Edit: Added pictures to the PASS section of the Redgate Hub

Happy New Year to all of the Simple talk readers! What a year this has been. I just read a list of the things we did last year for an internal report, and I wanted to share some of the pertinent stats.

This year we went through a project we called “Simple Talk 2.0”, and the goal was to evolve Simple Talk into something a bit more than a journal of articles. Not that articles went away, or have any chance of going away, but the first step of the project was to build the foundation for all the new types of content we have on the way.

It has been a wild year for me, and a really great one. So here are those highlights I promised!

The Website

The Simple Talk site got a complete renovation that was deployed in July, and it has been quite the transformation from a site that was basically just a text listing of articles, to one with some more color, and a lot mor content types.

Of courses, articles are still the focus of the site, and we have published over 210 articles this year on various topics, including:

Of note is that the one article on Oracle is the first of many to come from the newest Redgate advocate Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman!

These are currently our primary areas of focus, but as you can see, they don’t even make up ½ of our content. We cover many different topics on Simple Talk, and while I am looking forward to bolstering our output of database topics, we cover a lot of different computing topics.

One of my favorite changes of the year? Dark mode for articles. My eyesight is not the best, and dark mode makes it a lot easier to see and read.

There have been a lot of small changes you can and cannot see, and there have been a ton of down payments on stuff that will be enabled very soon!

Conferences and Sponsorships

One thing we started this year was sponsoring conferences are Simple Talk. In total we were involved in 14 different events, some sponsored directly as Simple Talk, some co-sponsored with Redgate’s event team, and a few where I just went and spoke.

Even though it didn’t get off to a great start since I missed the first 4 months of the year down with an injury, I spent a lot more time this year traveling all over the US from Seattle to Orlando and New York City, on planes, trains, and of course my preferred mode of transportation… automobiles.

We sponsored several SQL Saturday events and a Data Saturday event, including SQL Saturday Haiti and SQL Saturday Toronto that were new to me, though I didn’t attend either of them. Haiti was virtual (and mostly in a different language… pretty sure it was French!). Toronto didn’t fit in my schedule as I was going to SQL Saturday Orlando the prior week, That turned out to be a blessing as Orlando had to move to the same day as Toronto due to Hurricane Milton.

One of the things we were supposed to do was do more than just sponsor SQL Server events, so we also did PGDay Chicago, THAT Conference Wisconsin (with Redgate), and Scenic City Summit. I also attended PGConf NYC, which was already sponsor by Redgate.

Overall, it was a lot of fun, a lot of work, but I saw familiar faces and met new people as well. It was my first experience sponsoring conferences, but while it didn’t always happen smoothly, I learned a lot and Redgate was able to help out a few more conferences! Win-win!

Podcast

One of the things I had wanted to do since I started at Redgate was to do a podcast. I have recorded one for theme park content on and off for years, and the goal was kind of the same. This July, we finally got it off the ground! We have video and audio available for every episode, which you can find here: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/podcasts/

We are on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Libsyn, and the Redgate YouTube channel as well.

For 2024, we did 13 episodes, with my entries being to interview someone in the community for a “Coffee Chat”, and the Advocates doing a show discussing something technical. On the 19^th of December, we dropped the final episode of the year where we discussed AI and other things that we felt defined 2024.

PASS Summit

The final thing I want to call out is our experiences at the PASS Summit. This was, to me, the most interesting thing we did for the year. There were 4 activities that we did at the PASS Summit I want to highlight:

Sessions

We had 5 sessions that were considered “Simple Talks.” My goal was to have 2 kinds of content. Deep dive sessions, and content on writing. For the technical sessions, there were 2 sessions that were 400 level (by Fabiano Amorim and Ben Johnston) , that were added from sessions not chosen and 1 that was adapted from something the speaker didn’t submit for the Summit (Jason Romans).

Then there were 2 sessions on writing, one about using AI (with myself, Tony Davis and Tonie Hauzer) and another giving a burst of writing tips.

All were done by Simple Talk authors and reviews were all quite nice! Attendance was great for the technical sessions, and okay for the writing sessions.

We knew the writing sessions would be lightly attended (because there are so many great technical presentations), but these sessions are timeless and will hopefully be watched by people streaming, and then hopefully in years to come.

Breakfast

On the last day of the conference, Simple Talk sponsored a breakfast. The food was excellent, the company even better.

We had many of the authors and Redgaters who are involved with Simple Talk there and the conversation was excellent.

Podcast Recording

One of the interesting things we did was to record quite a bit of podcast content. I recorded an episode with Mala Mahadevan and the Advocates recorded three episodes, including one that has dropped about Oracle, plus two others.

This image was captured by Emma Taylor who Director of Communications at Redgate and they did not know they were being photographed. Kellyn doctored it up some, and we think somehow this year we need to cut an album with these four with this as the album cover.

Redgate Hub

New this year, Redgate split their booth up into different experiences. There was the primary booth, where they were demoing products, and the Redgate Hub experience.

The hub was there to be a kind of non-sales area. Simple Talk was a big part of it, but all of our learning resources were as well. The area was just a great feeling, one from a large conference standpoint, with a couple of really comfy chairs and a lot of swag to go around.

Weirdly, this is one area of the conference where I got no really good picture. I mostly took video for my @drsql Instagram account, where I tended to story my SQL adventures. Not any real content up there now other than a video I took of the new PASS building. So these pictures were given to me by Alison Leightley, who was at the hub area a lot more than I was!

Speaking of pictures!

Standing beside Bob Ward and Conor Cunningham after their part in the Microsoft Keynote was awesome. I have looked up to these two for so many years. I first met Bob (and maybe Conor…not totally sure where I met him first) in Dallas over 20 years ago when we had an MVP Summit there.

He was showing us how to use the compiler to debug SQL Server and I was enthralled. I had no idea how to reproduce what he was doing of course (I understand how to code in T-SQL, and that is about it!). This was exciting stuff.

What about next year?

We are busy planning next year, but hopefully it will be more of the same, and maybe a few new things too. Hopefully I will be able to share more about 2025 soon.