I’ve been pretty lucky in my career to have the opportunity to attend quite a few conferences. I’ve attended one, and often more than one, a year, and I’ve had great opportunities to not only learn more about SQL Server and technology, but also to network and meet professionals from all over the world, many of whom have become good friends.

A few years ago my business partner, Andy Warren, was looking to both help the community and get more exposure for our training business, End to End Training. We were looking to sponsor local events in the Florida area, but didn’t have too many opportunities. So we created our own, which has come to be known as SQL Saturday. Our goals were to provide a high quality, free training event for people that lived in the area and might not get the chance to attend a PASS Summit or TechEd.

Andy has built a great system that makes holding one of these events much less difficult than it might otherwise be. By drawing on his experiences in Florida, he’s been able to help people in a number of other areas from Jacksonville, FL to Greenville, SC, to Olympia, WA hold events in the last 2 years. He’s provided technical assistance with a fully functional web application, mentoring with regular phone calls, help getting shirts for speakers and even liquidity in the form of funding to pay for a venue, lunch, and more.

I had the chance to attend SQL Saturday #8 in Florida last October. I was amazed to see well over 300 people show up on a Saturday to choose from 8 tracks and multiple sessions throughout the day on all aspects of SQL Server and related technologies. A nice speaker party afterwards, and the chance to sit around and chat with some passionate, intelligent SQL people. It was very impressive and I went back to my employer, Red Gate Software, to talk about the event with them.

A few weeks ago I was in the UK visiting Red Gate, and we decided to help support SQL Saturday and the community with a regular, committed sponsorship for events in 2009. We’ve decided that SQLServerCentral and Red Gate will contribute up to $1000 towards your event. We might even send a speaker along as well! I’m not committing to events since I try to avoid traveling too much, but you may be able to change my mind. If not, perhaps we can convince my colleague, Brad McGeHee, to come instead.

Red Gate is supporting these events as a vendor, and they’d like to get more exposure and sales for their tools. Attracting customers is something every business wants to do, but we want to do more than give you a flyer and try to sell you something. Red Gate believes its tools are a fantastic value for the money, just like SQL Server, and they provide a fantastic ROI. We think if you try the tools you’ll agree.

But we also believe that giving back to the community, and supporting both present and potential customers is a good way to do business. Running SQLServerCentral is one way to do this, and supporting SQLSaturday is now another.

Andy Warren has written a great blog post on what’s required to hold and event, and it’s not a lot. Two tracks, 100 or more people, a little signage, and that’s about it. We’ll let you run the event as you see fit and try to support you as best we can.

I hope that quite a few of you will take advantage of the SQL Saturday framework to host an event in your local area and I’m looking forward to hearing the reasons why I should come to your town.