Have you heard the sound of silence?  Yep, that’s been my blog.

It’s been weeks since I’ve posted anything on here, and to both of my loyal readers I offer my apologies.  It’s been a bit of a wild summer already… I sold my house, moved my large family into a small apartment, and am in the process of buying another house (resulting in, yes, another move later this month).  Add to that the task of organizing one SQL Saturday, planning another for later this year, and traveling to Florida to speak at yet another event.

Sadly, my blog has fallen victim to this overbooked summer.  The good news is, since it’s been a while since I’ve written, I’m overflowing with ideas, and I’m writing to build up my queue now, which will include a new bite-size blog series I hope some of you will enjoy.  I’m also working on some new SSIS videos for SQLShare.com.

In the meantime, you can catch recordings of a few recent presentations I’ve done.  I had the opportunity to present my tenured presentation on SSIS Scripting to the Oklahoma City SQL Server User Group earlier this month (recording here), and I delivered a presentation to the PASS AppDev Virtual Chapter on Intermediate SSIS the same week (recording here).  Coming up, I’ll be speaking at SQL Saturday Baton Rouge next month, and a little later this year I’ll be speaking at Houston TechFest and at least one other SQL Saturday event.

I’d like to share a networking success story.  Last year, I blogged about my experience at the PASS Summit of 2005, where I was essentially a wallflower and didn’t really do any networking.  Since then, I’ve realized its importance and have embraced professional networking as a key component in a successful career. 

Ever since then I have carried through on the lesson I learned, spending as much time as possible getting to know my colleagues, and lending them a hand whenever possible.  At the PASS Summit this past November, I got the chance to redeem myself from the lack of initiative from my trip four years earlier, and took the opportunity to get to know as many people as I could.  During lunch on the third day of the Summit, I met a fellow Dallas-area business intelligence professional who works for a small consulting firm in my area.  He mentioned that his company was looking to hire one or two more senior BI people, and I hinted that I was considering making a move.

To make a long story short, that encounter led to a few phone calls and a series of meetings with this company, and as of next week, I will be a permanent part of their team!  My new role at Artis Consulting will be as a business intelligence consultant, solving complex business data problems alongside some very sharp coworkers.  I’ve had the opportunity to spend a little time with all of the leadership and several of the staff members, and I’m very excited about this move and the new challenges that it will bring.

So back to the success story… Looking back at the events of the past couple of months, I don’t believe things would have ended up this way without the groundwork I laid through networking.  In the last few years, I’ve spent a good deal of time working with and getting to know the folks in my local SQL Server user group, which in part led to my leadership role within that group.  That leadership position helped me to meet and develop friendships with other SQL Server group leaders, and one of those relationships led directly to a friendly introduction to my initial contact at Artis, resulting in the interviews and eventually the new career with that company.  It's important to note that my new role at this company was not openly advertised as a vacant position, so I would likely not have found this opportunity through a traditional job search.  I do believe that there was a greater comfort level on both sides of the interviewing fence after we came together through a known and trusted common contact.

My recent experience is further proof that building professional relationships through networking is a great strategy for career improvement.  If you’re like I used to be – introverted, a bit shy, perhaps doubting the value of professional networking – I encourage you to take a chance and get to know some of your peers and colleagues.  Find a local user group in your area of expertise, and set a goal to meet X number of people.  Attend a local technology event such as a product launch or a SQL Saturday, and introduce yourself to others there.  Invite a colleague you don’t know to lunch or coffee.  Volunteer to be part of a team in events such as GiveCamp.  There’s nothing to lose!  The very worst thing that can happen is that you’ll meet some people you’ll never see again.  And often, things work out such that your networking contacts work together to change your career for the better.

"Fortune favors the bold.”  -- Virgil

So for the latest database geek meme, Paul Randal started this thing off and tagged Tom LaRock, who enlisted Grant Fritchey, who finally tagged me.   This one simply asks, “What 3 things or events brought you to where you are today?”

The Eyes

Barely a year out of high school, I was working full time in retail and occasionally attending classes at the local community college.  Through my job I had befriended a local Marine Corps recruiter, SSgt. Tennant.  Doing what recruiters do best, he saw a young man who could use a little direction and discipline, and invited me to lunch to discuss my future.  After a few months of meetings with the staff sergeant, I was convinced that I was to be a United States Marine.  I would enlist and become an MP, pursuing a dream (up to that point, anyway) to be a police officer.

SSgt. Tennant was on vacation on the weekend I was to make it official, so another recruiter drove me to the enlistment station in Dallas, where I underwent a battery of physical exams, blood tests, urine tests, aptitude tests, hearing tests, and a variety of other procedures.  At the end of the second day, we had reached the point of no return – I was called into the CO’s office to put my name on the big contract.  I brought up the specifics of what I would do as a Marine, citing my intention to work as a military police officer, but it was then discovered that my poor eyesight, although corrected to 20/20, would disqualify me from serving as an MP.  I was invited to still join up, but in a different MOS (method of service).

Now in retrospect, had SSgt. Tennant been there to counsel me, I probably would have still enlisted.  But there I was, young and naive, surrounded by strangers and incredibly disappointed that my well-laid plan was not to be.  I spent a couple of hours by myself in the enlistment station, pondering whether to join up or walk away and regroup.  In the end, I chose the latter.  Was it the right choice?  I must have asked myself that a hundred times since.  Whatever the answer, it’s clear that the choice I made helped get me to where I am today.

The Boast

Twelve years ago, I had a friend who was searching for a new career.  He wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do, and he decided to explore a couple of different options, including taking some vocational training.  Our local community college offered a computer repair course, essentially a CompTIA A+ prep course, and he seemed to enjoy learning the basics about computer hardware and software and such. 

At the end of the course, he took the A+ test and unfortunately did not pass.  I remember bragging that I had always been a computer whiz in high school and would probably excel at such an endeavor, and certainly would have passed the certification exam on the first try.  My embellished tales of brainpower and academic prowess must have reached the maximum BS threshold, and I received a good old-fashioned southern put-up-or-shut-up.  Not to be bested by a challenge, I scraped up the $500 to take the computer maintenance course – and for the record, I did excel in the course, and I did pass both A+ exams on my first try.  More importantly, the bit of experience I gained through the course and exam prep led directly to my first technical job – it wasn’t glamorous, mostly installing white box computers and deploying Ghost images, but it was the foothold I needed to get started in the business.

The Notebook

No, not the sappy chick flick.  Back in the early 2000s (Is that really what we’re going to call the first 10 years of this millennium? Bah.), I was working as part of a 3-person IT team supporting the entire technical infrastructure for a 10-campus, 6000-student school district.  We didn’t even have a ticket tracking system of our own, instead relying on the antiquated system used by our building maintenance department, and because we didn’t own enough licenses for our IT staff to directly access their ticketing system, I had to rely on printed reports to administer our workflow.  We could only open or close tickets by submitting hard-copies of the request forms, and it often took weeks for the maintenance secretary to open or close an IT ticket in the database.

I started keeping these reports and written forms in a three-ring binder that we dubbed The Notebook.  Twice a week I would print out a list of the “current” (yuk yuk) list of tickets, and had a rubber stamp that I would mark those that had been completed but not yet marked as such in the database.  Also stored in The Notebook were copies of the hand-written requests awaiting data entry.  The system worked, but was a time sink; I would often spend 15% or more of my time just keeping up with workflow issues, not to mention the wasted time and opportunity cost for the entire team for lack of having the right information at hand.

So I began quietly keeping track of wasted hours, as well as researching ticket tracking software packages.  I found a package that was affordable and relatively easy to administer, and, with an armload of research data, presented to my boss a software solution to the problem of The Notebook.  After much convincing, my request was fulfilled, with one stipulation: that I learn enough about SQL Server to maintain the back end and create a few reports.  It wasn’t long before that one SQL Server installation helped me find my true calling, and it slowly changed over from a secondary duty to a full time career.  And the rest is history.

So, to keep this little meme going, I’ll tag the following:

Aaron Bertrand (there’s likely to be an amusing story there)

Kendal Van Dyke (those Florida guys can always tell a good story)

Lee Everest (a fellow Dallas-area guy, and I’m curious to know how he got started)

I’m also going to tag Kevin Kline – I know he’s already been tagged, but he was missed during the last meme and was taking it pretty hard.

I got the opportunity to present to the PASS DBA Virtual Chapter today, discussing the properties and practical uses of SSIS expressions and package configurations.  Thanks to Greg Larsen and the other members of this virtual chapter for allowing me to present.  We had a good turnout, about 40 people, which is not bad for a lunchtime presentation.

I’ve published the code samples and slide deck if you’re interested; these can be downloaded here.  The LiveMeeting session was recorded, and should be published on the PASS website soon.

Day two of the summit found me in the keynote, an interesting but much too long (2 hours) for comfort.  Among the most notable information was the confirmation that SQL Server 2008 R2 will definitely be released during the first half of next year, along with a couple of new SKUs for the product.  Also part of the presentation was a demo of a SQL Server application running on a 192-processor box sitting on the stage.  Interestingly, the server started making a lot of noise after the demo, resulting in a lot of Twitter speculation as to whether the server would either explode or lift off.

I started the training day in a business intelligence session, which I ended up leaving early mostly due to some audio issues with the mic.  I took the opportunity to jump over to the session of fellow Dallas-area tweep Trevor Barkhouse, who did an excellent job on his first PASS Summit presentation.  I spent the rest of the time slot visiting with a couple of folks at the PASS booth.

Lunch was the best part of the day on Tuesday!  I spent two hours at Joe Webb’s table talking about technical consulting, as part of the Birds of a Feather lunch.  I’ve been corresponding with Joe via e-mail and Twitter for a while now, so finally meeting him in person was a pleasure.  About a half dozen other people came and went, each with a unique perspective, and the ensuing conversation was insightful.  My takeaway from this was that it’s possible to make a very comfortable living as an independent consultant, but this life is not without its risks or costs.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon taking in parts of several sessions.  I had a great time taking in multiple sessions at once through Twitter – following the #sqlpass hash tag is almost like attending every session at once.  I’ve got another blog post planned to discuss my reflections on the use of Twitter during this conference.

This evening held the exhibitor reception in the main exhibit hall.  There was food, giveaways, vendor demonstrations, and lots of swag.  I spent some time catching up with Kendal Van Dyke, whom I just met on Sunday, and Wes Brown, a fellow Texan whom I’d just met tonight.  Later, I was invited to the SQL Sentry party at the Tap House next to the Sheraton, where I’m almost certain that the sheer number of people in the room was a violation of the fire code.  Thanks to Peter Shire and the other SQL Sentry guys for their hospitality.