Chock-a-block full of SQL Goodness – EDMPASS

OK EDMPASS’ first meeting was a great success and I’ve been receiving wonderful feedback over the last few days.

We had some good eats, laughs, and also (hopefully) learned a thing or two along the way.  One of the big concerns I had (other then ordering WAY TOO MUCH pizza) was my target audience. 

To be safe the featured speaker and I discussed a general “what’s new” in SQL Server 2008 that would appeal to not only the DBA folks in the crowd but also the developers and BI analysts as well.  One of the best things that came out of this meeting was the results of a survey I had everyone do.  The meat of it was 3 questions:

1)  Area of expertise (Development, Administration, Business Intelligence, Other)
2) What level of presentation are you interested in (100, 200, 300, 400)
3)  What topics are you interested in ( about 40 different options to check off)

(not THAT Chekov)

The results (while not overly suprising) are definitely useful in ensuring that the speakers I bring in are not only speaking on topics that people are interested in but at a level that will keep them interested and coming back.

Here is a quick run down of the results:

1)  Expertise – 55% Admin,  35% Dev,  5% BI,  and 5% Other
2)  Level – 45% Advanced(300),  35% Intermediate (200), 20% Expert (400), 0% Intro (100)
3)  Top 10 Topics – SQL 2008, Performance Tuning, Security, Resource Governor, Policy Based Management, TSQL Coding, High Availability, DMVs, Maintenance, and Monitoring

Even though the sample size of 20 people is quite small it’s amazing how close this actually matches up with alot of survey results from the PASS attendees from last year.

Anyways it was a great time and I’m in the process of finalizing the next meeting date, speaker, and topic.

Enjoy!!