This blog is long overdue about my journey to Columbia SC for SQL Saturday #70. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to speak at this event and to be able to attend the speakers dinner. I had a great time getting to meet and spend time with so many SQL folks. Geoff Hiten, Jorge Segarra, Julie Smith, Andy Leonard, Allen White, Andrew Kelly, Stuart Ainsworth, Brian McDonald, Audrey Hammonds, Aaron Nelson, David Taylor, Sergey Pustovit, Steve Wright, and Jessica Moss to name a few. Those of us who got to speak were given really nice blue shirts, I of course had to wear mine to work the following Monday to show it off. There was a real nice lineup of presentations. I attended “SSRS Administrator – Enter a BIDS Free Zone” with Sandra Mueller. Great session and fantastic presenter, next I attended “Configuring and Troubleshooting Tempdb” by Andrew Kelly. This session was great, it inspired me to put together my own presentation regarding tempdb. The main reason for this is to force me to learn more about GAM, SGAM, and PFS. If you really want to learn something, try to teach it. My third session I attended was “Reporting Services Deep Dive” by Brian K McDonald. Brian did a great job and really explained a lot of cool things about Reporting Services. After Brian’s session we had lunch and had a nice presentation about Redgate’s Source Control by Andy Leonard. After lunch it was my turn to be in the presenters seat and I gave my presentation “You Inherited a Database, Now What”. I had close to 20 people in my session and lots of good questions and discussions. It was nice having several developers in my class who were thinking of making the switch to DBA. After my session I hurried over to “Adding SSRS Report Bells and Whistles” by Jessica Moss. She packed the room out and had lots of support from Pragmatic Works. Jessica gave a very spirited presentation and really got the room involved. I finished the day out with one of my favorite presenters, Mr Andy Leonard with his session “I See a Control Flow Tab. Now What”. I had only been dealing with SSIS for around three weeks so his session was spot on for me. I picked up several great tips and tricks from Andy. Once the sessions were over several prizes were given away. We are very fortunate to have such great sponsors like Confio, Redgate, SQL Sentry, Fusion IO, Quest, and many others who enable us to have these events. Bobby Dimmick, K Brian Kelley and the rest of the volunteers did such a good job organizing this event. The SQL community is slap full of wonderful people who give up so much of their person time to volunteer at these events, publish countless papers and blogs to help all of us out. What other technical community has such events that are free of charge? I am honored to be a part of such an organization.
