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This year I’m one of five candidates for the PASS board of directors, joining fellow candidates Allen Kinsel, Andy Warren, Douglas McDowell, and Geoff Hiten. You can find our mugshots, as well as our campaign promises here.  I was always afraid to run for political office given my illustrious youth.  Luckily we didn’t have Facebook when I was in college!

It’s an honor to be on the ballot. Win or lose, I’ll see many of you in Seattle, and will continue contributing to the PASS Community.

Currently I run three local PASS chapters, the San Francisco SQL Server User Group, the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group, and the new Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.  Our meetings are free and we usually have 50-70 attendees at each of our meetings.  If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, please check us out!

In case you don’t know about PASS, it’s an international organization, with both local and virtual Chapters, and is a tremendous network for database professionals.

I’ve been involved with the SQL Server community for more than a decade.  During that time, Microsoft has steadily developed their flagship database project into an enterprise-ready powerhouse.  SQL Server 2008 R2 is out there now, bringing many new Business Intelligence capabilities.  I’m really pleased with all the great opportunities that PASS has given me to learn and to get to know so many terrific SQL Server and BI professionals.  Thanks to the PASS Nominations Committee for giving me a chance to get even more involved with this powerhouse community.

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Brent Ozar‘s presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on the Top 10 Developer Mistakes That Won’t Scale was a hit.  He’s entertaining and his content was valuable to a wide range of SQL Server professionals.

Thankfully, along with the many mistakes to be avoided, Brent offered examples of alternative approaches!  I really liked his discussion on Dynamic SQL and its alternatives.  We run across a lot of this at DesignMind when helping our clients improve application performance and avoid SQL injection attacks.

Brent also entertained us when reminding us of the perils of using Version 1.0 features.  I think all of us have had the experience of investing a lot of effort into those cool new software features, only to find they didn’t work as advertised, don’t scale, and don’t last.

You may have gotten to know Brent through his work for Quest Software, and as one of the few Microsoft Certified Masters in SQL Server.  He recently moved to SQLskills, joining other top SQL Server experts, including Paul Randal, Kimberly Tripp, Bob Beauchemin, and Stacia Misner.

You can see Brent’s slides here.

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