T-SQL Tuesday #84 – If I Were a Speaker…

I’m finally getting around to doing second T-SQL Tuesday submission. Thanks to Andy Yun (b|t) for hosting this month’s topic!

The topic for this month is a call for growing new speakers. For someone who has never presented (like me), it’s a challenge to step up and start speaking.

My first reaction is: Seriously, I just started a blog a several months ago (I know, I’m late to the party) and now you want me to speak?!?! I see a very slippery slope in front of me:

In this scenario, I’m represented by Lane Meyer, played by John Cusack, and you are Charles De Mar, played by Curtis Armstrong, in the classic film, Better Off Dead.

Just kidding!

On a more serious note, at PASS Summit, I actually had a couple of different conversations in passing with a couple of people about new speakers in general and I had seen this month’s topic so I was able to mention this as well. Plus PASS WIT has said they’re looking for new speakers in their October newsletter. It seems like something important to the community right now. So I’ll play along.

And so the question before me is: if I were a new speaker, what would I talk about?

I see a couple of options:

• At a previous job, I did training for new employees to teach them basics of T-SQL: how to write basic select\insert\update\delete statements, the different parts of the query statement, FROM clause, WHERE clause, GROUP BY, the types of joins, etc. It was really aimed for the people who knew they were going to have to work with databases but never had before. It was definitely a T-SQL 101 level talk. This is the sort of thing I could see bringing as a topic for programs encouraging girls and women to get more involved into computer science. I don’t know how much databases are discussed in these types of programs but it would be nice to make sure they’re brought into the mix.

If I looked at my blog, I seem to have developed two themes so far in its short lifetime and either one could be subjects for a presentation:

• There’s the long term, overarching project that I created for myself where I’m taking a historical survey and trying to create a database from scratch for the answers. It’s not the subject of the survey itself that’s the purpose but rather going through the exercise of reading text, identifying the data points and the context surrounding them, understanding what type of data we’re holding, determining any requirements for the data and from there, figuring out the database design for the tables. Simple enough, right? I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject but this would be more as one person’s approach to this. It would be a kind of a “Reading Comprehension for Data Requirements” talk.

• The only other T-SQL Tuesday challenge I did ended up being about temporal tables. From there, I found an odd behavior that led me to a second post. And I have a couple more ideas that I would like to look at for future posts. So if I used all of these (past and future) as a basis, it would be kind of a “Exploring Temporal Tables” type theme. But I feel like this is something a lot of people are talking about and looking into so this may be something that already has a lot of attention.

Clearly, I don’t have that many posts on either topic yet, which means there would be a lot to pull together. Not to say it can’t be done, it’s just a lor of prep work.

So if I were to present, which one of the three topics would be more interesting:

• Introduction to T-SQL
• Reading Comprehension for Data Requirements
• Exploring Temporal Tables

 

Oh no… what am I getting myself into?