Moran: Congratulations. Well you haven't filed it yet, so can you say what it is (or perhaps I could revisit that question after you file)?
Kline: Yeah, let's come back in a couple months and we'll talk about it some more.
Moran: Do you have a favorite memory of PASS?
Kline: It's a very personal memory, but I guess it was either the first or second year I was president, and it was in Dallas when we were in the Gaylord [Texan Hotel] in Grapevine, and we went to this big rodeo place for a volunteer outing. A bunch of the really big volunteers like Pat Wright at the time, Chuck Heinzelman, there was 50 people there and they grabbed me and stuffed me into one of those rodeo clown barrels. And, I don’t know, at that time I just felt like it was a big family of people who cared about each other. It felt really great. If I was home sick, I would get a card or a call from one of these people, and that's what made it feel really really good to me. Yeah, I learned a ton about SQL Server, but it wasn't until it felt like family—that's when it was priceless.
Moran: Just for the interview record, I'll readily admit I was silly and didn't have a good recording device, so we missed some of the earlier stuff. On that topic, you were talking about family. You already addressed this, but I think the readers would really want to hear it in your own words rather than my note taking. You talked about having been in IOUG versus PASS, and the differences.
Kline: Thanks for reminding me of that—I forgot all about that. One of the things that attracted me to PASS in the very early days was when I realized it was a different group and different kind of people. I had been active in IOUG at the local level—now it's called the Independent Oracle User Group. It has a very different feel—people have their heads down, there's not a lot of mixing and laughing and cajoling and playing around, and it just didn't have the same kind of feel. That's one of the things I really love and enjoy about PASS—there's a real sense of humanity. You said that I have fans—I never thought of it that way. There's people who think that what I have to say is interesting and worth listening to, and maybe that's what a fan is, but I'm just as interested in what they have to say back. It's not a closed loop, and I really love that about PASS. I love being able to do a session here, and then ask the audience to answer another audience member's question—"Does anyone else have any thoughts about that?" And it's great. In an Oracle environment, you would be kind of ashamed to do something like that because you wouldn't get that support. People would be like "What are you, stupid? What's your problem?"
I'm not saying it's that way with all Oracle groups or all Oracle people by any means, but the times that I went I definitely got a vibe that, "I'll ask a question, but I'm going to do it in more formal terms. Excuse me sir, I have question," not "Hey, Kevin! What do you think about this?" So it has a very different feel.
Moran: So to paraphrase: Would it be fair to say that SQL Server people are generous and nice and Oracle people are evil and wicked?
Kline: I would use that any day of the week.
Moran: You mentioned that the Oracle people are a little bit more heads down. I was at the keynote this morning and I seem to recall a picture of you being somewhat heads down. What was the story on that?
Kline: That was back in Dallas, and we were just doing our transition to our new management company, so we were having an enormous amount of meetings as well as just trying to run a conference and do all the logistics there. And in addition, that year I really really wanted to conduct some postmortems with each of the board members individually to find out what they felt like had gone well and what had gone poorly that year, not just with the conference but with each of their portfolios. Was I helping them facilitate what they were trying to do? Was the board?
So it was back-to-back meetings, up at 6 a.m., in bed at midnight, 1, or 2 a.m. It was the last day of the week in that photograph, Rick Heiges and I had just completed his postmortem, and the next board member on the list wasn't immediately at hand. Rick said "Hey, I'll check to see if he's around." It was Paul Nielsen, I believe. And so he turned his back just for a minute or two, when he turned back around I had just completely flatlined, passed out I was so exhausted. So he took a picture at that point, and we had a good laugh. I was going 100 mph and just didn't have enough gasoline to keep it going the whole time.