Last week, at the PASS Summit in Seattle, the DCAC team, including John, Monica, Yuki, and myself, were able to volunteer at the “Community Experts Clinic” booth sponsored by Redgate. I always enjoy speaking to community members about their technical challenges and how we can solve their problems. An area like that, a great process with appointments and a calendar, provided an excellent value add to PASS Summit attendees. The other brilliant thing Redgate did was to have tables with whiteboard tops so attendees could quickly sketch out their environments to help the experts understand their issues.
At the same time, it reminded us of our team’s technical depth and experience at DCAC as we answered questions about networking, security, database performance, data analytics and engineering, and various other technical topics. We have a combined 100+ years of experience, which means that while we are very good at databases, we also have a deep understanding of other technical and functional topics. An example of this was when I was talking to an attendee about how to fix a security issue that was going to annoy most of his team intensely—I was able to explain how the best way to manage this in his organization was to “blame the external auditors and insurance company” for making the unpopular technical change, to keep the heat off of the IT team.
Monica talked to another attendee about their Azure VM configuration for SQL Server. Based on some bad advice, they were spending thousands of dollars per disk more than they needed to and not seeing any performance benefit from it. These are just a couple of examples of the great questions we were able to answer in the booth. Whether it was high availability and disaster recovery, data warehouses, or database performance, our team was there to answer questions.
The Expert Clinic was popular with everyone who attended the conference. As a group, the DCAC team talked to over 50 people over the three days of the conference, with the clinic talking to well over 200 attendees over the three days. On Wednesday and Thursday, I would wrap up talking to one attendee just in time for the next walk-up or appointment time. Hopefully, the clinic will be even more popular next year at the conference.
If you are asking questions about your cloud bill (and why it looks like a phone number), trying to make your databases or applications run faster, or trying to glean new insights from your data, DCAC can help. Reach out to us, and we can set up a consultation to see how we can assist your organization.
Denny
