I had the honor of traveling to Tampa Florida this past weekend and presenting a session to a great group of people. I first need to mention what a great job the facilitators did organizing this event. Jose Chinchilla (@sqljoe)and Pam Shaw (@PamShaw) are who I worked with the most but there were countless other volunteers who put in countless hours to make this event happen. My trip started off with a short drive to ATL. While I was waiting to board my flight I ran into Geoff Hiten (@sqlcraftsman), when he found out a volunteer was going to have to pick me up from the airport he offered to give me a ride in his rental. Conveniently enough we were staying at the same hotel and had the same flight back so things worked out perfect for me to get to tag along with him. We had a quick flight, got the rental car, found the hotel, dropped our stuff off and headed out to the presenters/volunteer/sponsor dinner. It was a nice large group and I got to meet a lot of new people and hang out with some good friends as well. @dyfhid, @sqlvariant, @randy_knight, @dr4ster, @sqlchicken, @unclebiguns, @rondba, @datachiz1, and many others. After a good night sleep I arrived at the event and attended a few great sessions. My session was in the 1:30 time slot right after a fantastic lunch. I was glad I had the extra time during lunch to get my nerves settled down, find my room and get it setup for my session. I had a good turn out of people come to my session and I was very glad my friend @dyfhid came to support me. Having him there helped calm my nerves a lot. My group was interactive which helped the presentation flow along. I had a couple of people come up after the session to thank me and tell me that my session was exactly what they needed. That made all the time I spent putting into making this presentation all worth it. (Link to the slide deck below)
The PASS community is run by volunteers and all seem to be paying it forward. I get so much out of attending SQL Saturday’s and this time I was able to pay it forward. I would like to give a huge thanks to the #sqlsat62 group for giving me the opportunity to do so.
Another nice SQL event for me this past week was getting the email from Microsoft that my paperwork had been processed to become the new President of the “Columbus GA SQL Users Group” an Official PASS Chapter.
