Founder and owner of Green Mountain Software, a consulting firm based in the Capital District of New York focusing on SQL Server.
Formerly, a consulting DBA ("and other duties as assigned") by day, and sometimes night, and caver by night (and sometimes day).
Now, a PA student working to add PA-C after my name so I can work as a Physician Assistant.
When I'm not in front of a computer or with my family I'm often out hiking, biking, caving or teaching cave rescue skills.
“Now, in the ’60s, there were only two other cars made in America that had Positraction, and independent rear suspension, and enough power to make these marks.” – Mona Lisa Vito
In my first stint as a computer consultant, I was visiting a potential client and noticed a magazine called I believe The American Bee Journal. I was a little surprised at first that such a magazine even existed, but then it dawned on me that it made perfect sense and that probably every specialty had a trade magazine or the like of its own.
In the world of SQL Server we’ll talk about query plans and clustered indexes vs non-clustered indexes and use other words specific to our trade.
In caving we’ll talk about speleothems and karst and other words that the average person might not recognize.
And mechanics can talk about Positraction and skid marks.
Knowing the language of a particular specialty can be important when it comes to understanding it.
I’ve been reflecting upon this lately as I continue to study so I can apply to a Physician’s Assistant program. I’m about to finish up my first semester of classes and one of the classes I’ve been taking and really enjoying is Anatomy and Physiology I. I still have a second class to take, but I’ve been loving things so far. It is, to me, absolutely fascinating to learn how the body works. For example, learning the physiology of muscle contractions is in three words, absolutely fucking cool. And any caver who has vertical experience would realize it’s not much different from how we ascend a rope.
Part of what I’m learning to is the language. In fact one of the first lectures and labs was simply on the language to use describe where things are. To someone not familiar with the language, it may sound like gibberish to say that the tibia is lateral to the fibula and the lateral malleolus is at the distal end, but such a description can help someone who knows the language orient themselves as to its location. Similarly if someone says they have a sore sternocleidomastoid muscle, I’d know where it is, based simply on the name. (I’d also honestly wonder why they simply didn’t say they had a sore muscle in their neck). In that case, the name of the muscle basically describes its origin (the sternum and clavicle or cleido) and insertion (the mastoid process). (If you’re curious, if you turn your head to the left, you can see the right sternocleidomastoid sort of bulging from the right side of your neck).
Honestly, at times I feel like I’m at a Broadway play and the orchestra is playing the overture and the curtain is slowly being drawn back to reveal what’s behind it. I’m excited by what I’ve learned and seen so far and excited to see what more I’ll see as the curtain continues to be drawn back!
There’s an old saying in the software industry that “If houses were built like software was, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”
I was reminded of that last week in both ways. First I was sitting at my desk when I heard what sounded like someone banging on a tin drum of some sort. I went up to the porch outside my office window and saw a bird fly off. Seeing that only solved part of the question in my mind and created a new one. The new one was what the heck was a woodpecker doing on the corner post. It’s pressure-treated and there’s no signs of any sort of infestation. But even more so, why was it so friggen’ loud and metal sounding? About 20 minutes later it was back. I chased it off again.
This cycle has become a daily event with it coming back 3-4 times a day. But I finally got a partial answer. I had forgotten that on the far side of the post was the copper downspout for the gutters. As far as I can tell, it’s hitting it directly (though I can’t imagine why) or close enough that the entire downspout is acting like a drum. Annoys the heck out of me, but the woodpecker doesn’t seem to care. And the good news is, despite all this, my house is still standing.
The other reminder was an error message I had received from an ETL process I have written for a customer. It takes data from a vendor and loads it into my client’s Salesforce instance. The error was one I hadn’t seen before (but had thankfully planned for). So I went into the package and started to investigate. It seemed all the new records had simply failed to load. I looked closely and could not see an issue, so I attempted a manual load and it instantly failed. This was unusual and troubling. My first thought was that the vendor had somehow changed the data format and that was causing a problem, but nothing really indicated that (and had that happened it most likely would have actually generated an error earlier in the process).
After some digging I realized that it wasn’t the vendors fault. As part of the ETL process, one of the steps that happens is a lookup into Salesforce for a Vendor ID to make sure the data coming in is tagged with the right ID. This step is somewhat important because the ID, being an internally generated one in Salesforce, is different between the UAT instance and the Prod instance, so rather than hardcoding it, it’s a lookup. And while the ID itself in an instance can never change, the keyword associated with it in theory can. In practice it shouldn’t. Normal users don’t have permission and admin users should know that changing the keyword should never be done, or if it is, needs an entire change process.
Sure enough, my lookup, which was basically doing “Where Vendor_ID=’Adventureworks'” was now returning nothing. So the insert, which needs that Vendor_ID was failing. A little digging showed that an admin had changed it and not to something like ‘Adventure Works’ or something that might have been close and thought to be a trivial example, but had changed it to something like ‘Bob and Mary’. It wasn’t even close.
Needless to say, better controls have been put into place, but apparently a woodpecker came along and broke my ETL.
Fortunately, that one isn’t coming back.
Code strong, code robustly, and have good error checking.
Three-quarters of a century. That time frame seems both like forever and a blink of an eye. They say one doesn’t speak of the age of a lady, but I think in this case, I’ll make an exception. This past weekend, besides celebrating Easter a day early, my family and I celebrated my mother’s 75th birthday.
Now when one thinks of an Easter celebration, one might think of a ham or lamb dinner with all the trimmings, or at the very least some sort of formal sit-down meal. And yes, for much of my life that’s what we had, especially when we would celebrate at my grandmother’s.
But no, this year my mom, now the matriarch of at least this little corner of the family decided she’d rather do take-out sushi and loads of Thai food from a local restaurant. And a great repast it was.
That’s not to say we eschewed all tradition. Ever since my kids, her only grandchildren have been old enough, she and her partner Jimmy have hidden plastic Easter eggs around their house for the kids to find. Even at 22 and just about 19, they still enjoy the tradition and while being quite competitive about it, end up sharing the rewards equally. And inevitably there’s one plastic egg that seems to go missing.
This year, that tradition was changed a bit to accommodate my cousin’s children who are much younger. For them, the eggs were multi-colored and placed on the floor. And yet, they still managed to find a few of the ones higher up. I suppose a child’s reach should exceed their grasp.
And of course, as always in our family there was the tradition of cracking colored, boiled eggs.
Easter Eggs, ripe for cracking
But as I mentioned it wasn’t just an Easter celebration, it was a celebration of 75 years of my mother’s life travelling around the Sun. Of course I wasn’t around for some of those years, but I know she’s always been the unconventional one in the family. She’s the one that went to art school, the first to get married, the first to get divorced. She was the one that opened a store for interior design in a small town in Northwest Connecticut. She later managed one of the first antique centers in the area. While she may not have had the formal education of some of her peers, but she often could out smart them anyway.
During college, I’d often stop by after a hiking trip with friends in tow, and no matter how many, she somehow always had food in the house to feed them all, no matter how muddy or stinky we might be. I even managed to get her into a couple of caves one time.
Other times I’d come home from college for vacation or break and we’d end up in deep philosophical discussions or discussions about politics. We still do from time to time, though now, more often on the phone.
She’s taught me much of my appreciation for music, and I will never think of Joni Mitchell or Billie Holiday without her. And my kids will always have memories of sitting on the floor eating sushi with her. You might start to notice a theme here that involves food. I will add “wavy pizza” without any context.
I think I should add at this point that my mom is, in my opinion an awesome cook and I developed my love of cooking and baking from her.
All these memories and many more have been running through my head over the past few days. 75 seems like a magical number and I think it is. And the truth is, given the events of Covid over the past few years, this honestly was perhaps the best Easter and birthday I recall in awhile. I’m glad I was able to celebrate it with her and look forward to many more.
And while as she admit, her body is showing her age a bit, her spirit hasn’t slowed down one wit and I love her for that.
And Mom, I look forward to celebrating number 76 and many more with you. In the meantime, don’t trip over the robo-vac and enjoy all the flowers and so much more in your life.
Or, another week in the life of a DBA and other duties as assigned
So a few weeks ago a developer at a client of mine reported that some recently deployed code wasn’t working. I tried it and of course it worked for me. That isn’t unusual since I have sysadmin rights on that box. I tried execute as using her ID and it failed. Not uncommon, sometimes in production permissions don’t get promoted the way they should. So I checked her permissions and the permissions of the users actively trying to call the stored procedure. Strangely, they all had the proper permissions, at least as far as I could tell. Then I had that lightbulb insight and realized I had been misinterpreting the error message execute as was giving me. “The server principle “DOMAIN\USerXYZ” is not able to access the database “ImportantDB” under the current security context.”
I realized I had been troubleshooting the wrong problem. It wasn’t that the person didn’t have permissions to execute, it was that no one other than sysadmins had the right to CONNECT to the database. A simple:
GRANT CONNECT SQL
And all was good to go! Or was it? It took us some digging to figure out why this had happened on a production database. Apparently when the database was designed in Dev, the developers had the rights they need to connect, so never thought about who else might need to connect. Apparently they had created it with very limited Grant Connect rights. When the database was moved to production, in this case, with a backup and restore the same lack of rights moved upstream with it.
Now, in the opposite direction, a vendor wanted to send a file to my client in their UAT environment. I fired up the PowerShell script to retrieve the file and decrypt it. The decryption failed. It took me awhile to figure out the problem. The client has a rule that every 2 years we must upgrade our RSA Public Key with them. Ironically, I had just completed the most recent update last month and moved it into production. Apparently though, their rule doesn’t apply to their UAT environment. Which came as sort of a shock to me, since they’re always so insistent on us following their security requirements. Of course beyond the irony of them not following their own rules, the file they had asked we download, wasn’t there.
The PM contacted them and they assured him the file would be there on Friday. Well here it is Tuesday and we’ll see if this time the file is there.
In any case, this time, the problem wasn’t promoting a change from UAT to PROD, but the client’s failure to move a change from PROD to UAT.
Such is life.
So sometimes I’m the creek without the paddle and sometimes I’m down the creek…
I think I speak for many DBAs when they say they’ve all had a programmer tell them, “The database is too slow, we need faster hardware.” Then as a DBA, you go in, look at their query and realize they’re running a table scan across a huge 100GB plus table without any indices. You analyze the data and overall usage further and decide to put in an index and suddenly their query is running in sub-second times instead of minutes.
Or, in a case I was working with with a client years ago, they had a stored procedure that sometimes would suddenly get slow. Their solution was to occasionally issue a WITH RECOMPILE command when calling it and things would get better. It worked, but was hardly ideal. After analyzing the stored procedure and usage I realized that it was suffering from a form of parameter sniffing and with a bit of work I was able to recommend a rewrite that solved their problem in a better way.
What is critical here is understanding HOW exactly data is stored and how the query engine works and how we can take advantage of how the database engine works to improve things.
And honestly, for me, I’ve always loved understanding “how things work.” I’ve marveled at seeing Bob Ward open up the debugger, live on stage, and show how a particular piece of code in the SQL engine works.
And now, I’m starting to undergo the same journey in the human body.
Let me caveat things by saying I am only half-way through my Anatomy & Physiology I class (and same with my Bio I class) and I greatly recognize how much more I have yet to learn (and that’s only out of what we know. We’re still learning more!)
However, I continue to be blown away with “how things work.” Mother Nature has had millions and millions of years to make things work. What strikes me as interesting at times is how both conservative and ingenious things can be. We all start from a single cell that divides and forms a sphere of cells. This soon forms a neural tube and then starts to specialize further. Somehow from that single cell we end up with our feet at one end and our skull at the other, completely different, but from the same source.
But, even then when you dig deeper you realize that at some level hands are really feet, but with an opposable joint and far more flexibility and dexterity. The internal structures are very similar. Then you move up to the arms and legs and realize even the limbs start out fairly similar: the upper limb has a single main bone and the lower limb has two bones. Of course the joints start to differ, a knee joint is VERY different from an elbow joint. Nature is conservative.
This week we started to study skeletal muscles and how they work. This builds on earlier lessons in both the parts of a cell and histology. A generic animal cell has sort of a skeleton made up of fibers the cell produces. These fibers can come in one of several forms. In most cases they’re simply there to give a certain structure to the cell, or perhaps via the use of other proteins, connect to other cells. They often may look haphazard in design and function, but they get the job done.
Until you look at skeletal muscle. Then you see two of the fibers are laid out a bit differently. One, the thin “actin” fibers are laid out radially around larger fibers, the myosin. You may see these fibers in other cells, but in muscle cells their layout is different. And this makes all the difference. The myosin fibers have “heads” on them that can, in the right circumstances both attach to the actin fiber, but also essentially pull on it by flipping its head from a “forward” to a “backwards” position. The head can then release, flop back to its original position, grab the actin again, and again flip back to the tail facing position. I’ve left out a lot of details, but if you think of yourself using both hands to pull upon a rope, you get the same basic idea. Or, for the caving readers among me, it’s a pair of handled ascenders and it’s basically using a Texas system!
To me, this is really an ingenious re-use of existing structures inside the cell. The more I learn about the human body (or biology in general) the more I’m amazed.
I’m loving “seeing under the covers” and this is part of it!
From the first day of classes I’ve worried about a week like this. I think I’ve mentioned I’m only taking three of the prereqs I need to apply to PA school. That’s not a horribly heavy load, but this week everything came to a head at once.
Monday – Anatomy & Physiology I Exam
Tuesday – Bio I Exam
Wednesday – Bio Prelab due and Bio Lab Quiz
Saturday – General Psych Exam Due
Sunday – General Psych Paper Due
Literally the only thing that’s NOT happening this week is my A&P lab quiz on bones and their facets and attachments points and more. I suppose I should be grateful for small favors.
And to make things worse, none of my study group for A&P was available this weekend.
Now fortunately, the General Psych paper can be submitted for review early, so I knocked that out Saturday morning and got feedback by Sunday night. So I’ll upload that shortly. And the General Psych test is online and available starting tomorrow night, so I can put off studying for that a bit and take it at my convenience.
And finally, the Bio Prelab is almost literally cut and paste and can be submitted on-line. So that’s been knocked out.
But the A&P I and Bio I exams: those made me nervous. Fortunately they’re mostly multiple choice, with the Bio exam having some essay questions.
I’ve always been a decent test taker, but I have to admit, multiple choice does make things easier. In fact, one of the topics we covered in General Psych last week is memory and how recognition is “easier” than recall. i.e. it’s a bit easier to see 4 possible answers to a question and recognize the right one than to be simply asked the question and have to recall the information and write it down.
That said, for me, one thing I often like to do when taking a multiple choice test is see if I can think of the right answer before I actually see the choices, i.e. make use of recall to reinforce my recognition. This gives me more confidence when I eventually choose my final answer.
And if you add to this the fact that there are actually skills one can learn when taking multiple choice tests, such as recognizing distractors, knowing certain answers are simply wrong and sometimes being able to think through to the right answer.
This came into play on question on yesterday’s test. I went back and checked all my answers before handing in the Scantron (yes, they still use them!) and had marked a few for “definitely look at” and one I wasn’t 100% sure on. But I was able to rule out two answers of the 4 and was down to two answers. I had initially checked one of them, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the other was the right one.
So, one test down, another in an hour and then on to the rest. Wish me luck.
I wrote last year about how my job title seems to be DBA and other Duties as assigned. A little incident yesterday got me thinking about that again. This time though, it got me thinking more about the DBA side of that title.
I’ve mentioned before I’ve written a number of ETLs for various clients. Some are fairly complex and some are fairly simply PowerShell scripts. In most cases, at the end of the script I send an email with a success or failure status and some additional information if appropriate.
Over the last two weeks I had noticed that the email for one particular ETL was coming in later and later. I finally found somet time to investigate. I looked at the destination table and noticed that some of the tables had extremely large numbers of rows. Now, my first inclination was that the source data had increased (which would be a good thing, it meant the client was basically selling more widgets). But the increase seemed too dramatic and large. My next thought was perhaps the export itself was simply giving me more data.
So I decided to look more closely at the data and I noticed something interesting. Picking on of the tables at random, I simply did a
select * from RandomTable order by GoodIndex
SSMS returned approximately 24,000 rows. But something stood out. There appeared to be duplicates rows. Lots of them. This raised a lot of suspicions.
I then ran the query on my UAT box which in this case actually loads a copy of the production data. I got back about 1,600 rows. VERY curious.
Back on production now I ran
select distinct * from RandomTable order by GoodIndex
This time I got back the same number as UAT. Extremely curious.
Then it dawned on me, about 2 weeks ago, we had made a change to where the script looked for the source data, a number of CSV files. UAT had not changed, but Prod had. The reason for this change was to be able to get the ETL PowerShell script to run on the proper production server (the original location had security issues reading from the original CSV file location.)
So my first thought was that the team that had updated their export had somehow left out the command to delete the old file and was simply appending. I was about to write a pointed email when I stopped myself.
I looked at my code and realized that when I had setup the script on the new production box, I had properly handled all the permissions except one: the step that truncated the destination table. Sure enough, my code was no longer truncating the table before I inserted new information. Fortunately I realized my mistake before sending that pointed email.
So was this a DBA issue or a “other duties as assigned” issue? I don’t know, but I’d say as a DBA I should have not created the problem in the first place, but thankfully, due to proper logging and emails I was able to catch it and solve it fairly quickly.
Moral of the story: Pay attention to details. Notice when things start to drift. They can be the sign of a larger issue.
Many weeks I struggle with what I plan on writing about, but this post came to me last Thursday or Friday. It was clear to me that I should write about 2022 SQLBits.
Now, the more astute of you are probably thinking, “But Greg, you weren’t there. How can you write about it?”
Well you’re right. I’m not going to write about my experience attending it. Rather I’m going to write about my experience not attending it.
I had applied to speak at SQLBits, but didn’t make the cut this year. That happens. But this time there was more than mixed feelings. Had I been selected, I almost certainly would have tried to find a way to do so in person. However, as many of my readers know, I’m back in school taking classes as prereqs to get into PA school. And frankly, I’m loving it. But it is taking time and focus. This week, March 14-18 is Spring break for my fellow students. But last week I did have classes and I’m not sure I could have taken the time off to fly to the UK. And I’m not sure I would have wanted to; if only because of missing my A&P I lab this week (learning about the bones of the head and spine, including the axis and atlas (C1, C2 vertebrae).
So in a sense, I’m almost grateful that I wasn’t chosen to speak. It solved me the pain of trying to solve the dilemma of do I attend in person or not?
But dang, did I miss people. I saw posts from so many of my #SQLFamily that I was sad I couldn’t see them in person. And then, looking at the calendar, it dawned on me, I’m not entirely sure I can make the PASS Summit this year, again due to classes.
It just drove home how much so many of you have become family and how much I miss so many of you. And in some ways its just the start. As my plans continue, I’ll find myself making the slow transition from the #SQLFamily to hopefully a #PAFamily or whatever community I find there. And while I have often found myself in many communities, for example besides #SQLFamily I’m also heavily involved with the NCRC and plan on continuing my efforts there, I know over time my active involvement in #SQLFamily will slowly diminish. That said, I’m not walking away just yet and will continue to be involved as much as I can, both in presenting when I can and in running my local user group.
But that said, I miss you all. And do look forward to seeing any of you when I can.
Today is International Women’s Day. I was reminded of this from a semi-unrelated post by a fellow #SQLFamily member, but this post is an intersection of a variety of Facebook posts and discussions I’ve had over the past week that touched upon women’s health. In the interests of privacy and protection I am going to anonymize a bit what happened. I’ve mentioned in past posts how we as DBAs have to take into consideration topics such as gender and more. We’re here to describe the world, not to prescribe it. But, if my hoped for career change to become a Physician’s Assistant passes, topics of women’s health will become even more important for me to take into account.
Let me start with the first discussion I had: menopause and Nuvaring. A friend mentioned she’s going through menopause and her physician had suggested the Nuvarin as a form of hormone replacement to help reduce the effects such as hot-flashes. She looked into what her insurance covered and found out that it would cost I believe $360 for 3 months of coverage. But, Viagra was free. That’s health insurance in America. Want to get an erection, if you have good health insurance, it’s free. Want to avoid feeling like you need to rip off your clothes in public because you’ve gone from cold to sweating hot in seconds, sorry that’ll cost you $120/month! Perhaps it’s time to rethink how we allocate some of our funds.
The other discussion that came up was someone that I know more vaguely, but who is a trans-woman. She mentioned how doctors have turned her away. Pharmacies have refused to fulfill prescriptions for her that they routinely fill for cis-women. In general, because in their minds her physical presentation doesn’t match their expectations, they treat her as an outcast. Let me be simple and blunt: I’m offended and angry. She deserves access to the same treatment as any of the cis-women around her (and as the above discussion suggests, women in general deserve better treatment).
Writing this, I realized, I lied a bit, unintentionally. The above paragraph was prompted by a particular post, but I know several women to whom it could apply. So no need to try to guess who she is among my friends. She could be and is in fact a compilation of several.
Before I close, I want to recommend a Youtube channel I spend some time on: Dr. Momma Jones. While I don’t think my specialty will involve Ob/Gyn (I’m more interested in emergency medicine), I love watching her posts because I learn a lot, both medically and about gender bias and topics that I’m generally less familiar with.
That said, in closing, if I become a PA, I will work at treating all my patients equally and equitably and to the best of my abilities, regardless of their identity. Even if I don’t become a PA, I will continue to work to fight for the rights of all and to treat all equally and equitably .
So on International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate and remember all women.
P.S. and in the meantime, let’s fight against the rules put in place in Texas regarding medical treatment and discussion around trans-children and against the “Don’t Say Gay” law being voted on in Florida. I will say right now: children will die because of these rules. They will commit suicide.
Today’s T-SQL Tuesday edition comes from Rie Merrit and she is asking about “Advice on Running a User Group.”
Fortunately she’s only asking for 1-2 ideas, not an entire book (though there’s at least one book out there on the topic, which I’ll admit I’ve skimmed but not read cover to cover).
It Starts at the Door
This is actually an area I’ve not done as well in as I’d like, but I’m going to continue to work on. For your in-person meetings (we remember what those were like, right?) find one of your more outgoing, sociable members, ideally someone who is good with names and details, and position them by the door to greet people. When someone new comes in, this person should make sure they get their name, ask them if they have any particular interests, and then introduce them to others, ideally with similar interests.
It can be very intimidating to walk into a new User Group meeting where you know no one, and every already there is already happily chatting away and you end up feeling like an outsider.
By assigning someone to the role of greeter, ideally any new person instantly can be made to feel welcome. Besides simply introducing them, the greeter can explain how things work in terms of schedule, where the bathrooms are, where food is at, etc. This keeps newcomers from feeling lost and left out.
On the flip side of this advice, the greeter has to make sure they’re not too enthusiastic either. If the newcomer indicates they’d rather just sit in the corner and listen and leave, that’s fine too. The goal isn’t to force everyone to socialize. The goal is to make it easier for those who wish to.
I can guarantee that if you make people feel welcome, they’re more likely to come back.
It Pays to have Sponsor
Or more accurately, its sponsors that make it possible to pay for food and other costs. Several years ago at a User Group Leader meeting at PASS Summit, I listened as a speaker talked about looking for sponsors you might not normally consider, i.e. going outside of getting sponsorship from technical companies. This has worked really well for me in the past. But before you even go that far, you need to get some data. And since we’re DBAs, we should be good with data. I recommend once a year, collecting data about your group with some questions such as:
How many people receive your weekly or monthly emails. You don’t need an exact number, but is it 100, 300, 500, 1000?
How many people typically attend your meetings? (and now ask in-person versus on-line if you’re doing hybrid)
Where are they coming from?
How many years have they been in the industry?
Do you have a breakdown by age range?
You’re trying to get a sense of demographics. This will come in handy when you look for sponsors that are non-technical (for technical sponsors you will want different demographics). But with the data from my group, I have approached a number of different sponsors such as banks, insurance agencies and the like. My sales pitch is generally along the lines of:
I can put your name in front of 400 people via email and 20-30 people in person that are in your demographic (generally 40-50 years of age, higher income) that are probably in the market for your services (such as life insurance, investment opportunities, etc).
I’ve had a lot of luck with this approach. Sometimes I’ve gotten a check right there, sometimes they’ve had to go up their chain of command, but now they have data to sell the idea to their boss. And sometimes, you find out a prospect is not a good match. This happened with me when I approached a contact at the local, then new casino. Turns out their target demographic was older, retired women. Apparently they spend a lot of time and money at the casino. In contrast, mid-life professional DBAs don’t gamble much!
The other key detail when approach a sponsor is being clear on what you’re selling them. You probably recognize this without really realizing it. At any conference you’ve been to you’ve seen Platinum Sponsors, Gold Sponsors, etc. The more someone is willing to pay, the more mention they get, the bigger their logo may be featured, etc. This works for user groups. My advice here is to not overdue the number of sponsorships and to deliver on what you promise. For my group, pre-Covid, I would typically try to have no more than 3-4 sponsors at a time, and total over a year, perhaps 6 or so. Some sponsors would sponsor for 3 meetings, some for the entire year. There were discounts for an annual sponsor as opposed to a quarterly sponsor. If you were a quarterly or greater sponsor, besides having your logo in emails and being mentioned from time to time, you were given the opportunity once a quarter or so to give a 5 minute pitch before the group. Some took advantage of that, some didn’t. But I have to say those who did, I think made a better impact when they could introduce themselves and point to the food and say they were glad to sponsor our group.
I’ll close with one final comment on sponsors: not all need to provide a direct financial contribution. We have a local hotel that has provided us 1-2 free room nights a year. We typically use one to put up a speaker who is coming in from out of town, and the second as part of our annual holiday raffle. We also had the local garbage collection company provide a free year’s service as a prize for our annual raffle. That was surprisingly one of our more popular prizes. In SQL Server you don’t have to worry about garbage collection and for a year neither did one of our DBAs!
In Conclusion
I can’t speak for other user groups, but I do know we’re probably very close to going back to in-person meetings in the near future so I’ll be dusting off the playbook and doing the above as well as other things in order to build up our successful in-person attendance again.
I look forward to seeing what other group leaders advise!
Green Mountain Software 