S3OLV User Group Presentation – AlwaysOn

When I was at the PASS Summit 2012 last November, a friend of mine Jason Brimhall (b|t SQL MCM and a lead author of this book) asked me to present my AlwaysOn – Finally, A Usable ‘Mirror’ presentation at the S3OLV SQL Server Users Group in Las Vegas in April 2013. I accepted. Fortunately, they use LiveMeeting so I was able to do the presentation and demos from my office in Austin. Usually, I present this session in person to a live audience, which makes it very easy for me to have good audience contact and interact (bidirectionally) with the audience. I typically ask how many folks have used Mirroring in production and how many have used Clustering. The normal show of hands allows me to adapt my illustrations and comparisons, technical depth, and pace according to what I perceive the majority of my audience knows. In this case, since it was a web presentation with muted attendees, I was a bit blind. This was not a problem for me though, since I typically present 3h webinars to audiences ranging from 30 to 400 attendees and I do this about 4 or 5 times a year as an Iron Speed MVP. Same drill here: PowerPoint, tons of demos, gotta have a bunch of corny jokes to keep folks awake, and everyone is muted. Meanwhile, I pretend they are all laughing [at me] while really they are sighing and probably checking their email. I use the chat feature to collect feedback and I use the Question and Answer feature to screen questions. It does make it more difficult to handle questions as compared to an in person presentation, but it is not a big deal. My presentation to S3OLV was very well received. Charlie Jones, who runs S3OLV, said it was among the best presentations he’s seen and if I ever need a speaking reference, have them contact him. Wow, what a nice compliment! I think he must have gotten me confused with one of my favorite technical presenters Grant Fritchey (b|t). And no, I’m not kissing butt. I really enjoy his high energy active and sharp presenting skills.