For several years now, I have moderated or hosted the Enzee Universe Best Practices Sessions. Last year at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, three ballrooms were opened up side-by-side to accommodate upwards of 500 attendees as we took deep dives into many of the practical aspects of implementing an IBM Netezza machine, with guest speakers and plenty of audience participation and open Q&A.  Those sessions were overall 6-hours in length and I was very proud of how the Enzees kept the seats full for the entire ride. This simply underscores the real hunger folks have for more information, and we really try hard to make it worth the time.

This year, Netezza will host an “in-miniature” version of Enzee Universe, and I am once again hosting a shorter version of the Best Practices sessions for three hours between 9am and 12noon on the Sunday, October 21 of the IOD week. Many of you may have made accommodations for the Saturday thru the next week, so Sunday morning might be a great time to get the scoop on Netezza implementations and the updated decks on the 7.0 release of the NPS. We have some common subjects on-deck, including migration, in-the-box processing and data management. But we have a lot of other material too and we might just take a vote to see where the audience wants to go with some of it!

This year we will operate like the format of the 2009 Roadshow sessions, where we used panelists along with audience participation.  This will give participants direct-access to experienced users and architects. But something else, participants will be able to look around and see who else is working with a machine and interact with them directly over the course of IOD.

But the real key to all this: audience participation. In the past several years, audience participation has been stellar, and invariably the attendees will start conversations with the panelists, the moderator or even other attendees to drill down into details not available in virtual forums, plus the ability to follow-up later with each other. The “live” nature of the sessions can get electric at times, with folks asking questions that they didn’t know it was okay to ask! But we also bring the feedback we have received over the prior months on what people are doing in-the-field, their reasoning behind why they’re doing it, and if it may apply to other attendees. We learn quickly that there are good and bad ways to implement an appliance, and in many cases one-solution-fits-all (or fits-most) and the attendees can glean from the rich repository of others’ experience.

Hope to see you there, and don’t be shy – come up and introduce yourself!