I have been extremely fortunate to have spoken at the last two North American PASS Summits. The experiences have been amazing and I’m hopeful about getting a chance to present at this year’s conference too. I received very good feedback from last year’s session, “Deadlock Detection, Troubleshooting, and Prevention“, which is reassuring, but so many fantastic speakers have submitted to speak that there is fierce competition.

This year, the session selection committee is trying something new and has requested input on the submitted abstracts. I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes and vote for abstracts that appeal to you in the PASS Summit 2011 Session Preference Survey. You can vote even if you might not be able to attend the conference… all that you need is an account on the SQLPASS.org web site. If you don’t already have one, registration is easy and free.

If you have attended any of my presentations and enjoyed them/learned from them, I would greatly appreciate the support of voting for some of my sessions. I submitted the maximum of four abstracts, but I would prefer to deliver either of my “cookbook” presentations:

• A PowerShell Cookbook for DBAs
  • I have been delivering this presentation since SQLSaturday #22 on 2010-06-05
  • As a production/escalation DBA, I use PowerShell more than any other single program, especially when interacting with SQL Server
  • My goal is to convince fellow DBAs to try PowerShell by showing a variety of ways that PowerShell makes our jobs easier and by providing attendees with a collection of ready-to-use scripts for getting started
• An XQuery Cookbook for DBAs
  • This is a new presentation that is under development. I will probably deliver it for the first time at the July meeting of the Fort Worth SQL Server Users Group
  • A lot of valuable diagnostic data is exposed as XML these days
  • I have written many T-SQL/XQuery scripts to analyze and manipulate the data, but I would not describe the experience as being pleasant
  • I would like to give other DBAs these scripts, along with a little bit of background understanding, so that they can access this very powerful meta data without the many hours of frustration in developing the scripts
  • Some of the “recipes” included in the presentation will work with the following data sets:
    • DDL trigger event data
    • Deadlock graphs
    • Extended Events payloads
    • Output from the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool
    • The [sys].[dm_os_ring_buffers] DMV’s contents
    • Windows event logs
    • XML statistics profiles (query plans)

Note: The deadline for voting is tomorrow, so please do so as soon as possible!