I had a great time at the PASS Summit 2013 this past week in Charlotte! I spoke to several people who told me they were pleasantly surprised by the venue and the event. Charlotte rocks! As a NASCAR fan, I particularly enjoyed the Community Event held at the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
It is always an honor to present and I was honored to deliver Designing an SSIS Framework and to participate in a cool panel discussion titled How to Avoid Living at Work: Lessons from Working at Home. Panel discussions are always fun, and my co-panelists made some really cool and interesting points about working remotely and working from home. Kudos to them and to Thomas LaRock for organizing the panel!
I had a great time delivering the Designing an SSIS Framework presentation, but I fear I may have offended an attendee who had a question about using the SSIS 2012 Catalog for logging. I’ll digress a bit to explain that I was spinning up a metadata-driven parent SSIS package right there on stage, live. (I type during demos. On purpose.) One attendee asked about logging in that package, and they asked the question right before I moved to that topic. As an experienced presenter, I can tell you it is awesome when the audience is asking questions about the very next topic. It means you’ve done a good job ordering the material and that the attendees are engaged and paying attention.
The first version of a framework I demonstrated was based on SSIS packages stored in the file system. This framework was written to support SSIS 2005, but it works well in 2008 and 2008 R2. You can download a version here. It will also work in SSIS 2012 if you do not wish to use the new Project Deployment Model (use the Package Deployment Model instead). SSIS 2012 is almost completely backwards-compatible and that. is. awesome!
The next question was asked as I wrapped up the discussion about the “old” (pre-SSIS 2012) framework. I will have to listen to the recording to see if I can catch the actual question, but it was something like, “Can you use the SSIS 2012 Catalog logging now?” Again, I will have to listen to the recording to quote my exact answer, but it was along the lines of: “Yall are right on top of this today – you should be up here leading this presentation.” What I meant was that the folks were asking great questions in a timely manner. What I fear is that some folks interpreted my response to mean something different from that. I know at least one person interpreted my response differently because they told someone who told me.
I was wrong to respond that way. It was a poor choice of words and I am an experienced presenter. I know better, and I probably offended the gentleman who asked the question. I don’t know who that person was, but I want to publicly apologize for my words. I promise I didn’t intend to offend you. It was a great question and I did not take offense at you asking it or asking it when you did. As the words were coming out of my mouth my brain was shouting at me, “PUT DOWN THE SHOVEL AND CLIMB OUT OF THE HOLE!!!” To you, sir – the gentleman who asked the question – to the other attendees of an otherwise cool presentation, and to the Professional Association for SQL Server, I apologize.
I look forward to SQL Saturday #237 tomorrow. I will be there. I’m the fat guy with a longish beard. If you are there and read this blog, please introduce yourself!
:{>
Comments