Category Archives: SQL Saturday

SQL Saturday Louisville precon – interview Andy Leonard

This will be year #9 of sql saturdays in Louisville. Every year (starting with 3rd or 4th), it has been a tradition to do ‘precons’ on Fridays. For those who don’t know – Precons are day long paid trainings by an expert in the subject, held on the friday before the event. We have heard repeatedly from many attendees that precons are their best bet at attending any solid training – they are local, priced low and given by the best of the teachers there is. Quite a number of attendees come to precons on their own dime to learn more.  In short it is impossible to overstate the value add of a precon to community.

We try to have 2 or 3 different precons on different subject areas. This year, we have a precon on Query Tuning by Grant Fritchey, SSIS/BIML by Andy Leonard and Building modern  data architecture by Joshua Luedemann.  Karla Landrum, the queen of sql saturdays – has been doing a blog interview with each presenter for the precons she has at SQL saturday, Pensacola. I thought this is a great way to publicize the event as well as the presenter and am doing it for our events too. This post is an interview with Andy Leonard.

If you are a serious BI/SSIS professional – it is impossible to not know Andy.  He is a highly respected person in the BI community – a technical guru and a former MVP who voluntarily gave up his title to enable more new people to get it. I am really glad to have him do a precon for us this year. Below is a short interview with him.

1. Give us a brief background/history of your work with sql server.
I started working with SQL Server in the late 1990’s. I was building electrical control systems and human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for manufacturing back then. To stress-test an HMI, I set the data-acquisition frequency to one second for every tag (data-collection point) and left for a 3-day weekend. When I returned I tried to open a 3GB Access file and… nothing happened. The stress test succeeded in letting me I’d need a bigger database engine. I found SQL Server 6.5 and it passed that same test. Problem solved.

2.What are the top 3 compelling reasons you’d give to someone for attending your precon – ‘intelligent-data-integration-ssis-design-patterns-and-biml’?
Automation is happening all around us. The days of being paid to copy, paste, and edit repetitive SSIS packages are fading fast; as are the days of manually building and deploying configurations scripts between SSIS Catalogs. Attendees will learn:
1) How to use Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml) to automate the development of repetitive SSIS solutions;
2) How to leverage SSIS Design Patterns to improve SSIS package performance; and
3) How to combine SSIS Design Patterns and Biml to manage enterprise data integration. I’ll even throw in some demos of the free tools and utilities available at DILM Suite – no extra charge!

3. We are going through a lot of changes in database world. There are lot of skills required to sustain ourselves as data/BI professionals. Why do you think SSIS/BIML are among them, why is it so important to add to our skills as BI professionals?
All of the changes in data/BI are driven by economies of scale. Automation is driving down the costs of data integration and management. The net result is data integration developers can now deliver more in less time, with improved quality. There is benefit in spotting a trend and getting in early (ask me how I know!). Data integration automation with Biml is new-enough that one may still get in “early.”
4. What are a few reasons you’d give to someone for attending sql saturdays?
SQL Saturdays are awesome for so many reasons! My #1 reason for supporting SQL Saturdays is the networking opportunities they represent. I love the local-ness of the event. I love that SQL Saturdays offer so many in our community the opportunity to present their ideas and solutions to an audience for the very first time. And I love that SQL Saturdays introduce so many to our community. As I tell my lovely bride, Christy, attending a SQL Saturday is just like hanging out with family, except I don’t have to explain acronyms!

5. What do you like to do for fun/relaxation?
I like to read for relaxation. I read science fiction series – some old, others new. I really enjoyed The Expanse novels and I think the television series is doing a good job capturing the story line. I read business books (and listen to business audio books) because I’m interested in becoming a better businessperson and leader. I read (and listen to) books about theology and Christianity because I want to be a better husband, father, grandfather, and person.

I hope you enjoyed reading and hope it helps you sign up for his precon!! Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SQL Saturdays – down memory lane

A casual twitter-conversation with Karla Landrum and some other peeps led me down memory lane on older events. Our SQL Saturday at Louisville will be 9 years old this year. We were event #23, in 2009. SQL Saturdays started two years before, in 2007.

Our first event was held at a training center – 2 tracks, 6 speakers, 29 sessions submitted, 3 sponsors and about 60 attendees. We outgrew that location the very next year. Our present event has 6 tracks, close to 300 attendees, 109 sessions submitted so far.

The 22 events before us were as below:
1 Orlando, FL
2 Tampa, FL
3 Jacksonville, FL
4 Orlando, FL
5 Olympia, WA
6 Cleveland, OH (did not actually happen).
7 Birmingham, AL
8 Orlando, FL
9 Greenville, SC
10 Tampa, FL
11 Tacoma, WA
12 Portland, OR
13 Alpharetta, GA
14 Pensacola, FL
15 Jacksonville, FL
16 South Florida
17 Baton Rouge, LA
18 Orlando, FL
19 East Iowa, IA
20 Jacksonville, FL
21 Orlando, FL
22 Pensacola, FL

A lot of the Florida events are past their 10 year anniversary. Many others will be having one this year or next year. This means 10+years of free training to many, networking opportunities, small businesses that have profited by providing services and vendors who have <hopefully> found more customers. If you attend any of these events make sure to thank the organizers – an event is a LOT of work to organize and doing it for 10+ years is no mean achievement – it takes considerable motivation and hard work. Some of my personal choices of memories around 9 years of running this include –

1 I did not have breakfast/coffee delivered once. This is probably the biggest thing I remember that went wrong during my decade of running the event. The food vendor had an employee who was new to town and made his delivery somewhere else (pre GPS days). I still recall that frantic morning with upset speakers and repeat calls to the food vendor.

2 One of the free locations we hosted our event in once threatened to cancel on us on the Friday before. The reason given was that there was ‘an inch of snow’ on the ground and they did not want to risk anybody’s safety. I was on my way to speaker dinner, and had to turn around to talk to them and convince them otherwise. One inch of snow is a big deal for some people. My team and the only volunteer we have left from those days – Deana, has stories on planting signs on the road on a frozen morning. Needless to say, we never had an event in winter ever again.

3 We had 8 tracks at one event. There was a new speaker who was doing her first talk and had nobody show up at her class. She was in tears. We never overdo how many tracks we have after that.

4 Among my other favorite (smaller) memories of the decade include –
1 A lady DBA who was also a new mom attended the WIT session we had with Kevin Kline and Karen Lopez. She was close to quitting her job and decided to stick on after she heard them.
2 One of my events happened to fall on my birthday. Some of the attendees got a big cake and I had a ‘happy birthday’ sung to me by hundreds of people.
3 Wendy Pastrick, one of the PASS board members appreciated our event as among the best organized smaller events.
4 Tim Ford convinced me to attend SQL Cruise during my of events. I’ve attended a cruise every year since then.
5 Hearing attendees talk about ‘do you remember 5 years ago…we came here..’ – never tire of that, ever.

Thank you to all the organizers of the events above for your dedication and hard work..and hope to keep this going as long as we can!! If you are an organizer of any of the above events – do write more on your favorite memories!!

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Budgeting for SQL Saturdays

We’ve been doing SQLSaturdays for eight years at Louisville now. We’ve had a quite a wide range of budgets depending on the year – a good year (our highest was 2013) and lowest, the first year we started, 2009.

As main organizer, handling the dollars and making sure I spend them right has been an interesting, learning experience for me. For the past two years I’ve had additional help from others on the organizing committee, but for a good six years it was just me doing it and figuring out the do’s and don’ts the hard way. Below is how I do it now, and I have got it down to a good formula that works most of the time.

I divide the revenue into two buckets: – 1 Predictable and 2 Non- predictable. Predictable revenue is what comes in two months before the event. That includes committed sponsors. So far, we have been lucky in getting two or more this way. Non- predictable revenue is what comes in closer to the event, includes last- minute sponsors and revenue based on pre-cons.

Expenses wise – I divide my expenses into the following three buckets.

1. Essentials – These – include event rental, event insurance, and food. Without these,we cannot run.the event. The predictable sponsor revenue goes towards this category of expenses.

2. Wants – After we pass survival, the second bucket of expenses comes in: – that includes speaker dinner, speaker gifts,volunteer shirts; printing of various event- related material like internal signage , event schedule, speaker and event feedback forms; speedpass for speakers;lanyards and nametags. Printing of materials does not cost much. Volunteer-shirts is something we do every year as they are popular not expensive either. The main costs here are speaker dinner and speaker gifts – how much is spent on them depends strongly on how well we are funded.

3. Nice-to- haves – This includes attendee swag/give aways,extra treats to eat (such as cake or ice cream), and reusable event inventory that we can store for future events. We have done lots of cool things in this category – especially with reusable stuff. Our stock includes signage (external to the building), extension cords, foldable garbage bins, raffle boxes, dollies, a laser printer and many smaller items like paper, duct tape, staplers, scissors, and so on. We have enough stuff to just walk in somewhere and set up any event at short notice.

So that said, what about some real numbers? Below is the percentage breakup I have for a good event (where we have had great funding), and a low- funded event.

budgets

It is interesting to see that essentials take up 80% of funding on a typical bad year. Needless to say that nice-to-have-es are are almost down to zero. The question this type of analysis helps me answer is:

What is the minimum $ needed to put up an event?

Every SQL Saturday organizer should absolutely know the answer to this, if not you are walking blind. To know it you have to focus on what are the costs of essentials – room rental and food Remember that both costs are driven by attendee count. For us in Louisville – it is seriously hard to find a free location any more. We don’t like to cut down on attendees as we have worked hard to build up that  number and do not like disappointing them. I realize that there are events that can play with this number and reduce the number of attendees to support their funds, but I’d not like to do that unless am absolutely forced to. Finding a free location is also possible with smaller attendee counts, so that is not something to be ruled out entirely, but we’d like to keep that up as much as we can. With attendee count at 200-250, – the other numbers I focus on are as follows.

We have typically six tracks, with six timeslots, adding up to 36 speakers, ideally. For a short -funded event we can cut this down to four tracks with five timeslots, adding upto 20 speakers. This also saves us money on number of rooms rented. We can go from a buffet to a boxed lunch, that costs about 6$-8$ per head. Since 30-40% of people who eat are speakers/sponsors and volunteers, that can significantly reduce my costs too. Given that my costs add up to approx. $800 (rental + insurance) + $1800 (food) + $400$ extra = $3000$ to run a decent event (that includes lunch fees). With less money than that, I would think very hard about doing it. I can, if I find a free location which means even fewer rooms and consequently fewer attendees, but hopefully will not need to. This number gives me a lot of relief when it comes to what to expect by way of funding. It is the same math that goes into what is needed to pull off a pre-con too – if the attendee count does not add up to paying for rooms, lunch, and a minimum of 20% leftover, we typically cancel as it is not worth the costs.

My costs in the ‘want’ bucket are significantly lower with each year because of the reusable inventory swag we have built over years. I would strongly encourage all organizers to invest in this, especially when your funding is good. I do not deny that there is a storage cost that may be involved. We are fortunate to have a volunteer store it at her home for us – but this might be hard for some people. It does, however, help you make your event as mobile as possible without depending on specific locations, and also significantly cuts down on your costs, while keeping up the good appearance of a professionally run event.

From #23 to #403 – 8 years of SQL Saturday

“Many of us are more capable than some of us, but none of us is as capable as all of us.” Tom Wilson

SQL Saturday 403 marks 8 contiguous years of SQL Saturdays in Louisville – which I have had the pleasure of running. I have learnt many, many lessons during these 8 years – lessons on how to run an event on a budget and unpredictable funding, logistics around finding restaurants/caterers, what audience looks for,  what vendors look for, when is the right time and season for an event, who are the right speakers to pick, on and on. But the most important lesson among them all is one of team spirit. Good teams are self managing, where members enjoy what they do,thrive in each other’s company and do it for the love over anything else. I am fortunate to have been blessed with such a team to run our SQL Saturday.

A SQL Saturday team needs to have many skills – we need people who are good at marketing and selling the event to vendors and attendees, we need people who can order food/suggest restaurants/caterers etc, we need people who can do registration and structured work, and we need those invaluable hands who can do just about anything as needed. My team has been with me for 7 years – in the course of which we have lost and gained several people. I lost the person who did our marketing last year, which was one reason why our funding as well as attendance suffered. I was looking for someone with this talent to come on board – when I heard of John Morehouse moving to our town. I had heard of John’s passion for community and the great show they put up at Omaha sql Saturday and invited him onto our team immediately. Along with John we also had Chris Yates – who has been a twitter friend and community enthusiast for a while. Between John and Chris our marketing rocked the attendance and funding like nothing else before.  Some of the highlights of our event this year are as below –

1 We had 254 who registered – about 220 showed up. The registration is the highest to date.
2 Our funding was also highest to date and possibly the highest one has for events of our size.
3 Our signage as always was done very professionally by long time volunteer Deana Ritter. The flutter sign in  particular has become a cheerful landmark of our yearly events and one that is unfailingly appreciated by many people. Deana and her assistant volunteer Bill Murray get on the streets as early as 5 30 AM to put out signs near the highway for attendees coming in to the event.
4 Our sign ins and registration was ably handled by long time volunteer Karen Schuler. Karen is a cheerful presence for every attendee who walks in the door (directing those without speedpass to ‘table of shame’ :)). Speedpass was hugely successful this year with only around 25 people needing printouts at the venue.
5 Our lunch was catered by Mark’s Feed Store – it was hot bbq lunch and greatly appreciated by attendees. Volunteers James King and Bill Murray worked very hard to get arrangements in place to ensure smooth serving, no spillage or damage to carpet in the venue, as well as a cost effective arrangement to suit our budget.
6 All our swag was delivered to long time volunteer Dave Ingram, who carefully brought in every single package without a murmur (and there were many!!).
7 Our snacks, sodas, ice etc were ably taken care of by speaker cum volunteer Kenney Snell.
8 Our event cameraman was TJ Crivits – who has  captured the event in many memorable shots. Personally I see myself going through these when am old and still thinking of what fun it was doing all this. TJ also did a great job with getting the lunch leftovers carted away efficiently to a local soup kitchen.
9 Last but not the least is our volunteer cum speaker cum chapter lead Dave Fackler – whose many mailings helped immensely with publicity to the event. Dave also manned the table for PASS at the event.

During the 8 years of doing SQL Saturdays – we have had great events, good events and events which are kinda okay. We’ve had food deliveries that were missed, key volunteers who could not make it at the very last minute because of personal or work issues, venues that threatened to cancel on us because of weather (one day before, and yes that was our last and will be our last winter event, ever!) , vendors who backed out on sending funds..on and  on. This event was one that did not have any such issue , and was a complete, total success. I am proud and happy to close it out and look forward to event #9, and then soon, a whole decade of SQL Saturdays!!

Links related to our event:
1 Why we speak and volunteer for SQL Saturdays – by Dave Fackler.
2 SQL Sat 403 – Recap by Chris Yates
and one of the best geeky examples of using Powershell to tweet event info –
3 SQL Saturday Speaker Marketing with Powershell – by John Morehouse

User Group Funding: Twitter Chat summary

I was part of a very interesting chat on twitter on how to find funding for user groups and SQL Saturdays. The conversation was initiated by Brent Ozar with an RT of Andy Warren’s blog post stating that running chapters is a lot of hard work. It was followed up with an active discussion on funding and how to find more funding to support chapters, particularly smaller ones. Those who participated include – Brent Ozar, Grant Fritchey, Kendal Van Dyke and Andy Warren. Matt Velic and me added our thoughts also. Following are some interesting observations.

On funding for small groups:
Me: ‘Funding for small groups has become inconsistent after UGSS and Idera pulled out of consistently sponsoring.’
Kendal: ‘Ideally that’s where SQLSaturday activities can help fund the group for the year.’
Matt: ‘SQL Sat would have to charge a fair amount to fund for a whole year’.
Brent: ‘Charge $25 for SQLSaturday,still the deal of the century’.
Andy:’Hard to justify cost/effort/reward for small groups if you’re a sponsor. Have to find ways to change that’.
Kendal: ‘Having a marketing plan, good look/feel, consistent messaging – all help bring in more sponsors.’
Grant:’ Fact is, small UGs suffer. I know. Trick is, minimize your needs, don’t emulate big groups.’

On topics and speakers:
The topic deviated to if or finding big-name speakers was important or as important as topics. I spoke to my experience that big names draw big crowds – at user groups or sql Saturdays. Others chimed in as below.

Brent:There’s less of a “celebrity” factor in the SQL community than folks think.For most attendees, local presenters *are* stars.
Andy: ‘Topic matters as much, or more.’
Grant : ‘ Another vote for more. Topic wins huge. I’m seeing that more & more.’
Grant: ”Fight like heck to get big name speakers, even if it’s just remote.’

On drawing bigger crowds of people :
We had some debates on quality versus quantity of people. Charging a fee might mean fewer people but draw those who are really interested.
Brent – ‘Vendors want quality too, not just quantity’.
Grant – ‘Speaking as a vendor, we want quality, but let’s face it, quantity has a quality of it’s own.’

Everyone agreed that Andy had done a great job with Orlando SQL Saturday and also with blogging consistently on these issues. We look forward to more posts and guidance from him (with other thoughts and ideas also). as we move forward into the next year.

 

 

SQL Saturday 2013 Louisville – A Recap

This year was SQL Saturday #5 in a row for us at Louisville. It was by far the best event we have had and we greatly enjoyed hosting it. Below are some things that worked and did not work this time:

What worked:

1 The location – ideally situated, no parking hassles, walking distance from the discounted hotel, all rooms on one floor, a very friendly and cooperative staff – in short everything we wanted in a location came through this time with this one. Our sincere thanks to Indiana Wesleyan University for hosting us (in particular to Leigh Ann Black) and our volunteer Dave Mattingly for finding them for us. We hope to have the next event(s) at the same location.

2 An enthusiastic crowd – although our turnout was not as high as usual (190 compared to 220+) we found most of the audience interested, appreciative and many stayed until the very end.

3 Our loyal speakers – over time we have grown a crowd of  speakers who attend our every event unfailingly – these include Kevin Edward Kline, Louis Davidson, Allen White, Tim Chapman, Dave Fackler and Craig Utley. Our thanks are due to these speakers (and  everyone else) whose knowledge and willingness to share it made the event a grand success. It may also be worthy of mention that Kevin unfailingly gets voted as the best speaker, and Tim has been the first guy  who made it upto the MCM from this town.

4 Sponsors – We put the sponsors in a separate room along with snacks and sodas. Almost all of them were very appreciative of the audience they got and promised to return again.  It may also be noteworthy that other than Quest/Dell Software and Confio and our local VSoft Consulting, all the other sponsors were first timers for us. Some like Embarcadero, Imperva  and BI Tracks did their first ever SQL Saturday sponsorship with us and wanted to return again. We consider this a huge victory not just for us but for the bigger SQL Saturday  community as well.

5 Post Event party – We did not have  post event parties at older events. The main reason for this is because we are a small volunteer crowd and all of us were very tired at the end of the day. Coordinating  another party was too much of an effort to pull off. This time VSoft Consulting stepped in as sponsors and coordinators, and we were able to host the first ever post event party. While it was not hugely attended, it was a good start and we will surely consider doing this again.

What did not work:

1 Pre Cons – We started with announcing 4 pre cons and ended up cancelling all of them. Three pre cons were cancelled at the behest of the speakers, who  were busy  with other work and did not find attendance big enough to book their time in advance. The last one had to be cancelled because the count of students was too small  for us to coordinate it. This made a few attendees unhappy and we were sorry that we had to do that. But some self examination helped us understand that pre cons were too much effort in addition to the sql Saturday – we are probably not going to have them again.

2 Speaker Shirts – We ended up with some shirts that were not of desired quality. The main reason  was that our order was placed in the last minute with a vendor who did a mix and match of suppliers. Our decision was to go with the Florida based SQL Saturday supplier that was used by many events , from next time.

3 Speaker Room – We had insufficient tables and chairs in the room that resulted in many speakers relocating to the lunch/registration room for chats and discussions . More attention to be paid to this later.

4 Speed Pass – We had a printer with us  for those attendees who did not show up with their speed pass printouts. Surprisingly this time it was quite a large crowd (roughly around 30-40 %). That resulted in the printer chugging along as fast as it could and two volunteers working the registration table non stop from morning until the last attendee strolled in after lunch. We also learnt by show of hands during the raffle that most attendees were first timers. This might be one of the reasons. From the next time we plan to work around this by having something different – like perhaps a $1 fee for those who forget their printouts.

5 Lower attendance than normal – We had about 20% less people than usual. We attributed the main reason for this to be our choice of date for the event – one week away from July 4th and a time when most people take time off for summer vacations. We will work better at finding a better date.

SQL Saturdays are team organized events, they are not one person effort no matter how motivated the organizer is. The success of this event is due to the hard work of our volunteers – Brian Carter, Dave Ingram, Dave Mattingly, Karen Schuler, Deana Ritter, Kenney Snell and newbies Scott Drake and James King. We hope to remain a team going forward and bring more events to the community. Our thanks again to speakers ,sponsors,volunteers and attendees who made it a grand success.

SQL Saturday Richmond – 2013

My friend Karen and me decided to drive out to Richmond and attend their SQL Saturday this past week. We have had several people from Richmond and the Washington DC area attend our events – we wanted to go there too. The other reasons were that the speaker line up was very attractive and there were several friends I had known via SQLCruise and PASS Community in general who were going to be attending. We left Louisville the morning of Friday the 8th and reached Richmond by around 6 pm in the evening. It was a pleasant, scenic drive through the mountains and weather was cooperative to the extent it could be for winter.

After a good night’s rest and dinner we arrived at the event location by 8.00 am the next day. There were several signs posted that made it very easy to locate the building in the campus of University of Richmond. Check in was very quick and easy with speed pass printouts – we were handed our swag bags with event schedule. There was coffee and bagels available for a breakfast.

My first class of the day was ‘Building a virtual lab’ by Matt Velic. I have been struggling with labs for many days and I found the session useful – although Matt had lots of material to cover and time did not seem to suffice. I was encouraged to know that he had made a book out of the process – it is on my list of things to download and work further with.

The next two classes I attended were ‘Windowing Functions in 2012’ by Kevin Boles and ‘Branding yourself for a dream job’ by Steve Jones. I have been wanting to attend Steve’s session for a very long time and go to do it finally. He gave some great tips on prudent use of social media and its importance in networking – also on using networking to find the next job. I greatly enjoyed it.

Lunch included many selections including two for vegetarians – and came as a neatly wrapped box of pasta salad, sandwich,fruit salad and cookies. For $5 it is about the best bargain I have seen so far and was very tastefully done. I ate lunch at the Women in Technology session on ‘Breaking the glass ceiling’ – moderated by Kevin Kline. The panel included Karen Lopez, Melissa Coates and Stacia Misner. I have attended many WIT sessions before but this one was definitely memorable and greatly useful for the many insights provided by the panelists – particularly Karen Lopez, on salary negotiation and behavior models of women in the male dominated techie world. Kevin also raised the question of numbers of women in technology across the world – and it was one I could provide some insight on.

I spent an extra hour on networking in the afternoon – something I have felt very necessary to do, especially at an event where I knew so many people. It was a valuable experience and made me understand the need to rethink the habitual pattern of running from class to class. I attended two sessions – one by Michael Corey of Ntirety on Virtualizing SQL Server, and the other by John Welch on Big Data. Both were packed with information and made for worthy use of my time.

The day ended with raffles and closing remarks. A mini slide show highlighted the volunteers and sponsors. Many prizes were raffled off including one for those who provided event feedback. We said goodbye to many friends including organizers,speakers and attendees and left for home, greatly satisfied.

As an organizer of many sql saturdays – am well aware of and always appreciative of the efforts that go into  making an event successful. I wish to communicate my hearty congratulations to the Richmond team for providing a memorable event for 2013 – hope you get some much needed rest until another event comes along!

SQL Saturday 154 – St Louis

I attended SQL Saturday 154 at St Louis last weekend. I was particularly keen to attend this event since it was organized by my friends at St Louis (Sanil Mhatre,Julie Bloominquest, Kathie Kellenberger, and others) who have been regular attendees at all of our events at Louisville. It was also their first sql saturday. I arrived late on friday and checked in at Crowne Plaza, the hotel assigned to the event. It was very comfortable,reasonably priced and close to the event location – which helped me not rent a car. The next day morning I finished breakfast at the hotel and walked to the event. It was a short and pleasant walk. I had left my speedpass printout at home but the team was quick to print me a copy, and I was set with my badge and swag bag in a few minutes. I was also able to get a good cup of coffee and settled in for my first session of the day – Dan Guzman’s ‘Maximising SQL Server Insert Performance’ – I learnt a few things particularly on benchmarking and measuring performance. The next session I attended was Arie Jones’s ‘Pwned..Security,SQL Server and you’. AJ is one of those people who can keep you listening for hours with the content and stories – and he was totally in his element today. I greatly enjoyed the presentation and learnt many new things about hacking techniques and security mechanisms to prevent them. After this session I had to head back to the hotel to check out, and returned in time for lunch. There were no lines and was able to get my sandwich easily – it was recommended to sit in classrooms, eat and listen in on vendor presentations. This was a great idea but for those of us who could not attend the post event, this was also the only time to socialize. I spent this hour socializing with many people I knew, and also with vendors. The only post lunch session I was able to attend before rushing to the airport was Kevin Boles’s ‘ Common TSQL mistakes’ –  another brilliant presentation packed with tips for every day use. I thoroughly enjoyed the session and left the event very satisfied with a good day’s learning.
As an organizer of 5 sql saturdays I happen to know the many pains and huge effort to pull off an event – and the effort put in by the team was obvious. Finding a space to host such an event for free is a huge challenge, but again bigger spaces are the only way events can grow – so perhaps a bigger space would help next time. Also, as Kendal Van Dyke pointed out in the SQL Saturday news letter – the most common feedback events get are around signage in and around the building. We learnt to make investments in signage and reuse them every year – something I have never regretted doing as an organizer – this could be considered.  A boxed lunch with all sides in one box would be better – in return for $10. Other than these small issues I felt the event was very well organized and look forward to attending the next one!!

SQL Saturday 2012 – Lessons learnt

We had our fifth SQL Saturday at Louisville this year. It was an awesome day of free training and networking, with a record attendance of over 200 people and 35 sessions on 7 tracks. Our venue was at the School of Business at University of Louisville. Some of the lessons learnt and experiences we had as  organizers are as below.

1 Pre Cons/Day before: I have written a separate post covering pre cons themselves. Generally having pre cons at the same location gave us a huge breather in terms of organizing – usually we only get the location the day before – and stay there until late night setting up. This allowed us to put up signs, fill bags and get tables and swag organized a whole day earlier. Many volunteers could enjoy the speaker dinner and show up far less stressed the next day because of this. While it is tough to get the same premises again without interruptions on a working day, the advantages are tempting and we will try to make this happen in similar ways next time.

2 Signs: We made a significant investment in getting good signage this time, and it paid off really well.Many people appreciated the signs, and not too many complained of being lost.

3 Speaker Dinner: We wanted to pick up the tab on speaker dinner this time since we had not done so in the past. The Bristol Bar and Grille provided good food with local flavor at a reasonable price and well within our budget .Most speakers and attendees enjoyed the dinner.

4 SpeedPass: This was our first experience using speedpass. We were a little skeptical to be honest – since a lot of our attendees show up with barely any info/paperwork on them even for paid conferences. The location did not have any fast printers, and it didn’t seem practical to have inkjet printers on us. Printers are pretty heavy to lug around and set up, and we had enough to do without that as overhead. So we made printouts of name tags and raffle tickets, to be safe. Approximately 20-30% of attendees showed up with no printouts, much lower than what we thought. So while the printouts were useful – speedpass largely worked for us and we will use it again.

5 Vendor Area: Setting up vendor area went very smoothly and all vendors were appreciative of the experience.This is also a landmark event for us in terms of finding local vendor support – we had four local vendors, two of whom was gold sponsors.All of them seemed extremely happy with the experience.

6 Lunch – Our usual vendor Jason’s Deli did a great job this time also with delivering quality food on time at very affordable prices. The only hassle with lunch was that no food was allowed in classrooms and people had difficulties finding areas to sit and eat. This is one of our action items to work on for next year.

7 Speakers and Sessions – Our speakers were a mix of those who were loyal to us and proven good speakers, and new speakers who had submitted interesting sessions. We have recieved great feedback on most, and some small complaints on others. As is the norm this will be considered for selection next year. It is heartening to note that the list of ‘loyalists’ or proven good speakers grows every year, we regard this as an extremely healthy trend.

8 Session timings – We timed sessions to last one hour each with 15 minutes for questions. It seemed to satisfy most speakers – a couple of attendee feedback comments indicated that some were ‘rambling to fill time’ 🙂 We are not sure if this is serious enough for any kind of action – but we will let speakers know of the duration well ahead of time.

9 Professional Growth – We had a dedicated track to professional growth this time that included an awesome panel of speakers for Women in Technology and many other useful sessions. Unfortunately these sessions had very thin attendance – I have seen Professional growth suffer low attendance even in PASS summit so this is nothing unusual but i personally believe many speakers on this track deserved better. Perhaps having the WIT session at lunch and scheduling some of the other sessions around the technical sessions instead of a dedicated track might help in this regard. This is something to experiment with for next year.

All in all the event was a huge success. With 35 tracks and 230 people signing in, 4 local vendors and 4 national vendors, it was bigger than any we had ever hosted. We were proud and happy to have provided quality free learning yet again, and look forward to next year already.

SQL Saturday 122 – Addressing attendee feedback

Most organizers including me usually write one post covering the entire event. This year I decided to break it up into multiple posts simply because the lessons are many and the audience for each post is different – a post on budgeting would probably interest organizers a lot more than an attendee. This post is for attendees, addressing some of their feedback.

A lot of attendees have never been to a sql saturday. A lot of attendees have, but do not know much on basics of how these events operate. At every one of the five events we have hosted – I have explained to wide eyed attendees (including one microsoft employee this time) that this is a completely free event, and nobody makes a dime out of doing it – the organizers as well as speakers, all do it for free, just for the pleasure of learning and community. To add to that a few more facts –

1 There is a lot of feedback on having more vendors and more swag. Starting with vendors – we are thrilled to have as many vendors as we can possibly have and we try very hard to sell our event to as many as possible. But how many vendors we actually get is a combo of budgeting decisions vendors make and the luck factor. This year has been a landmark year for us in terms of finding local vendor support – VSoft Consulting and SIS, both local consulting companies, came in as a Gold Sponsors. New Horizons, another local training company came in as a silver sponsor. Lakeshore Consulting sponsored breakfast, and Republic bank gave us swag bags, as well as 10 attendees for our pre cons. We hope to get more of their support going forward too. As for national vendors, we still had four of them – Quest, Idera, Confio and PASS. But they have a huge choice of events, some events much bigger than ours – we understand that and we have to live with the choices they make.

2 On to SWAG and give aways- many vendors have cut down on swag material due to budgeting decisions. SWAG is cool for an attendee but in reality it is extremely hard to handle – someone has to store it before distribution and someone has to keep the leftovers after, that takes up room in their homes and garages, space that they would rather keep their personal stuff in. Truthfully having less swag has given us more time and energy to organize other parts of the event better. Give aways again, are a vendor call. We do not control any of the decisions they make – if they have an IPad or not, and if they have 3 gift cards instead of one.

3 To clarify both points again – all SQL saturdays are not funded the same. Some of them get 10x more funding than we do (and no, not 10 times more people or more sessions!!). It is a vendor decision to offer more funding to some events and less to others – so if you are at an event with several ipads or television give aways or karaoke parties, do remember that we didn’t get as much funding as they did to make those things happen.The main goal of a sql saturday is in two words ‘free learning’. Any feedback you can give us to make that better can and will be greatly appreciated – but free giveaways and swag are not likely to get on the improvement list easily.

4 Space for lunch – We realize that not having enough tables and eating areas around was a significant issue for several attendees. The location is given to us for free (we cannot afford most paid locations with such facilities). Their request was not to allow food in classrooms – which we had to accomodate in return for 7 awesome classrooms and some vendor display space. This limited networking opportunites and also took away valuable time from having well attended lunch sessions such as WIT or Toastmasters.This is definitely on top of our list of things to improve for next year.

5 Post event party – This is again one thing that comes up for discussion every year and has not happened yet, for several reasons.On top of them is the fact that our small and committed team of volunteers are tired to the bone towards the end of the day. Heading to a party is frankly the last thing on our minds, and it is difficult to have a party without atleast one person there making sure things are going ok. We considered having a job fair kind of a party this time – but the recruiting companies we worked with had already signed up as vendors and done their networking at the event itself.  Lastly, most bars are packed in and around Louisville on friday and saturday nights, and we cannot book any of them for you without dropping a significant sum of $ which we would gladly use for other purposes. All said ,this is also on our improvement list for next year and the goal is to make it happen.

6 ‘Missing’ or bad lunch payments – A couple of attendees claimed they had paid and were showing up as not. There are 3 ways to track a lunch payment – one is if they have a lunch coupon, two is if they have the paypal receipt for the payment, and three is if they show up on our list as paid. If none of the three are available it is really very hard to attach payment to the person or prove he paid (in all probability he just thought he did and didn’t). We did have spare lunches but it was against rules of the school to accept cash payments on site, and also would have been unfair to paid attendees. So all we can say in this regard is to keep your tickets and payment proof handy.

The remarks on various speaker sessions have been taken seriously and passed on to the speakers. We hope you have considered giving them same/similar feedback on the paper forms that were available in each session. Speaker feedback is taken very seriously by speakers and organizers but with reasonable limits attached – so if you went to a design session and complain that you didn’t’ get something to ‘act upon’ immediately (unless you are half way through designing something that is unlikely) – it is really not the speaker’s fault. We have also noted the requests for more developer sessions and will try to accomodate this as well.

Last but not the least – SQL Saturdays happen on a global level, in all countries and all communities. The last place where you expect a racist remark is on feedback for an event, but this time I got one. This person accused ‘one community’ of ‘dominating the event’ and that ‘knowledge is not enough but communication skills are important as well’. Being an organizer has nothing glamorous to it – it is not a position of ‘authority’ or ‘domination’ in any way. You are lucky as an organizer if you get committed volunteers to share your load, like I do. It is a task that makes huge demands on your personal time, makes you handle a lot of $ that is not really yours but you are accountable for it just the same – you get nothing out of it other than a few compliments here and there and you do it just the same because you love the community and the team work. I am a US citizen and living in this country for 17 years now. My team is as american as apple pie. If anything  we did upset this person all I can say is more constructive feedback would be appreciated, and references to communities/domination etc is just plain hurtful.

Judging from the overwhelming number of personal compliments many of us got, and the fact that almost 95 percent of our attendees who responded to the survey want to come back next year and the remaining 5 percent are just a ‘dont know’ – we have done most things right. Now is the time to kick back and relax a while..until next year..thank you everyone!!