Yesterday was our first 2013 SQL in the City event in Pasadena, CA. I was excited and nervous, with 3 talk and a keynote that I needed to integrate and work with two others on. We practiced 3 or 4 times on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, trying to get our timing, and our lines down. It felt appropriate that we’d scripted out most of what each of us needed to say and produced this like a mini play or movie. I’m glad we practiced because the first few times were rough, but when it came time to deliver this Wednesday morning, it seemed to go over well.

Tuesday was also setup day. We had plenty of Red Gater’s from the UK over to help. There were booths to be set up and laptops checked

There were plenty of bags and badges to be readied and organized

There was even one guy with a red shirt.

On Wednesday it rained in Pasadena. I was surprised and unsure of what was going on as I drove in the early morning to work out. At first I thought the rain might be an issue and then I realized I was being silly. I have planned on swimming, so what’ s a little rain going to do? Get me wet?

I had a nice swim, getting some laps in as the sun rose on the west coast.

Then it was off to the venue, a touch more practice and as people trickled in, we opened with the keynote. The demos all worked, we took turns speaking without any pauses, and I think it was a good story. We got good feedback later in the day, which is always nice.

I had my version control session up first, and it went well. Quite a few people were using version control for databases, which was good, and I had some good questions on how to get teams to start working together with VCS. No one even argued with my “shared development databases are bad” section.

I also had an encryption talk later in the day, and then a backup common mistakes talk where my demos didn’t work well. I’d set up the VM, but for some reason my licensing expired on the local server. I think I must have snapshot’d it. Grrrr. Still, it was a good talk and I’m glad I included the backup description. Quite a few people had misconceptions on how a full backup actually runs and works.

Everything ran smoothly, thanks to our amazing organizer, Annabel. You can see she was very relaxed throughout the day as the event went off without any issues.

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