.” Except that then I feel like I maybe don’t know all the different things that can go wrong with Resource Governor (or whatever), and I wonder what kind of situations I’ll be faced with. And then I find myself looking through the stuff that’s explained in the videos, and wondering what kinds of things I should know that I don’t, and then I get amazingly bored and frustrated (after all, I tell people that these exams aren’t supposed to be studied for – you’ve been studying for the last 15 years, right?), and I figure “What’s the worst that can happen? A fail?”

I’m told that the exam provides a list of scenarios (maybe 14 of them?) and you have 5.5 hours to complete them. When I say “complete”, I mean complete – you don’t get to leave them unfinished, that’ll get you ‘nil points’ for that scenario. Apparently no-one gets to complete all of them.

Now, I’m a consultant. I get called on to fix the problems that people have on their SQL boxes. Sometimes this involves fixing corruption. Sometimes it’s figuring out some performance problem. Sometimes it’s as straight forward as getting past a full transaction log; sometimes it’s as tricky as recovering a database that has lost its metadata, without backups. Most situations aren’t a problem, but I also have the confidence of being able to do internet searches to verify my maths (in case I forget it’s –883). In the exam, I’ll have maybe twenty minutes per scenario (but if I need longer, I’ll have to take longer – no point in stopping half way if it takes more than twenty minutes, unless I don’t see an end coming up), so I’ll have time constraints too. And of course, I won’t have any of my usual tools. I can’t take scripts in, I can’t take staff members. Hopefully I can use the coffee machine that will be in the room.

I figure it’s going to feel like one of those days when I’ve gone into a client site, and found that the problems are way worse than I expected, and that the site is down, with people standing over me needing me to get things right first time...

...so it should be fine, I’ve done that before. :)

If I do fail, it won’t make me any less of a consultant. It won’t make me any less able to help all of my clients (including you if you get in touch – hehe), it’ll just mean that the particular problem might’ve taken me more than the twenty minutes that the exam gave me.

@rob_farley

PS: Apparently the done thing is to NOT advertise that you’re sitting the exam at a particular time, only that you’re expecting to take it at some point in the future. I think it’s akin to the idea of not telling people you’re pregnant for the first few months – it’s just in case the worst happens. Personally, I’m happy to tell you all that I’m going to take this exam the day after tomorrow (which is the 19th in the US, the 20th here). If I end up failing, you can all commiserate and tell me that I’m not actually as unqualified as I feel.

Rules of Holes #7: Some Will Look Down on You.

ArnieRowland — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:28:00 GMT

I've been extoling the Rules of Holes, hoping to give you both courage to get out of your Hole, and solace for having allowed yourself to get in a Hole in the first place. How about the others, the folks that see that you are up to your neck, the folks that could guide you out, the folks that are secretly glad that it is you down in the Hole instead of them.

So this brings us to Rules of Holes #7: When you are in a hole, some will look down on you. Only a few will offer their hand, and of those, only a few will be able to provide you the help you require.

As was mentioned in Rules of Holes #6, you have to be careful when folks offer to help you out of your Hole. You need to carefully evaluate the probability of success with their help. If it is the wrong person, without the needed skills or expertise, you will just end up pulling them down in the Hole with you. And a crowded Hole can be a very unpleasant place –as well as quite unproductive. In a later Rule, I'll explore how to better identify those that can genuinely help you get out of your Hole.

But with Rule #7, you realize that some will gain delight in watching your struggle to get out of your Hole. It takes their attention away from their own struggle to escape from their own Hole. By figuratively 'looking down on you', they are able to falsely elevate their own stature. They may be telling themselves that they would never dig so deeply, or ever find themselves in such a predicament. The truth is, they are most likely indeed in a Hole. Actually, maybe by watching your plight, they can continue denying the reality of their own Hole -but that is another story...

Look up and smile, for one day, much sooner than they could imagine, the roles will be reversed. And then just maybe you will be able to extend your hand and offer the help needed, or at least assist in locating the help needed. But I hope that as a result of your experiences with your Hole, you refrain from just looking down on the hapless occupant.

(I am in the process of compiling a more complete list of 'Rules of Holes', and in upcoming weeks, I'll share them with you. And if you have developed your own 'Rules of Holes', i invite you to share them with us.)