Learning through others

This PASS Summit was a different experience for me – I wasn’t speaking. I’ve presented at three of the five PASS Summits I’ve been to, where the previous one I’d not spoken at was 2012, while I was a PASS Director (and had been told I shouldn’t submit talks – advice that I’d ignored in 2013). I have to admit that I really missed presenting, both in 2012 and this year, and I will need to improve my session abstracts to make sure I get selected in future years.

I’m not a very good ‘session attendee’ on the whole – it’s not my preferred style of learning – but I still wanted to go, because of the learning involved. Sometimes I will learn a lot from the various things that are mentioned in the few sessions I go to, but more significantly, I learn a lot from discussions with other people. I hear what they are doing with technology, and that encourages me to explore those technologies further. It’s not quite at the point of learning by osmosis simply by being in the presence of people who know stuff, but by developing relationships with people, and hearing them speak about the things they’re doing, I definitely learn a lot.

Of course, I don’t get to know people for the sake of learning. I get to know people because I like getting to know people. But of course, one of the things I have in common with these people is SQL, and conversations often come around to that. And I know that I learn a lot from those conversations. I don’t have the luxury of living near many (any?) of my friends in the data community, and spending time with them in person definitely helps me.

And it’s not just SQL stuff that I learn. This month’s T-SQL Tuesday (for which this is a post) is hosted by Chris Yates (@YatesSQL), who I got to run alongside on one of the mornings. Even that was a learning experience for me, as we chatted about all kinds of things, and I listened to my feet hitting the ground – another technique I learned from a community – and made sure I stuck to my running form to minimise the pain I’d be feeling later in the day. Talking to Chris while I ran helped immensely, and I was far less sore than I thought I might be.

On the SQL side, I got to learn about how excited people are about scale-out, with technologies like Stretched Tables coming very soon. As someone involved in the Parallel Data Warehouse space (and seriously – how thrilled was I to be able to chat with Dr Rimma Nehme, who was involved in the PDW Query Optimizer), scale-out is very much in my thoughts, and seeing what Microsoft is doing in this space is great – but learning what other people in the community are thinking about it is even more significant for me.

@rob_farley 

PS: This is the 60th T-SQL Tuesday. Huge thanks to Adam Machanic (@adammachanic) for starting this, and giving me something to write about each month these last five years.