This year at Simple Talk has been exciting, after a slow start with me being more or less out for a few months. We have made changes to the website, which are still being evolved. We have started a podcast and as of this writing, we have 6 posted episodes, with many more planned.

And today I want to announce something new that may just be the start of something we do every year (and maybe in more locations if possible). Simple Talks at the PASS Summit.

My goal was to find a set of sessions that were deep in nature but get them done in a way that would be accessible to pretty much anyone that works with the tool or system that is being presented about. Add to that a few sessions about writing and we have a little mini track.

Note: Simple Talk will also be hosting a breakfast at PASS this year. The invitation will go out to everyone registered to the PASS Summit and the Simple Talk Newsletter soon. Or if you are reading this after early October 2024… that should read “the invitation went out…” Sorry, I don’t have any control over how time works.

The sessions

The sessions are all done by Simple Talk authors this year and you can go to their Simple Talk content by clicking on their names (except Tonie Huizer, and we are working on a pretty exciting concept. His link takes you to his catalog of work with Redgate.) I hope to expand upon the speakers in coming years with more authors from more locations and a variety of topics. For the 2024 PASS Summit, these are the sessions (with an excerpt from their abstract):

Jason Romans – My Power BI Report is Slow: Time to Take Action!

Users are reporting that a Power BI report is so slow that it is not worth using. There are many reasons that a Power BI report may not be performing well, but how do you know where to start? In this session I will show you some of the main tools that I use to dive deep into the common and not so common performance issues I run into.

Ben Johnston – Side Channel Attacks in SQL Server

This session is a demonstration of implementing data masking, row level security, along with a discussion of use cases for each and how they work together. After showing how they work, this will be an active demonstration of each pattern getting broken using various methods, primarily side-channel attacks. Finally, mitigations to these attacks will be discussed and demonstrated.

Fabiano Amorim – Another 13 optimizer statistic problems you didn’t know you had.

In this session, we’ll explore another 13 different cases with an unusual behavior related to SQL Server statistics. The idea is to understand what happened, what to do, and increase your knowledge on query performance troubleshooting.

Tonie Huizer. Tony Davis, Louis Davidson – Ethical AI and LLM Usage For Bloggers

For some of us, writing blogs comes at least reasonably naturally. There are lots of technical bloggers with natural writing skills, but for others of us, it takes a lot of time and a lot of practice, and assistive software to help us out. If you want to write, but are really new at it, you might be thinking “I should try and let ChatGPT do the some of the hard work for me.” This leads to the question: “how ethical is this?”

Louis Davidson – Writing Tips From A Professional Novice

In this session, I will try to help you skip some of my mistakes by sharing as many tips as I can in 30-minutes without speed talking. Whether you follow them now or remember them after you make the same mistakes yourself a time or two, I will give you the tips I use daily to parlay my writing skill set into a professional career as a writer and editor.

It won’t be long

As I am getting ready to post this, the PASS Data Community Summit is coming in a mere 41 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes and 59 seconds. I am very confident that it is less now, but I am very excited to get back again this year and see these speakers, along with so many other of the attendees including speakers, vendors, coworkers, and every last one of you reading this right now.