Last week, when I saw the announcement on the PASS Summit Keynote Page that Dr. David DeWitt was coming to the PASS Summit 2012, my first thought was “cool” and then my second thought
was “it would be really cool if I did an interview with him”. If you are interested in seeing him
present, then check out his Spotlight Session on
“Big Data Meets SQL Server”.
The following interview with Technical Fellow and past
Keynote speaker, Dr. David DeWitt is my special treat for the SQL Community!
Tell us about yourself
After finishing my PhD degree in 1976, I spent 32
years as a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teaching database courses and
conducting a research program in the database area. I supervised 35 Ph.D. students over the course of my career as a
professor. I spent 5 years as department chair.
In March 2008, I retired from academia
and started a small research and advanced development facility for Microsoft in
Madison which, organizationally, is part of the SQL Server product team. In
addition to 8 full time employees, the lab also houses 8 graduate students as
well as a couple of faculty members as consultants. The URL for our site is www.graysystemslab.com.
Tell us your favorite thing about
your PASS session(s)
I love the enthusiasm and energy at the keynote talks
I have given over the past 5 years. While the talks always take a long time to
prepare (sometimes dismaying my bosses about the amount of time I spend on
them) it is always worth the effort. The audience is truly amazing. Having seen
the tweets, a couple of years ago my wife decided she had to come see me in
person. Not only did she find a math error on one of my slides, she decided
that I was not as good a speaker as the tweets might indicate.
While I was disappointed that I was not asked to do
another keynote this year, I am very pleased to be able to give a spotlight
talk.
Tell us about your first time
presenting at PASS Summit
The first time I gave a keynote at PASS was in 2008. I
had only been a Microsoft employee for about 6 months at the time and I decided
to talk about parallel database systems, an area I had been working on for more
than 30 years. Only after Bill Graziano rode a motorcycle across the stage did
I fully understand how different PASS is than the typical academic conference I
had attended as a professor. I had never spoken to more than 500 people. I was truly
terrified to find myself in front of more than 2000 people. But the audience
was incredibly gracious in their comments and I found the entire experience
very satisfying - forcing me to up my game at every successive keynote.
As a previous keynote speaker, you
know what it takes to present to a PASS audience. What advice can you give to
new, current and future PASS speakers?
Prepare, prepare, prepare. I typically start on a talk
at least a couple of months in advance and strive to have a complete initial
draft of the talk a month in advance. I fine tune every single slide
repeatedly, striving for maximum understanding by the entire audience. Having
taught undergraduate and graduate classes for many years I have developed a
pretty good sense of how to communicate complicated ideas as simply as
possible, but I still find that every talk requires a large amount of work on
my part.
Do you have any general advice for
the professionals who are trying to increase their in-depth knowledge of SQL
Server?
There is no better place to do this than by attending
PASS. It is an incredible community of individuals willing to share their expertise with their peers.
Do you have any general advice or
words of encouragement for the SQL Server Community?
This is an amazing time to be involved in
the database field. The amount and types of data being accumulated by every
business and organization is simply incredible. The move to the cloud opens
many new opportunities that we are only beginning to appreciate.
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