Today it was a workshop day at SQLDay. Five workshops (one unfortunately has been cancelled). I think at least 300-350 people have attended the conference during the first day.
I think the most unusual workshop was prepared by Rob Farley. He did a full day classes without a laptop. He draw everything on a flipchart and also asked people for help! It was a great experience! I know that as I already talked to some of them. This also gives me some point how you can add a even more value to your talks!
Grant Fritchey did his workshop is a classical way. But that is why people also love Grant. He is no longer the scary dba. Lot of useful, ready to use code, practical examples without tons of slides. I like it!
Grzegorz Stolecki had his workshop in the Auditorium room. This room is really huge as it can be over thousand of people there at the time. Grzegorz had his workshop about Reporting Services. You can think that this topic is no longer funny or that it can be boring. No – you should go at least for one session with Grzegorz and you change your mind immediately.
Andrzej Kukula and Bartosz Ratajczyk gave a full day training about the T-SQL for not so experienced developers (part II). Andrzej and I did part I two years ago and it was a great success. This time it was again a great day with even more happy people. The TSQL will live long – people still like to learn this language!
The last workshop was about a parctical implementation of Machine Learning. I had luck that Marcin Szeliga agreed to run this classes with me. He is an absolute world class expert in this area and eveyrthing is so simple when he explains the hard topics. We tried to run this workshop funny as the topic is not easy.
The best I think what happend was that people came to us after the workshop and talked to us and laso thanked for the day. It was a long day with long preparation but it was definitelly worth to do this!
Cheers,
Damian