I have spoken at a lot of SQL Server Events over the past few years including a bunch of SQL Saturdays, User Groups, PASS Virtual Chapters, and PASS SQL Rally. But my abstracts for The PASS Summit were never accepted. Until this year. So a few weeks ago, I had my chance to speak for the first time at the premiere SQL Server Conference. To say I was a bit nervous is an understatement. Especially because when I gave the session at our local SQL Saturday the month before, one of my demos blew up. To make matters worse, I took the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) lab exam the Monday before the conference. So it was a nerve-wracking week to say the least.
So I prepared and rehearsed like crazy and went for it. At the time I felt like the session went very well. The audience seemed engaged and all my demos went off without a hitch. I also had practiced with and used ZoomIt during all the demos and tried to remember to repeat all the questions.
All Summit sessions are recorded. Some were on PASS TV this year but mine was not one of those. But they do record the audio and presentation from all sessions and make them available for streaming, download, or on a USB stick after the conference. This is a great way to catch all the sessions you couldn’t make it to so I always buy them and watch them over the course of the year. This also meant this was the first time I could actually watch my own presentation end to end and see how I did. I was pleasantly surprised. It is true that we are often our own harshest critic … it was good to hear myself. I picked up on a few things I can work on as well.
Today the Session Evals came out. I was pretty pleased with my results. Some very nice comments from the attendees and if one “ranks” the sessions by eval scores I came in at #20. Not bad for a first timer.
Hopefully I can do this again next year. It was a great experience.
