It’s T-SQL Tuesday!!

T-SQL Tuesday #148

T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog | Twitter). December 2009 was the first T-SQL Tuesday invitation that went out by Adam. It is a monthly blog party on the second Tuesday of each month. Currently, Steve Jones (Blog | Twitter) organises the event and maintains a website with all previous posts. Everyone is welcome to participate in this monthly blog post.

The Ask

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Rie Meritt ( Twitter | LinkedIn ). Rie says: “For this edition of T-SQL Tuesday, I’d like to ask everyone to write about all the various aspects of running a user group.”

The original post is here.

My contribution

Building out a session schedule for your user group

I’ve been planning and running our dataMinds user group evenings for a few years now, and have a learned a few “gotchas”  and “aha’s” while doing so. With what I know now, I could have things so differently when starting out with this. And for that exact reason, this is a T-SQL Tuesday I was jumping to for participating. If someone else can benefit from my random thoughts, than I’ll be very pleased about this!

Listen to your Target Audience, and include them

For me, this is the most crucial thing about building your session schedule. Most user groups have a pretty specific scope where they specifically focus on Power BI, DBA, Data Engineering, .. topics. Early on, we made the decision to cover the entire span of the Microsoft Data & AI landscape. It gives us the chance of building in lots of variety in speakers, topics, complexity.

A definite downside is that when we’re switching from the hardcore SQL Server Internals stuff to Power BI visualisation, we see a big change in the attending audience. It’s harder to build up a strong bond, as most attendees will not want to attend the majority of the sessions. And still, we like the way we’re doing things and get some good feedback from those attending with us. I know, it’s all a bit different these because of the virus thingy that shan’t be named, but the patterns still come through quite clearly.

We actively ask our user group attendees, and recipients of the newsletter to come to us if they want to see specific things covered in a session or speaker. Even better, something they want to cover themself. By listening to the things your users are facing in their occupations, you have a bit more certainty that you’re planning sessions that can actually help them.

Pick your dates

2 years ago, we switched to planning the event dates at the beginning of the season (September to June). For me, this has worked so much better as I now just plan for an entire quarter with the dates I have availabe. I know other groups take a certain day of a certain week every month. It all depends what works for you, and your attendees. As we’re now doing 1 – 2 evening sessions per month, we try to alternate between days of the week, to make sure we can include other people too.

The art is in the balance

Depending on that target audience for your user group, it’s all about finding a healthy balance between speakers, topics, and levels. Are you including sessions that vary between introductory stuff and more complex deep dives? Is the same speaker presenting at your user group every quarter, with a decline in attendance? Are you covering only Power BI stuff when you also have a large DBA audience?

There’s no silver bullet here, as it will be catered to your specific situation. But I think striving for a healthy balance based on your member feedback is a healthy way to progess.

Location

In the olden days, our user group held its evening sessions on site at one of our partner companies. With usually 2 sessions planned per evening, it would be one of their employees presenting a community oriented session and another speaker that fits well with this. The partner provides the location and catering, meaning we can run the user group as a low cost effort. Then, because we’re essentially travelling through the country (It’s Belgium, so don’t think too much of it), we cater to people living in the different parts.

Now with the virtual sessions, it’s mostly 1 extended (60 – 75 minutes) where the speaker can take their time to explain things, with plenty of room for a healthy portion of banter.

With things returning to a steady situation in Belgium, we’re actually planning a return to in-person activities as we speak. For now, we plan on the same approach as we did before, and adapt if we see the patterns changing. One thing I’m personally worried about is the increased percentage of no-shows. When we’re going back to ordering drinks and food, I actually do care if someone shows up..

Network, network, and network. Did I mention network?

Now for the tricky part .. How do you actually find those speakers for a healthy mix? What worked for me was networking, in a variety of forms. Starting public speaking myself really helped me increase my range, but it doesn’t have to be this way. What matters most is that you try to build connections with those people you’re hoping to plan on your schedule, or that you meet people that can introduce you in a proper way. It’s not always easy, but so rewarding when you finally land those people you think will deliver a killer session for your group. Social media has changed this process drastically, where it’s become so much easier to get an overview of what is happening, or which interesting sessions pop up somewhere else.

Then, it’s keeping those eyes and ears open, at all times. Do you see a local person posting an incredibly useful article on LinkedIn? Why not ask them to turn it into a (short) session? Do you have a person that’s consciously attending most of your sessions? Why not check if they need a nudge to get on stage themself? Maybe you’ve heard of a consultant that has done some crazy stuff at a client to get something complex to work? All simple examples that can really help you build out the schedule.

And then, try to look at other user groups or conferences. Which sessions are being planned there, and can be a great fit for your audience? You’d be surprised of the interesting sessions you can come up with this way.

Be an opportunist!

Then, when you’re browsing those social media you may run into a message by a speaker saying they’re travelling to your region for whatever reason, or you’ve heard it through the grapevine. It never hurts to send them a message to check if they’d be interested in doing a quick session for your user group. It won’t always work, but it can lead to an interesting addition to your schedule!

Pick the tools you prefer

I know Sessionize now set up a User Group mode, that can have multiple installments of dates, where speakers can apply to. Personally, I still prefer reaching out to speakers myself, as this gives you better insights into who you’re asking. Maybe a speaker you want to plan, wouldn’t submit out of their own iniative. But, it’s the other way around as well, as you can get interesting submissions you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

Whenever I reach out to a speaker, I do it with the same standard template I’ve built over the years. It contains some information about how we run a session, which session we’d like to plan, and the dates that are still open. With the remote approach of the last 2 years, we also ask up front if we can record, upload, and share demos afterwards, with a clear indication that this is not mandatory.

Then, when we’ve agreed on session and date, I set up the events on our own website and Meetup, and send out a calendar invite to block calendars for all parties. One last tip, don’t be too optimistic when reaching out to speakers. For example, don’t reach out to multiple speakers for a single date if you can only plan one. It’s poor planning if you have to come back on your words because of a double booking.

Conclusion

Another quick ‘n dirty writeup for T-SQL Tuesday, but I really felt I had to include my thoughts on this one before heading off to London. As always, I’d love to hear from you if you have any questions, remarks, or rants!

Stay safe, take care!

It’s T-SQL Tuesday!!

T-SQL Tuesday #145

T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog | Twitter). December 2009 was the first T-SQL Tuesday invitation that went out by Adam. It is a monthly blog party on the second Tuesday of each month. Currently, Steve Jones (Blog | Twitter) organises the event and maintains a website with all previous posts. Everyone is welcome to participate in this monthly blog post.

The Ask

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Xavier Morera ( Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn ). Xavier says: “How much do you love meeting in person, where would you like for your next event to take place, and why Costa Rica?”

The original post is here.

My contribution

1. Which is your favorite conference and why?

Over the years, I’ve attended a variety of events, ranging from really small ones (40 people) to fairly large ones (12.000 people). I’ve visited larger ones like PASS Summit and SQLBits, and thoroughly enjoyed them, but the whole experience felt a bit draining overall. There’s constantly new people popping for conversations, too many things happening at the same time, and way too many things I’d like to be doing at that same time. And, I’m notoriously bad at hiding in a crowd, as people always seem to find me quickly.

For me, I prefer the smaller events where you can have some good conversations, enjoy some quiet if you want to, and where there’s plenty of room for some friendly banter with other attendees, speakers, volunteers and sponsors. When I thought about this, there were two examples that first sprung to mind being DataGrillen and Power BI Next Step. Being completely transparent, I attend events for the ‘hallway track’ and have chats with people I otherwise wouldn’t run into. Smaller events are just easier to achieve this goal, with or without certain types of beverages 😊

You’ve probably noticed all the events I refer to are in-person events. I do not dislike online events, but they just don’t give me the same level of satisfaction as speakers, organiser, and attendee. I understand the place they have in our current zeitgeist, but there’s options I prefer better.

2. Which is the best venue that you have visited for a tech conference?

I’ll be very chauvinistic here. The venue we had for dataMinds Connect in 2017 and 2018 was pretty cool and got actual good feedback, despite the session rooms having some sound & tech issues. Back then, we visited the Ghelamco Arena in Ghent, which houses KAA Gent.

The view we had from the large rooms overviewing the soccer pitch was pretty cool, but I particularly liked the room we had in the actual Press Box of KAA Gent. This is where Klaas Vandenberghe ( twitter | linkedin) , Chrissy LeMaire ( twitter | linkedin ) and Rob Sewell ( twitter | linkedin ) held their dbatools precon session, but decided to turn it into a “press release”, because of obvious reasons. After 2 years, we ended up moving away from this venue, for multiple reasons, and going to the Lamot venue in Mechelen. But still, if you’re asking coolest venue, this one really springs to mind for me.

The Ghelamco Arena Pitch being cared for, during the conference.

Klaas Vandenberghe, Chrissy LeMaire and Rob Sewell hosting the dbatools Press Conference, ehrrr precon session.

3. Who is the best presenter that you have ever listened to?

I’ll split this into two parts, being online and in-person sessions, because they are completely different experiences to me. These days, you’ll rarely see me attend online sessions where I’m not moderating or presenting myself. I have a notoriously bad attention span (Squirrel!), and I focus all my attention budget on the calls I do during my daytime occupation, whereas I find it very difficult to stay attentive after hours.

There’s a handful of online presenters I’ve witnessed so far that actually keep me zoned in to their entire session. To single out one, I’ll have to go with Alexander Arvidsson ( twitter | linkedin ). Alexander has a certain way of telling a story, and using his set of tools, that keeps me drawn in. For this, I can only tip my hat. If you’re not completely sure about what I mean, I suggest you take a look at his session called “The Untruthful Art – Five Ways of Misrepresenting Data” ( youtube ), which resonated particularly well with me.

For in-person sessions, I can only put forward one name, and be a bit chauvinistic again. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen this person present, and am completely amazed at the breadth and depth of topics he’s covered throughout the years. In the 10+ years I’ve attended sessions by Nico Jacobs ( twitter | linkedin ), I’ve never walked away without learning something new and interesting, even if it were a session on a topic I considered myself to be proficient at. Over years past, we’ve jokingly called Nico our ‘joker’, as we can always can call upon him to fill a gap for a specific topic we’re looking for. He’ll probably have some materials and demo’s good to go anyway..

4. Which location would you like for your next event to take place and why Costa Rica?

There’s plenty of places in the world I’ve yet to discover, and if events are reasons for me to go there, I’m all on board! Someday, I’d like to present at conferences in the US & Canada, as I’ve been told there’s pretty interesting differences in the complete experience. Costa Rica sounds like a very nice place to go to, but only if I can extend the stay by 2 weeks to visit the country, and go train with an old friend of mine at his local dojo.

For reasons outside of tech, I’m dreaming about doing a tour of Japan and visit the cities like Osaka, Kyoto, Nagasaki, Tokyo, .. Visit those cities, but also go train at the different Shinkyokushin Dojos spread throughout the country, and hopefully attend the World Cup of Shinkyokushin Karate one day. If an event in Japan would help me achieve those goals, I’ll grab the opportunity with both hands 😊.

Conclusion

All the reminiscing about times past is fun. But I’m about ready to start doing the real thing again. Here’s to hoping we can pursue those dreams in the near future, and keep it safe for everyone ..
It’s a quick write-up, as I looked over the invite. But still, I wanted to contribute to this one!

Stay safe, take care!

It’s T-SQL Tuesday!!

T-SQL Tuesday #135

After making my first contribution to T-SQL Tuesday last month, I figured I couldn’t stay behind when it’s a topic I have loads to share on.

T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog | Twitter). December 2009 was the first T-SQL Tuesday invitation that went out by Adam. It is a monthly blog party on the second Tuesday of each month. Currently, Steve Jones (Blog | Twitter) organises the event and maintains a website with all previous posts. Everyone is welcome to participate in this monthly blog post.

The Ask

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Mikey Bronowski( Blog | Twitter ). Mikey says: “Without tools, most of the work would be much harder to do or could not be done at all. Write a blog post about the most helpful and effective tools you use or know of.”

The original post is here.

My contribution

Which tools are essential to my working day?

When thinking about which tools I use most often, I quickly drew the conclusion that my job content changed drastically over the past few months. Yes, some spiky microscopic creature causing havoc with a global pandemic naturally contributes to this, but it’s also the nature of projects I’ve been taking on lately. These days, I spend the majority of my time in Microsoft Teams, hopping through tenants & accounts, and jumping from one call/conversation to the other. And yes, I’ve lost many moments of my life figuring out in what channel I was at exactly, and who I was supposed to be talking to.

Microsoft Teams, Edge and Outlook

Bluntly put, Teams has some room for improvement to allow users to easily change between tenants and accounts, and without wreaking havoc on the related Azure ADs. Right now, my best working solution is that I have a Microsoft Edge-profile setup for every customer, and other types of organisational accounts I have (ie. dataMinds.be). Every single one of these profiles is synced in Edge, and tied into my LastPass vault. Each of those profiles usually has a Teams Tenant coupled to it, that I install as an Edge Desktop Application. It works pretty smooth, for most of the use cases you might have. The main reason for switching over to the ‘fat client’ of Teams is when I need to take over screens in a call, or to go dig deep into settings windows. Marc Lelijveld has written an excellent write-up on how to set this up, although I didn’t go as far as creating custom icons for each single one.

One thing I’ve also started doing for some clients (the ones I work for on a very regular basis), is to set up e-mail forwarding from that customer account to my own work account, with an extra incoming Outlook rule to triage that to a separate folder immediately. It saves me a lot of time when I quickly need to check if something has been sent to that account, rather than jumping through the hoops of VPN, Multi-factor authentication, etc. Most clients remember to include my work account if they want a quick response from me, but it still helps to track down some things that I may otherwise miss.

The Office Suite

When I mentioned my job contents changed a lot, it also means that I find myself more in the ‘writing documents’ part of the job. Writing out assessment, audit, governance, presales, .. documents is an important part of what I do these days. So yes, my best friends are Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Each has their specific use in what I need to do, and over time I’ve built a whole library of stuff I can reuse. OneNote has definitely grown on me, and it’s now an inevitable part of my process.

And do I do some ‘actual’ work?

Define ‘actual’ work 😉. I still get plenty of opportunities to build out some technical stuff, or help some colleagues/clients when they’re in a jam. For the sake of time, I’ll just limit myself to some of the Power BI things I do, and leave out the rest of the Microsoft Data Platform stack. For once, I’d like to publish a blog post under 3000 words 😊.

When External Tools were released (release blog) to the general audience in July 2020, a shock wave hit the BI landscape. Before, a lot of things were ‘kinda’ possible, but they mostly resulted into going on unsupported terrain, and potentially tricky results. All fun and games when you’re a more technical person trying to keep up with things, but definitely nothing to hand over to a client that is learning their first steps with Power BI.

The External Tools (and the Enhanced Metadata format enabling it) allow end users of Power BI Desktop to call on custom built applications, scripts, .. to augment their developer/designer experience. These days, there’s over 40 (I stopped counting) external tools available, each with their own use case and focal area. When showing off some of the capabilities to my clients, it amazes me to see how quickly they pick up these things, and start building out their own ways of working.

Depending on the client, their IT Compliancy rules, the business and technical requirements, my actual tool belt tends to vary. Not every IT organisation allows user to freely install an application, digitally signed or not, so this is definitely an important one to take into your conversations early on.
In a nutshell, my possible weapons of choice are:

• Power BI Desktop & SQL Server Management Studio
• Tabular Editor: My main go to when I need some more flexibility for ie. setting up calculation groups, content for documentation, advanced scripting, mass editing objects, .. This allows
  • PowerBI.tips has a 4-part series with Daniel Otykier, the main developer.
• DAX Studio: Whenever I need to write a more complex DAX measure, or go digging into how DAX measures are performing against my model, DAX Studio comes to my aid. Simply put, this has saved me many hours when figuring out things.
  • PowerBI.tips has a 2-part series with Darren Gosbell and Marco Russo (Part 1, Part 2)
  • SQLBI.com has a full playlist on DAX Studio and Vertipaq Analyzer
• Vertipaq Analyzer (Excel): Yes, I’m aware DAX Studio holds a version of Vertipaq Analyzer. Yet, the Excel version allows you to go a bit more into detail on encoding specifics etc.
  • SQLBI.com has a full playlist on DAX Studio and Vertipaq Analyzer
• ALM Toolkit: When working with Incremental Refresh or larger models, ALM Toolkit allows you to compare and publish metadata changes to the Power BI Service. Deploying datasets without needing to do a full refresh every single time, that’s where the magic is at ♥
  • PowerBI.tips held a webinar with Christian Wade on ALM Toolkit
• Power BI Helper: Reza Rad has put incredible effort into this tool,
• Power BI Cleaner: Lightweight solution by Imke Feldmann (The BIccountant) that checks which fields are used in your .pbix file.
• Power BI Sentinel: PBI Sentinel is a paid tool, but a downright impressive one. The sheer fact that they are able to capture a tremendous amount of information on how Power BI is used in your organisation can be a YUUUGE! timesaver. On top of that, they’re able to perform table and column level lineage for some data sources in Power BI. The fact you can’t even do this (yet) with the tools at hand by Microsoft, is a very impressive feat.
  • Reid Havens held a livestream with Alex Whittles in December 2020, going through some of the most important features.
• Power BI Field Finder v2: Lightweight solution by Stephanie Bruno to help analyze how a Power BI file is constructed, and how visualisations are used.
• DAX Beautifier: 1 click, 1 call to DAXFormatter.com to format every piece of DAX code you have in your model. Because yes, my eyes burn when I see poorly formatted code 😂

Which tools am I going to add to my toolbelt? (Soon, I promise ..)

After seeing some folks like Julie Koesmarno (twitter), Aaron Nelson (twitter) and Rob Sewell (twitter) show off Notebooks in Azure Data Studio, I’m keen in rewriting some of my scripts and processes into a fancy Jupyter Notebook. I’m convinced this will really help me in some of the assessments I do, and easily share my work and results. Other than that, it’s fancy toys I want to try out for myself.

Something I’m looking improve upon fairly soon is my remote whiteboarding setup. When in workshop meetings where I had actual people in the same room, I usually ended up at a whiteboard to quickly draw out some things. For me, this is still the hardest thing to adapt to in our remote way of working we have these days. I’m currently digging into some options for external drawing pads, to allow these to sync to the Teams Meeting I’m in at that time. Yes, my drawing skills will still be terrible, but it’ll be huge improvement of what I’m doing now.

I’ve been trying out some options for a to do list, and I’ve not found one that actually works for me. Currently I’m experimenting with Microsoft To Do, but it’s not catching on as I expected. For some odd reason, I keep ending back up at the pieces of paper that are always lying in front of me at my desk. The physical act of writing it down helps me to remember it best, which has been an issue with some of the tools I’ve tried. Who knows, I may even try to build out an actual kanban board on my wall as a next experiment ..

Conclusion

Writing out my train of thoughts made me realise I use plenty of different tools, as there’s still quite a few I haven’t touched upon. I’ll need to reflect on how I’m using most of them, and if it’s to their proposed strengths. If there’s option for improving my process, it’ll definitely be worth it. But, I’m looking forward to reading some other posts and see what other gems people are using.

Stay safe, take care!

It’s T-SQL Tuesday!!

T-SQL Tuesday #134

This is actually the first time I’m contributing to T-SQL Tuesday, after having read many of the entries in the years before.

T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog | Twitter). December 2009 was the first T-SQL Tuesday invitation that went out by Adam. It is a monthly blog party on the second Tuesday of each month. Currently, Steve Jones (Blog | Twitter) organises the event and maintains a website with all previous posts. Everyone is welcome to participate in this monthly blog post.

The Ask

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by James McGillivray ( Blog | Twitter ). James wants to know how we’re managing to give ourselves some breaks, to keep ourselves from going even more bonkers.

The original post is here.

What do you do to take a break when you’re stuck at home?

Arguably so, I’ve always been terrible at setting aside time for breaks when working on my own. When working at a customer site, or in the office, things flowed a bit more naturally when grabbing a coffee, and having a chat. The reality of the past few months has been that I’ve been stuck behind my desk for hours on end, mostly being dragged into numerous Teams Meetings or Zoom Calls. I quickly realised that I needed to get this under control, to be able to last.

These days, my break times are mostly consumed by the doggo of the house, Pixie. She’s a nearly 2 years old Briard, who have a heritage as French shepherd dogs. Long story short, these dogs are incredibly active and fun to have around. Most days, I take her for a walk around the block before getting started. Then, during one of my coffee breaks, I go out in the garden and kick around some of the Jolly Balls I bought for her. At times like these, I can tell that she’s got some frustrations of her own to kill as well.

Playing with Pixie in the garden

But in the weekends, when I have some more time on my hands, we usually go out for some bigger walks of up to 10-12 in the woods near where I live. This gives me some more time to clear my head, and gives the doggo some direly needed attention. Especially with the weather being a bit colder and some more rain, it’s mostly her diving head first into the first puddle she sees, and then continuing to do so for the rest of the walk. All good fun, but a long haired dog takes a looooong time to dry off :).

Walking the dog at Drieboomkesberg

Pixie discovering some local water

Then, at evening times, I try to switch between doing some reading or studying for things I’m working on, or simply blowing up stuff in a video game. I’m keeping my sh*t together, but I’m frantically counting down the days for when I can go back to my regular activities to get some peace of mind.

In normal times, I’d have a Shin Kyokushin Karate training 2 – 3 times a week, depending on my schedule for that week. It’s a full contact sport, which means it’s physically demanding and exhausting, and I’ve never ever even had as much as a lost thought on stuff I was working on.
Ahhh, to be able to hit some people again 😃

If money was no issue, what would be your bucket list vacation?

I’d have to split it into two, and I’d be torn if I ever had to choose between those two.

I’ve always wanted to go to Japan to visit some of the heritage sites and the Honbu Dojo. Preferably in the same time span as the World Championship to be able to witness the insane atmosphere in the Tokyo Dome with 15000 spectators watching some of the greatest kumite matches our sport has to offer. Followed by a tour of some cities like Kyoto, Nagasaki, .. to make this a splendid trip with some of my karate friends.

Then, competely on the other end of the spectrum, and I’m doubtful that I’ll ever be able to do this. For years, we’ve always got together with some of my Chiro friends (compare it to Boy Scouts, to a certain extent), and do a weekend where we pull the same idiotic stunts we used to do when we were younger. We’re all a bit older now, and many of us settling in to work/life situations. Getting together isn’t as easy as it used to be. For that reason, I’d be thrilled if we were able to get away for a week or so, and go camping with the boys only. Pure nostalgia, to some of the most fond memories I have.

Conclusion

I’m managing to keep things afloat, but I’m ready for things to slowly get back to normal. Especially because I’ve not been able to go the practice 2-3 times a week, I’ve felt some built up frustrations that needed to get out.
Here’s to hoping we can all reconvene soon, and get ready for some more epic stories!

Stay safe, take care!