Free Conference at SQL PASS

I’ve been invited to this event coordinated by Brent Ozar (Blog | @BrentOzar) called Free-Con.   It is free (yes, really) and it is the most unique event I ever be part of.     I sat in the same room with 15 other people that I truly admired and adore.   You can read about the event itself on Brent’s post here so I won’t go over it in detail on what’s all about.    What I do want to mention here is what I personally get out of it.  

First of all, I feel honored.   Initially, I also felt very intimidated.   I looked around the room, and I saw an author of one of my favorite SQL books,  Grant Fritchey (Blog | @GFritchey).   I had to buy his book, SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled (Expert’s Voice in SQL Server) twice since the pages on the first one got rip off from me flipping to that book so many times and I get to shake his hand today.     

So what do I get out of it?

See, I am a production DBA.   Well, I manage a small Production DBA team.  When I say small, it really is only one other DBA in my team so I still get to do all the dirty fun stuff us DBA have to do.    I’m not a consultant.   I do, however, want to be a Rockstar DBA and an expert within my own company.   Brent Ozar cover this very topic on one of his post here and Free-Con today gave me more ammo to achieve that.   One of the most important thing that I take home from it was  how to communicate like a consultant to the business as a production DBA.   Since I have no desire to be a consultant (at least right now), I need to be able to apply everything I learned today from the presentation and the discussion within the audience to my role and for me, that’s my missing piece of puzzle.  

Let me ask you something.   How many of you ever be in the situation that you were so frustated because you know what was the root cause of some major issue you had, but when you presented that to the business and made recommendation, they totally dismissed it.   The business went ahead and hire a consultant, an expert,  and they came back with the very same recommendation you have.    Sound familiar now?

I am very fortunate that my employer by far is the most awesome employer I ever have.   They supported me in any way that most of production DBA out there will drool and they actually respected me like I am an expert.   However, I’m still far from it and I still need a whole lot of learning  but I believe that I’m in the right track to get there.     I know what more I need to do such as  building my brand and be able to project everything that I do around that brand including how to communicate to the business owner within my company.   I need to do more product review or white paper, to promote myself  within my own employer, more than I already have.    

This present a huge challenge for me that I am happily accepting and looking forward to it.     Thank you, Brent, for letting me to be part of it.    It’s score 10 on my awesome scale, and yes, they are 1-10 scale.