Based on the great feedback that I received from my several public presentations and rehearsals, I made major changes to the talk over the last few days. I removed most of the material from the introduction and troubleshooting methodology sections, so that I could get to the demonstrations (and eye-candy) as quickly as possible. The edits made a big difference; I didn’t bore or overwhelm the audience with too much conceptual material, plus I didn’t have to race through the case study and demonstrations.

Here are a few highlights or observations:

• Prior to the start of the session, my friend Tim Mitchell (blog, Twitter) made a special point to come encourage me and offer any assistance that might be needed… even though he had another session to attend!
• I also appreciated the support of my friend Patrick LeBlanc (blog, Twitter), who was in the audience
• There was a very good turnout, far larger than I expected. I printed out fifty copies of each handout but there were not enough to go around. I didn’t have a chance to get an exact count, but I would estimate that about seventy-five people were present!
• I had a problem with one of the demonstrations (creating a SQL Server Agent alert for launching SQLDiag). I developed it against a default instance but was demonstrating it against a named instance, so the performance object name was wrong. Fortunately the audience was helpful in fixing the problem
• I was actually working on addressing this problem on the flights to Seattle (by retrieving the appropriate name from the [sys].[dm_os_performance_counters] DMV), but I neglected to finish it after getting here. It will be fixed before I post the code
• My other gaffe was that, early on, I decided to walk down and in front of the dais to be closer to the audience. I got over to the stairs before realizing that this just wasn’t a good idea and turned back. I’m sure that it looked awkward (and amusing)
• Because of the restructuring, I was able to stop and solicit questions at several key points, which helped to draw the audience into the talk
• I got to use "it depends" to answer one of the questions!
• Tim Mitchell also slipped in at one point to snap a picture of me talking. I brought my camera to the session, but forgot to ask for a volunteer to use it, so I was pleasantly surprised by his thoughtfulness
• I didn’t end up having time to cover the "’Strategies’ to Avoid" slide. I’ll write a blog post that explains the terms
• I only had time to cover a fraction of the original material… I could teach a full-day on this topic! It’s going to be important to publish quite a few blog posts to supplement the material
• Still, my main goal was realized: I managed to introduce many people to these invaluable, free tools that Microsoft’s engineers have developed (specifically PSSDiag, SQLDiag, PAL, SQL Nexus, and the RML Utilities)
• I hope to hear from many audience members as they have a chance to start experimenting with these tools and leveraging them at work
• There was a really good group that stayed around after the talk to ask questions
• While answering those questions, the lamp in the projector blew out. I was very fortunate that it waited until after my presentation ended!
• Tim Benninghoff (blog, Twitter) came up and introduced himself. We have interacted a bit on Twitter and I helped him with a PowerShell script back in May. This was great, since he was on my list of people that I was hoping to meet at the PASS conference!
• Only one person was playing #SQLBingo, which was a little disappointing!
• I have spoken to both Colin Stasiuk (blog, Twitter) and Greg Larsen (blog, Twitter) about delivering the talk as a webcast for their user groups (the Edmonton and Database Administration virtual chapters, respectively)

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