And, so I was selected. When I opened up my mail client earlier today, there it was- the email from the PASS Program Committee about the session selection results. I’ve submitted four (4) sessions for this year’s summit. In the past, I’ve tried to avoid doing technical presentations and focus more on doing soft skills presentations because I believe that technology professionals should be looking at professional development beyond their technical skills. I’ve done presentations in the past about the effects of emotional intelligence in IT, developing and preparing engaging presentations and success factors. However, probably because of the articles I write for MSSQLTips.com, I’ve created a perception in the SQL Server community that I am an HA/DR and a clustering expert (I still consider myself as a newbie as I’m still learning a lot of great stuff every day about SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery.) I’ve had my fair share of disaster recovery stuff working as a datacenter engineer in my previous lifetime building infrastructures and implementing DR plans so HA/DR is something I’m really passionate about. This year, I did submit a session on Reporting Services Scale-Out Implementation (which is another high availability option),  Oracle for the SQL Server DBA, Disaster Recovery and creating engaging presentations (I still want to make sure I do a non-technical presentation at PASS). My session abstract for the disaster recovery talk was selected among all four, probably because a similar presentation ended up on the top 3 sessions for SQL Rally 2011.  So, for this year, I’m speaking at the PASS Community Summit 2011 about the non-technology aspects of disaster recovery.

Title: Disaster Recovery Is Not Just About Technology
Abstract: Failover Clustering, Database Mirroring, Backup Strategies, etc. These are just some of the terms that you hear when tasked to work on a disaster recovery project. However, you’re missing a lot on the non-technology aspects. This session will describe the principles that should drive disaster recovery strategies and how they need to become the foundation of the technology solutions that you need to implement. You will certainly look at your disaster recovery strategies differently after learning these concepts.

This presentation was inspired by my blog series about the non-technical aspects of disaster recovery. I will be adding a few more posts to the blog series. If you’re thinking of attending the PASS Community Summit 2011, let me know. I might buy you a cup of coffee if you attend my session.