SQL Saturday #63 – Dallas was a great event. The venue was great, although parking was a little unclear (I had to walk all the way around the building to get in.) Breakfast was good, but I’m always disappointed when there are no breakfast juices, just coffee, cola or water.

I Attended Rob Sullivan’s (blog | twitter) session on ORMs. I always like having a different perspective of topics I talk about. He did a good job of showing what to watch out for, but not demonizing ORMs as is often done. David Stein’s (blog | twitter) talk on Zombie Databases was excellent. David was very entertaining to listen to. If you ever get a chance to hear him present, do so.

After lunch it was time for my session, “So What can I do with Powershell ?” (Resources) I got off to a good start: 

I was trying to make a clean joke and this came out instead. Oops. Other than that misstep, my session went really well. I was getting plenty of questions and interaction. I think this session was better since I used feedback given by Paul Randal (blog | twitter) when I gave a short presentation in front of him. Stay in front of the audience, not your computer and don’t block your mouth with your hands. I found I’m a much better presenter when I’m standing as it corrects both of those issues.

The gelato breaks were awesome!

I spent an hour talking with Idera about their interaction with the community and it sounds like they’re starting to get it. Quest, Redgate, Confio, and SQL Sentry have been doing community for a while and it’s nice to see the other big vendor get in the game as well.

During the closing ceremonies and raffle, I won a freaking iPad 1 being given away by Fusion-io. Before I had sat down from receiving my prize, I had won the Telerik Ultimate Collection. Talk about lucky, since “I never win anything!!”. I do have intentions to give away the Telerik collection to someone who’ll really use them, after all, what’s a DBA going to do with RAD controls. If you or someone you know does UI development, or forced to do UI development without any help, let me know.

Thanks to NTSSUG (blog | twitter) for putting on a great event.