PASSDCS – Data Work Mom

I wasn’t selected for PASS, and that’s as it should be.

This year I wasn’t select for PASS Data Community Summit and that’s a good thing. WAIT WHAT?

Meme with the text "whoa what the what?"

That doesn’t even make sense! Aren’t I supposed to be all “More Women Speaking”?!? Well yes. Here’s the thing – after reading a lot of the abstracts, seeing how many people submitted, and knowing mine was kinda niche AND that I had rushed my general session submission- I realized it shouldn’t have made the cut.

There I said it.

At some point I even did some back of the napkin math and realized purely from an odds standpoint (all other things being equal), I had about an 8%-11% chance of being selected. After reading a lot of abstracts I realized that if I HAD been selected, then that would have meant I was selected more because I was a woman, and not because it was a submission that rose to the top. And that is DEFINATELY not what I would want. Yea, yea, I realize that some of this is arbitrary because it’s based on different volunteers’ opinions, but I still would have felt a bit sad if mine had made it after reading others, and I would have thought my gender played a role.

You see, a lot of my younger years I was sometimes told I was selected for things because I was a woman. Often by people not even in my field. In one case, by a [male] friend of mine! People that had never worked with me and didn’t have my bosses handy to tell them different. And I have no qualms telling you that my bosses would. Case in point: my last boss CC’d me on an email he sent to another person touting me as “The Purple Unicorn they were looking for”, without telling me beforehand. (This was after I left the company and ironically, I wasn’t even looking for a new position.)

Being a Woman In Technology doesn’t mean I want my voice risen above others. That would imply that we care about gender over quality. Even worse – it would imply that there isn’t enough quality women voices, and that simply is not true. (I’d argue that it is often the opposite problem with more average men in the industry – simply based on numbers.) Plainly put, I want our industry to figure out WHY it’s difficult to get more women speakers and address it from that problem. Heck, lets tackle why so many of us leave IT and how to put more women in the pipeline while we are at it. Wait, I have a whole list of things if you really want to get me going…

But back to the main topic: I wasn’t selected for PASS and that’s how it should be. Remember how I said I rushed my general submission and it was kinda niche? Turns out there are 2 similar sessions that made it and though they are not the exact same as mine, they are with same core technologies and are less niche then my submission. And with better abstracts. One is being presented by a woman and one by another under-represented group. I’ll be sure to attend.

Back to being a Community Organizer: The (Virtual) Kansas City SQL Server User Group

Earlier this year, meetup sent their obligatory email about a group I was in needing a new organizer. Like most people during COVID, I joined a lot of online meetup groups after most groups moved their sessions online. The Kansas City SQL Server User Group (#KCSSUG) was no different and fast forward to 2023, one-by-one user groups were going back to in-person events.

Look, I get it. Lots of folks wanted to go back to the physical meetings to have that in-person interaction. But that option is not always available to people, and in particular, it often isn’t available to under represented groups for a myriad of reasons. I will let you do your own homework on why that is, but I can briefly speak to my experiences as a WIT. (Hmmmm, maybe that entire subject matter would make a good blog post all on it’s own.) I won’t even address it from a neurodiverse perspective.

A WIT Perspective

Here is a quick summary of my experience with it as a WIT: 25+ years ago, as a single mom, traveling to events wasn’t even an option. I was a young mother and my parents still were in the workforce and unable to take time off to babysit for me to go to a conference (though weekends were ok). Never mind school schedules. And even though I was in IT, money was pretty tight – so traveling costs were pretty prohibitive for me. (I once had to borrow money to buy basic groceries for a week.) None of my companies ever even considered paying for me to travel to a conference (or even attend a local conference), and I would have had to use PTO (personal time off – aka: sick /vacation time) to attend. If you are a parent, you know that PTO can often be eaten up by young children for NON vacation reasons and there simply was no room for me to chance it. Otherwise I might get docked pay and my review may come back that I had too many absences. Yes, folks, that’s how it is sometimes.

Think I’m exaggerating? Consider this: even though I was an organizer for SQL Saturday in Atlanta for 8 years, and I’ve been in the industry for over 25 years, last year was the first year I have ever traveled to a conference outside my local area that wasn’t on a weekend or that a vacation wasn’t planned around (PASS Data Community Summit 2022 in case you were wondering).* Even as an organizer, I used PTO to volunteer for our Atlanta Friday pre-con sessions. And I’m a seasoned IT Professional.

AI generated renaissance image of a seasoned female IT worker. — Random AI generated image of a seasoned female IT worker because I was curious after I typed that phrase.

*(All thanks to the wonderful company I currently work for: Kent Corporation. I finally work for a company that understands the importance of conferences and upskilling employees. There’s a reason they’ve won a ton of employee satisfaction awards. )

Online Options

All of this to build up to why I decided to step up as the organizer of the Kansas City SQL Server User Group: to continue to have online options for those that may need it. Be it speakers, or members, or anyone that wants to catch it on our YouTube channel. Not all of our sessions are recorded, for various reasons (including my first event where something messed up with the recording), but the majority are.

Our group isn’t the only group doing this, so I’m not doing anything ground breaking here: there are still plenty of great user groups and conferences that either have real-time online options or recorded ones – which is AWESOME. Last year SQLBits was in Wales and I was a online speaker for that conference. I wouldn’t have been able to speak at that one if they didn’t have the hybrid option and I’m forever grateful. (Side note: not only did I have many people join live online, but Andy Yun of #SQLFamily took pics for me of the in-person view. SQLBits even posted the videos a few months later; here’s mine: Migrating data solutions to the cloud – a checklist.) That said, as I was looking through my emails at the beginning of the summer, I saw the number of online options getting smaller and smaller.

Thinking of that, I decided to take action and become the organizer for the KCSSUG, and keep it virtual. I’m a strong believer that virtual options help play a role in DEI, and instead of complaining about the diminishing options, I could at least help in that area. All of this to say: now I’m officially the organizer for the (Virtual) Kansas City SQL Server Group.

Info About Our Group

Interested in seeing some of our sessions? We loosely follow a 2x a month schedule:

1st Tuesday of the Month in the early evening (5:45 PM CDT).
2nd Thursday of the Month as a Lunch and Learn (12 PM CDT).

The 2 different times allow us to cover people that can join in the evening and people that can do lunch and learns. It also allows us to include people in some additional time zones outside the US. Plus, it helps me not take up additional family time. As mentioned, we also have a YouTube channel that we post most of our events to afterwards. (Some quicker than others because – yea – my ADHD).

We occasionally have an additional session for guest spots with both regular speakers as well as speakers from Ben Weissman and Willaim Durkin‘s New Stars of Data. I’m particularly excited about giving new speakers an additional platform to gain experience and not just because #NSoD is where I got my start. Ok maybe I’m a little partial to them because I know all they do to help new speakers perform their best with their resources, mentors, and various volunteers that do all their magic.

Who are the amazing speakers we’ve hosted in the last 5 months?

And we have many more in the works for 2024 as well as new things coming down the line! Around February, we will have a new call for speakers to fill our remaining spots, so stay tuned (and submit!) If you’d like to volunteer to help host or join our team – feel free to reach out to me on linkedin or twitter.

Ok, so that’s it. Even I think this falls in the category TLDR, but I’ve haven’t written in awhile (at least not completed one, technically I’ve written a ton), so you get this big gush in one go. If you’ve made it this far – hope to see you soon (in-person AND online)!

PASS Data Community Summit 2022 Schedules – Part 2

Note: I decided not to add all the links like I did in Part 1. That took a crazy amount of time and I’m not feelin it while traveling. It’s easy enough to log on to the PASS Data Community Summit 2022 website and check out the info or go old school and google it. I will let this fall in the mom lesson #124 of “don’t do for them what they can do for themselves”. Call it tough love.

PASS Data Community Summit Part 2: The Thursday/Friday edition.

Originally I thought I was going to post this over the weekend, but we had some unexpected trip-ups of a environment promotion I had to tend to: Ahhh – fun times of trying to get things done under the wire before you leave for a trip. You know not to do anything major, but the small emergencies can get ya too. And of course everyone wants THEIR thing done before you leave. Especially before the holidays kick in. I totally get it.

~~So while I’m sitting in the Chicago airport waiting for my [now] delayed flight, I wanted to get Part 2 in real quick. Well, at least before my battery goes kahpoot.~~ I wrote part of this at the airport, but had to finish after a day of hilarity ensued. This is a somewhat shortened version

Thursday: November 17th, 2022

Thursday I decided to do a little different than Wednesday. I’ll probably be exhausted from late travel on Monday catching up with me and then intense focus on Tuesday and Wednesday and thought shorter sessions may more be inline. Again, this could and will probably change by Thursday – I make no guarantees.

Breakfast event: Breakfast with the Microsoft team: SQL Futures and Strategy. You had to sign up for this event separately, and thankfully I did a few weeks back because I saw today that the registration is now closed. This is an early morning event, but since it won’t require much focus I think I’ll be ok.

8:00 AM – 9:15 AM – Keynote: Doing More with Less: The Challenges Ahead for Every Data Professional – Steve Jones, Jakub Lamik, Kathi Kellenberger, David Bick, and Arneh Eskandari

This should be an interesting keynote as it is always on my mind. Knowing what to plane for is pretty essential in our field.

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Architecture Options in Data Warehousing and Modeling – Leslie Weed

Alternate/On-demand options:

Implementing Intelligent Edge Solutions with Azure IoT & AI – Mihail Mateev (9:30 AM – 10:45 AM)
Storytelling with Data in Power BI – Pragati Jain (9:45 AM – 10:45 AM)
Database DevOps in Azure: Prepare for Ludicrous Speed! – Pete Benbow (9:30 AM – 10:45 AM)
How to Maintain the Same Level of utilities in Cloud Deployments – Denny Cherry (9:30 AM – 10:45 AM)
Use your Baseline to find Problem Queries – Allen White
Moving an Availability Group to a New Environment without Downtime – Steve Hall (9:30 AM – 10:45 AM)
Securing and Protecting Content in Power BI: Practical Tips – Melissa Coates (9:30 AM – 12:30 PM)

10:15 AM – 10:45 AM: Getting Started with Database DevOps – Liz Baron

Alternate/On-demand options:

How to Use PowerShell to Get Data From Any Power BI REST API – Gilbert Quevauvilliers
Azure Data Factory Essentials for SSIS Developers – Tim Mitchell

11:15 Am – 11:45 AM: Modern Data Warehousing with Azure Synapse Analytics – Ginger Grant

Alternate/On-demand options:

Monitoring SQL Server at No Cost – Danilo Dominici (11:30 AM – 12:30 PM)
Performance Tuning for Azure Cosmos DB – Hasan Savran (11:15 AM – 12:30 PM)
Women in Tech: Becoming the Ally – Deepthi Goguri (11:15 AM – 12:30 PM)
Getting Started with Database Source Control – Kathi Kellenberger
Kusto Query Language – The Next Query Language You Need to Learn – Hamish Watson (11:15 AM – 12:30 PM)
Stabilize Query Performance without Changing Code – Erin Stellato
Durable (non-technical) Strategies for Success with Analytics – Tom Huguelet (11:15 AM – 12:30 PM)
Useful Insights into Azure Synapse Data Explorer – Warren Rocchi (11:15 AM – 12:30 PM)
Azure Data Factory ABCs – David Alzamendi (11:15 AM – 12:30 PM)

12:00 PM – 12:30 PM: Implementing a Datalake House in Azure Databricks – Jeff Renz

Alternate/On-demand options:

Getting Started With Unit Testing in tSQLt – Sebastian Meine

12:30 PM – 2:15 PM: Women as Tech Leads – Tackling the Challenges – Shabnam Watson, Jen McCown, Anna Hoffman, Blythe Morrow, Leslie Andrews

2:30 PM – 3: 45 PM: I’m still undecided here. 2 great ones on completely different topics.

Keeping your data fresh in Power BI – Patrick LeBlanc, Adam Saxton
Data Driven Disease Damage Control – Helge Rege Gardsvoll

Alternate/On-demand options:

Automate Development Database Refresh from Production – Andre Quitta (2:30 PM – 3:00 PM)
Finding the Right Data Types – Kevin Wilkie
Using Power BI with Lots of Data – Paul Turley
Fold on Tight – What is a Query Folding and Why Should I Care? Nikola Ilic (3:30 PM – 4:00 PM)
Getting Started Building Data Solutions on Azure – Hugo Barona (3:30 PM – 4:00 PM)
Practical Data Engineering with Spark – John Miner (2:30 PM – 3:30 PM)
Unit Testing T-SQL – Jay Robinson
Coaching for Managers: An Introduction – Eduardo Gregorio
Practical Experiences from Working with Synapse – Mathias Halkjær and Brian Bønk
Choosing the Azure SQL DB Tier: Tales from the Trenches – Reitse Eskens (2:30 PM – 3:00 PM)
Better Data Governance with Purview – Kelly Broekstra (2:30 PM – 3:30 PM)
Better Together: Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics – Bradley Schacht
VLTs: Very Large Tables – Problems, Options, THE Solution! – Kimberly Tripp

4:15 PM – 5:30 PM: Deploy a Self-Service Analytics Sandbox in Azure Synapse Analytics – Oscar Zamora and Tahir Abdullah

Alternate/On-demand options:

How to use Data Lineage in Azure Purview? – Erwin de Kreuk
How to Tune a Multi-Terabyte Database for Optimum Performance – Jeff Taylor
Migrating your Data to the Cloud? Look Out! Here’s What you Need to Know – Emanuele Meazzo
Kusto Query Language – The Next Query Language You Need to Learn – Hamish Watson (4:15 PM – 5:15 PM)
From SQL Server to Cosmos DB in 75-Minutes – Martin Catherall

Friday November 18th, 2022

Sadly on Friday, my flight time was changed to 2 hours earlier. Meaning that I’ll really only have morning to grab some sessions. If I leave by about noon, then I should be ok – so after the keynote and first session, I’ll probably be only attending the hall-sessions I keep hearing about. A layover in Phoenix may be allow me an online session – but I also may be completely done by then.

8:00 AM – 9:15 AM Keynote: 30+ Years of Innovation: How Do We Keep Up with Technology? – Kimberly Tripp

Another pretty on-point keynote on a subject that I continue to hear people talk about through the years.

9:30 AM – 10:45 AM: Building a Regret-free Foundation for your Data Factory – Meagan Longoria

Alternate/On-demand options:

GitHub + You + Microsoft Docs – William Assaf
Power Up Your Data Warehouse with Pre-ETL Processing – Erin Dempster
Power BI Composite and Hybrid Models – Alex Whittles
Query Shaping – Advanced Query Tuning – Edward Haynes 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Power BI: From Self-Service to Enterprise – Just Blindbæk 10:15 AM – 10:45 AM
Data Transformation Magic with Power Query – Jackie Kiadii
SSDT Methodologies for SQL Server DevOps – Eitan Blumin 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM
Intro to SQL Server Tools – Deborah Melkin 10:15 AM – 10:45 AM
Performance Monitoring, Tuning and Scaling Azure SQL Workloads – Deepthi Goguri and Surbhi Pokharna
Introduction to SQL Audit and Audit Reports – Daniel Maenle 9:30 AM – 10:00 AM

The rest of these will have to be on-demand options for me, but I still wanted to list them since they were are part of my favorites group.

On-demand:

Tracking History: Temporal Tables vs Ledger Tables – Ed Leighton-Dick 11:15 AM – 11:45 AM
How to Fix a Report I didn’t Build – An Ugly Baby Story – Reid Havens 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Improve Performance by Automating the Query Store – Chad Crawford 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Analyzing Azure Monitor Log Data for Azure SQL Database – Taiob Ali 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Creating a career portfolio using GitHub – Joshua Higginbotham 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Azure Synapse Analytics and the Power of Datamarts – Joanna Podgoetsky 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Enterprise Semantic Models in Power BI Premium – Christain Wade and Kay Unkroth 11:15 AM – 12:30 PM
Power BI – Discover DAX Fundamentals Through Common Mistakes – Fowmy Abdulmuttalib – 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Pro Tools for Performance Tuning: Baselines, Monitoring and Workload Tests – Martin Guth 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Can Microsoft Purview Answer All your Data Governance Needs – Angela Henry 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM
How to Run a Successful Proof of Concept (PoC) –John Martin 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM
Data Lakehouse, Data Mesh, and Data Fabric (data architecture soup!) – James Serra 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM
Handle Azure SQL Auditing With Ease – Josephine Bush 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Architecting for High Performance SQL Server on Virtual Machines – Anthony Nocentino 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Testing your Data Factory – Benjamin Kettner and Frank Geisler 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM
The Autistic Data Professional’s Guide to the Job Search – Chris Voss 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM
Migrate Your SSIS Skills to Azure Data Factory – Koen Verbeeck 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
When to Stop Tuning a Query – Milos Radivojevic 4:15 PM – 5:15 PM
The Dream Team: Synapse Analytics Serverless SQL Pools and Pipelines – Andy Cutler 4:15 PM – 5:15 PM
Power BI Model Development Best Practices in a Team – Mathias Thierbach 4:15 PM – 5:30 PM
Performance Mythbusters – Paul Randal 4:15 PM – 5:30 PM

That’s it. That’s the full shabang. If you are at Summit and see me – feel free to say hello! I’ll be the short lady that looks kinda mom like.

PASS Data Community Summit 2022 Schedules – Part 1

Note: Sessions listed here are ones I am specifically interested in for one reason or another at the time of this writing. It’s a mix of one part stuff I think will be helpful to my company, one part things I’m SUPER interested in, and one part sitting in sessions with a group of speakers that I know and want to hear. Sessions that were in-person had a higher priority when I had to choose between different sessions, which is perhaps unfair, but with traveling I want to be in-person as much as possible. Sessions not listed have zero baring on their quality – there are simply only so many hours in a day – even with the on-demand option.

Inspired by Louis Davidson‘s post: The PASS Data Community Sessions I am Most Excited For, I decided to write my own. Because all that time I’ve ~~obsessed~~ spent looking at the schedule should be put to some use AND I’m hoping it will help me get over my writers block. That said, after looking at the schedule I created with the Favorites I tagged, I realized that this post would probably be best in multi-parts. Part 1 will focus on Tuesday and Wednesday activities.

There is a lot of sessions in this post, but basically I’m trying to plan for next week and the next 12 months. Also with 489 sessions, obviously my choice can and will change over time. But I like to have a plan. LIKE REALLY REALLY like to have a plan. An initial one and one I can pivot to quickly if needed.

I’m not going to rehash what PASS DCS 2022 is, you can get all the info here: https://passdatacommunitysummit.com/. If you can’t attend in-person for any reason but still want to attend – there is a great online option and an option for on-demand recordings. I attended online last year (which was the only option) and was pretty impressed with the ability to interact with others, even outside the sessions. This year I will be in Seattle for the event, (thanks awesome company that I work for!) but they also purchased the 12 month on-demand recordings option. That way I don’t have to always choose between sessions: just which ones I see during the summit. (Note: links to sessions probably require you register for the site. You are on your own for that.)

I’m guessing that a lot of people choose the All-In-One Bundle, but I did a more ala-carte registration. 3-day conference + One Day Pre-Con + On-demand recordings for 12 months. My company saved a whole 7 dollars going this route – but I really wanted the on-demand recordings and I wasn’t sure how great I’d be at pre-cons. <insert record scratch>

I’ll be honest – pre-cons kinda scare me. I’m neuro-diverse and 8 hours is a long time to hold my attention and I get big anxiety about it. That said, I made it through grad school with a 3.93 (dangit worldwide pandemic) learning Python/R, analytics, statistics, AI, etc., so I realize that it may be all in my head. [so’s everything 1:49]. I signed up for one pre-con, and if that goes well, than I may go for 2 next time.

Tuesday

Choosing between Pre-cons was pretty difficult. Like SUPER DUPER difficult. Ones that particularly interested me were:

Race + Gender Equity Toolkit – Cindy Gross
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Adopting Power BI in Your Organization – Matthew Roche and Melissa Coates
Azure Infrastructure – Denny Cherry
Become a Hybrid Architect – Anthony Nocentino and Ben Weissman.

Ultimately I went with Denny’s Azure Infrastructure pre-con as it aligns best with key initiatives for my company. I’m on a small Cloud CoE team and we are planning some complicated moves to the cloud; I want to make sure I have my ducks in row – particularly with best practices. I’ve been privileged to see many of Denny’s presentations back when I was an organizer for SQL Sat in Atlanta, and I’m super excited to get to attend one of his pre-cons. Also, I’m studying for several certification exams (which one depends on the day), and this will reinforce topics that may be outside some of my current experience.

Just by happenstance, I have also signed up for Denny’s PASS Karaoke Party 2022. I’ve only been to Karaoke once in my life, and even then I was just a backup dancer (if you can really even be a backup dancer to Gangsta’s Paradise“), so this should be interesting. Truth be told, haven’t been out-out since about 4 years ago, so I’m game. Just don’t expect me to sing or stay out too late (I’ve got a big next day!)

Wednesday

Here is where it gets super complicated. Mostly because I keep changing my mind. Some sessions I initially planed on, I saw later were online and I went back and changed them for in-person sessions. I have some internal conflict doing this for multiple reasons (another post for another day) , and I may go and change things 10x by Wednesday (or there may be times that my “overwhelmedness” kicks in), so nothing is really set in stone.

Luckily I purchased the 12 month on-demand option (I get nothing for writing this in case you are wondering), thus I have a pretty sizeable list of alternates. For any of the times listed below, you will sometimes see a different time listed in the alternates section. This is because the session has a slightly different time than the original. I will spare you the different colored highlights in my original OneNote doc, because I don’t need to expose all the crazy.

Drum role please….Here is my current schedule.

8:00 AM – 9:15 AM: Transform your Data Estate with Microsoft’s Intelligent Data Platform. Keynote – Rohan Kumar

Keynotes are always good for “big picture” info and this one is right in line with my company’s needs: integrating databases, analytics, and governance.

9:30 AM – 10:45 AM: Confession – I still haven’t made up my mind on this one yet. Here are my 2 main choices. I have some experience in both, but I feel like I need a reset.

Alternate/on-demand options