When we adopted GroupBy, we promised each other we would work hard to maintain the spirit of what GroupBy was founded to be:
- A safe and accessible place to develop speaker talent
- A conference where the community picks the topics
Not everyone can travel to user group meetings and SQL Saturday events (well, no one can right now, but that’s beside the point). New speakers need their community to make space for them to try things out, make mistakes, and receive constructive feedback.
We realized this year that our two guiding principles may conflict with each other if the rockstars of our community all submit sessions, how can we develop new speakers?
That indeed happen. Look at this incredible line up!
| The top 5 speakers in Americas: | The Top 5 speakers in Europe |
| Brent Ozar | Koen Verbeeck |
| Erik Darling | Kendra Little |
| Grant Fritchey | Andy Yun |
| Julie Koesmarno | Jess Pomfret |
| Jean Joseph | Guy Glantser |
I’m sorry, am I at the PASS Conference? Pinch me! We were so excited to see so much top talent come together and offer their expertise, for free no less. How could you not vote for these folks? However, this inherently presented a problem – we want a more diverse speaker group. In my first GroupBy, I had the pleasure of speaking right before Steph Locke; the first time Eugene presented, it was right alongside Brent Ozar. It was an incredible experience for both of us. We want that for more people.
So we went ahead and opened another track.
That’s right. This year’s GroupBy conference will have 2 congruent tracks over two days. Surprise!
We’ve created a Performance track and an Analytics/Automation track for the European day and a DBA and Performance track for the Americas. Here’s the line-up:
| Europe – May 12 | ||
| Analytics/Automation | Performance | |
| 10:00 UTC | Koen Verbeeck: The modern Cloud Data Warehouse – Snowflake on Azure | Guy Glantser: SQL Server Setup Best Practices |
| 11:30 UTC | Jess Pomfret: Life Hacks: dbatools edition | Hugo Kornelis: Execution plans … where do I start? 11 |
| 13:00 UTC | Magnus Ahlkvist: My romantic relation with Powershell generally and DBATools especially | Andrew Pruski: SQL Server and Kubernetes |
| 14:30 UTC | Rob Sewell: Jupyter Notebooks for the none-Data Scientist | Kendra Little: Index Tuning Across Dev and DBA Silos |
| 16:00 UTC | Ed Elliott: Testing your ETL pipelines: test when writing test when deploying and test when running | Andy Yun: Lets Dive Into SQL Server I/O To Improve T-SQL Performance |
| Americas – May 13 | ||
| Database Administration | Development | |
| 15:00 UTC | Argenis Fernandez: SQL Server Virtualization and I/O Patterns | Monica Rathbun: Performance Tuning, Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Buck |
| 16:30 UTC | Matt Gordon: Turn Runbooks into Notebooks: Handling Maintenance and Emergencies with Azure Data Studio | Jean Joseph: How to troubleshoot database performance issues |
| 18:00 UTC | Keynote on Performance track* | Brent Ozar: Dynamic SQL: Pro Tips for Building and Tuning It |
| 19:30 UTC | Grant Fritchey: Learn to Effectively Use Extended Events | Julie Koesmarno: Notebooks 101 for SQL People |
| 21:00 UTC | Mike Byrd: A Self-Tuning Fill Factor Technique for SQL Server | Edwin M Sarmiento: What SQL Server DBAs Need to Know About Docker Containers |
| 22:30 UTC | Erik Darling: Better Troubleshooting Through Extended Events | Erik Darling to close out GroupBy on Database Administration track |
We are undoubtedly thrilled to see so much good content. We’ll be using zoom webinars again and trying out some of the great features to get people engaged. I’ll post more information on that as it takes shape. We’ve also given speakers 90 minutes to get really deep into their content. That was a direct request from most of the European speakers out of last October’s event. We’re testing that out, and we’re curious what you think.
Like always, this content will be edited, transcribed and posted for free on the GroupBy’s Youtube channel. The speaker will be fully credited and get all the SEO linkbacks to their blog/websites.
Thank you to everyone who submitted this year. We can’t thank you enough for making GroupBy what it is.
Blythe
