My Speaker of the Month for April 2016 is Keith Tate (b|t) and his session at SQL Saturday Chicago called Profiler is Dead, Long Live Extended Events.

I actually suspected very strongly from the start of the session that it was going to be good. The reason for this, Keith was having issues with his machine, but he started the session anyway. It was an excellent beginning. Then, he started to talk about Extended Events and used his slide deck to emphasize the points he was making, and it was wonderful. For example, as he talked about the way the number of events has grown in each version of SQL Server since 2008, he used larger and larger fonts with bigger and bigger numbers. It really hammered the point home. He continued the entire talk that way. His volume was excellent for the size of the room. He handled questions really well. He had a series of takeaways that he wanted to ensure that people understood, and as he made each point, he went back to the takeaways so that you remembered what everything was all about. I really liked a couple of his demos and I learned some stuff about how to better use the Data Explorer window with ExEvents. Wonderful.

I’ve already shared my criticisms with Keith. He needs to make sure he repeats the question, even in a small room. And yeah, that’s something every presenter gets wrong occasionally. He had a couple of slides that were very difficult to read. He spent too much time on a demo of the Profiler to show how bad it was (although, emphasizing why you need to stop using the Profiler is not a bad thing). He could have used that time to show off a little more in ExEvents.

Overall though, wonderful presentation, packed with information, presented in an interesting and engaging manner. I was impressed. I also just loved the topic.