At PASS we’ve been interviewing our pre-conference and post-conference speakers and publishing the interviews. The topics revolve around the speaker’s session and what they’re going to cover. For example, Brian Knight discussed about a common problem he sees in data warehouse implementations and how to overcome it. We’ve also done sessions with Kalen Delaney on the transaction log and Itzik Ben-Gan on query and index tuning.
We just published the interview with Paul Nielsen and Louis Davidson about their session on database design. I’m a firm believer that passion about a subject makes for a good presentation and these two are definitely passionate about their subject. They write about it, they talk about it and they practice it. The interview is worth reading on it’s own just for the insights into the challenges in database design.
Object naming and a good set of functional documentation are also tremendously important. There are so many systems out there with data structures that have weirdly named columns that cannot be removed because the person who created it is gone and no one is willing to delete it unless they are sure it’s completely useless. I like to think about "future me," and the nicer I can be to him, the better. I like to think that by working harder and doing a better job in the present, my future self can spend more time behaving like the Maytag repair man.
These two have been through a number of projects and production systems with design flaws and thought deeply about the issues and how to correct them. Add to that, they are both great presenters. Just the banter back and forth in the Q&A is entertaining! It should be a great session. And the Q&A is worth a read all on it’s own.