I’m very proud to announce that Pragmatic Works will be presenting a Business Intelligence Workshop pre-con for SQLSaturday #85 in Orlando on Friday September 23rd! In this session you’ll have not one, not two, not three but FOUR Pragmatic Works consultants walking you through how to develop a full business intelligence solution from the ground up! Your instructors for this awesome pre-con are:

Jorge Segarra (Twitter | Blog)

I’m a BI Consultant for Pragmatic Works and a SQL Server MVP. In addition to being a member of the Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (JSSUG) I’m also a PASS Regional Mentor for the U.S. Greater Southeast region. I have also co-authored the book from Apress “SQL 2008 Pro Policy-Based Management“. Redgate Exceptional DBA of the Year 2010 Finalist.

Mike Davis (Twitter | Blog)

Mike Davis, MCTS, MCITP, is a Senior BI consultant at Pragmatic Works. He is an author of a few Business intelligence books. Mike is an experienced speaker and has presented at many events such as several SQL Server User Groups, Code Camps, SQL Server Launches, and SQL Saturday events. Mike is an active member at his local user group (JSSUG) in Jacksonville, FL.

Brad Schacht (Twitter | Blog)

Bradley is a consultant at Pragmatic Works in Jacksonville, FL. He was an author on the book SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer. Bradley has experience on many part of the Microsoft BI platform. He has spoken at events like SQL Saturday, Code Camp, SQL Lunch and SQL Server User Groups. He is a contributor on sites such as BIDN.com and SQL Server Central as well as an active member of the Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (JSSUG).

Kyle Walker (Blog)

Kyle is a Business Intelligence consultant for Pragmatic Works. His current and past work experience includes Integration Services, data warehousing concepts, Reporting Services, and Crystal Reports. He is active in the local and online community as a speaker for SQL Lunch, Jacksonville SQL Server Users Group, and past SQLSaturday events, as well as a blogger on BIDN.com.

Abstract:

In this full-day workshop, you’ll learn from the author team of Jorge Segarra, Mike Davis, Brad Schacht, and Kyle Walker how to build a data warehouse for your company and support it with the Microsoft business intelligence platform. We’ll start with how to design and data model a data warehouse including the system preparation. Then, we’ll jump into loading a data warehouse with SSIS. After SSIS, you’re ready to roll the data up and provide the slice and dice reporting with SSAS. The team will walk through cube development and data enrichment with things like key performance indicators, which are essential for your future dashboards. Lastly, we will cover how to report against the data warehouse with SSRS including a primer in how to write MDX queries against the SSAS cube.

Take Home Skills:

1. Practical knowledge of building a Dimensional Model
2. Designing a simple ETL process using SSIS
3. Designing a Cube
4. Designing simple SSRS Reports
5. Building an integrated process that fully leverages the entire MS BI stack to load a Data Warehouse

See you all in Orlando!

First off we have an incredible deal with a pre-con we call Day of Data. We have two all-day training options for you at the incredible price of $99 (after today 1/5, price jumps to $109)! For the DBAs we have Denny Cherry (Blog | Twitter) presenting Storage and Virtualization for the DBA.  For the BI focus We have Stacia Misner (Blog | Twitter) presenting a Day of BI. This price includes coffee, juice and donuts, lunch, and course materials. To register click here and make sure to share this with co-workers and your boss! I guarantee the ROI on this training will be off the charts!

As for the main event we have an AMAZING lineup of speakers for this free (yes, I said FREE) training event. Check out the schedule (time/rooms subject to change):

And I guess it’s worth mentioning I’ll be there presenting my Policy-Based Management in a Nutshell talk so if you come to the event swing by and say hi (even stay for my session if you’d like!). So grab yo kids, grab yo wife, grab yo coworkers and get to SQLSaturday cuz everyone’s learning up in there!*

*I apologize for the horrendous addition to an internet meme to my post

This event was especially exciting for me for several reasons. First being that this is the first event I’d be attending as a PragmaticWorks employee, which still boggles my mind that I can say that! Secondly, in addition to all the amazing people that were presenting this weekend there were a couple of folks that I’ve come to know/admire/respect online for the past year which I finally got to meet face to face for the first time. Most notably of these were Mike Walsh (Blog | Twitter), Kathi Kellenberger (Blog | Twitter), Ed Wilson (Blog | Twitter) and the SQL Rockstar himself, Tom LaRock (Blog | Twitter)! For those of you who followed along the #sqlsat49 Twitter stream that weekend, you’ll have noticed that Tom and I have developed what can only be termed as a bro-mance. It couldn’t be helped people, this is what happens when outstanding geekiness meets pure shenanigans. It’s an unstoppable force of nature and I can only imagine what the week of PASS Summit will hold in store.

Man-love aside, let’s talk about the event and the awesome schedule that was laid out for us. As I have changed my career path from being a DBA to a BI consultant I’ve decided that from here on out I’d attend as many BI-centric sessions at events as possible. I kept this goal in mind but I couldn’t resist going to see Tom’s session on Wait Stats as I had missed him give this presentation online. Wait stats are a vital thing to learn no matter which tree of SQL Server you’re specialized in so I really enjoyed the topic. Tom’s a great presenter and one of the things that really struck me is this: Tom works for Confio, Confio makes Ignite 8 which focuses on wait stats and reporting on them in an easy and generally awesome way. You’d think this session would basically be an Ignite 8 infomercial but it wasn’t at all! In fact he did something really awesome in displaying Ignite graphs without specifically telling you where they’re from. Let the fish come to the bait, so to speak. One thing that was really cool from this session is I had no idea about was the SQL Diagramming method by Dan Tow (Website). I’ll definitely try to use this in the future.

I wasn’t able to attend a session during the second time slot since another exciting event took place. Recently PASS has re-launched the Regional Mentor program, of which I’m proud to say I’m one of the RM’s for the U.S. Greater Southeast region along with Adam Jorgensen (Blog | Twitter). Also in attendance at this event were several other RM’s including Patrick “The Ego” LeBlanc (Blog | Twitter) and Karla Landrum (Blog | Twitter). Since we had so many RM’s together we met with Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) and fleshed out some thoughts and ideas for stuff we’re looking to do with and for the RM program. I’ll expound more on this meeting as well as activities from the RM program in another blog post. Suffice to say this was a great meeting and look forward to some exciting stuff to come from PASS in the near future!

Next up I headed over to the BI track and listened to Devin Knight (Blog | Twitter) present on Intro to Analysis Services. If you’re new to BI and want to learn Analysis Services (or anything from the BI stack really) I highly recommend you catch one of Devin’s sessions. Great presentation that demos that make SSAS easy to digest and understand. Unfortunately Devin wasn’t able to use some kind of drug dealer database as his data source (which would have been highly entertaining) so we were “forced” to watch him demo using the standard AdventureWorks data sets. This wasn’t the last time I’d hear about this drug dealer data set today…

After lunch I swung by Patrick’s mini session on “Why Should You Present” and watched Patrick’s ego go into over drive! For those who don’t know, Patrick is a great guy and an amazing presenter. We joke about his ego since when you see him present you can instantly see how comfortable Patrick is up there (and he’ll let you know it too). Great topic and I can’t encourage folks enough to present. Honestly it’s one of the greatest ways to learn something new as it forces you to learn a topic!

I continued my BI knowledge suck by checking out Wes Dumey’s Data Warehousing session. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to stay for the whole thing as I had to leave early to prepare for my session in the next time slot. From the time I was there though, Wes did a pretty good job covering data warehousing concepts and terminology.

After my Policy-Based Management In a Nutshell session, I shot over to my last session of the day, Patrick’s CDC+SSIS = SCD (Slowly Changing Dimensions) session as it seemed like a pretty interesting topic. I wasn’t let down. Patrick, entertaining as ever, covered a pretty topic pretty thoroughly and walked us though a bunch of code which was really interesting. Again, if you ever get a chance go watch Patrick present. If you can’t make it in person make sure to check him out at his site http://sqllunch.com where he hosts free SQL webinars on a pretty regular basis.

The day wrapped us as per usual with tons of great giveaways from sponsors which included prizes like an iPad, free software, shirts, dart boards, and even an Apple TV! A HUGE thanks goes out to the organizers Jack Corbett (Blog | Twitter), Andy Warren and Kendal Van Dyke (Blog | Twitter) for doing such a fantastic job with this event. These guys always put on a fantastic event and their experience shows with how well everything flows and is executed. Another huge thanks goes to the volunteers for the event. Without them an event of this high of quality wouldn’t run as smooth as it does. Thank you Orlando for another amazing event!

Tom LaRock (Blog | Twitter)

Louis Davidson (Blog | Twitter)

Kathi Kellenberger (Twitter)

Ken Simmons (Blog | Twitter)

Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter)

Aaron Nelson (Blog | Twitter)

Adam Jorgensen (Blog | Twitter)

Patrick LeBlanc (Blog | Twitter)

Kevin Boles (Twitter)

Rodney Landrum (Blog | Twitter)

Jack Corbett (Blog | Twitter)

Ed Wilson (Blog | Twitter)

Kendall Van Dyke (Blog | Twitter)

and many more!!!!

Holy crap, just looking at that lineup makes me excited. If you haven’t registered, get on it! Oh yeah, I’ll be presenting too on Policy-Based Management. Come to my session and I’ll be raffling away a copy of “Pro SQL Server 2008 Policy-Based Management” as well as giving away one of my famous rubber chickens. See you in Orlando!

Pirate Cat can haz ur Swag?

Well it’s the first Monday back since this amazing trip and some folks have wasted no time in putting up their posts. I WAS going to do a recap of the week but over at SQLCruise.com Brent has done a great job recapping the week in detail. Instead this post will focus on the value returned from the experience. Before I start I’d like to give a HUGE thanks to the sponsors for making this event possible:

• SQLSentry (Special double-huge thanks to them as I was one of the fortunate four attendees who won this cruise courtesy of them!)
• Quest Software
• Redgate Software
• MSSQLTips.com

It’s hard to talk about SQLCruise without first talking about the SQLSaturday that preceded it. SQLCruise was purposely scheduled to coincide with SQLSaturday #40. As any SQLSaturday event, it was great but what really made this one special was its tie-in with the cruise event. Tim Ford (Blog | Twitter) and Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter) kicked off the event with a great keynote speech. The general theme of the talk was that the true value of this event was not what you were learning up on screen (which is also important) but the real value is what you learn from everyone around you at the event and the relationships you build. This theme was solidified by Brent and Tim’s personal stories of how they journeyed from being the ones in the chairs listening to speakers to being the ones up front presenting to the crowd. If you ever get a chance to hear these two give this talk/presentation I highly recommend it, especially since it starts off with an especially cool high-wire video.

This focus on the relationships you create and foster at technical events became a recurring theme throughout the week. After SQLSaturday the revelry of the presenters, attendees and SQLCruise-ers carried over to the after party at On the Border. The next day was an event that was not officially planned for SQLCruise but Gareth (Twitter) and Jen Swanepoel (Twitter) were kind enough to host the SQLCruise attendees at their house for a bon voyage BBQ. A huge thanks goes to Gareth, Jen and their amazing neighbors for putting on such a great event! Being able to interact with everyone in a relaxed, casual environment made it that much easier for everyone to get to know each other before departing. The funny part about this whole event is that many of us already “knew” each other via Twitter/Facebook/blog interactions but for many of us this was the first time we’d met face-to-face. In addition to meeting all the great SQL folks this was also an opportunity to meet everyone’s significant others which is always great.

Finally Monday rolled around and we got to finally board the Carnival Imagination and set sail on SQLCruise! As I mentioned earlier, and as Brent said in his recap, some of the most valuable things you learn during events like this are not on a slide deck. Be it the gatherings on the back of the ship on the “SQL Lounge” or the intimate classroom settings, it was invaluable to be able to interact with everyone freely. Another great advantage of being out in the ocean the distractions are kept to a minimum as the usual hub-bub of calls from work, email-checking, and A.D.D.-fueled internet browsing was not to be found. Brent and Tim had both mentioned one of their initial plans was to keep the class size to a small size specifically for the advantages a small group provides. One of the great benefits that came out of it in the formal class schedule was the flexibility of changing up the lesson plan. Initially we had a session on “Hidden Booty in SQL Server” scheduled but as conversations developed we all realized that the entire group was more in the intermediate to senior skill level. In addition to the higher-than-exepected skill sets, many of us had lots of questions of Brent regarding the Masters program he had recently gone through. Based on this scenario Brent put together a new presentation on MCM Trivia. I believe he put this together before watching Matlock reruns on his laptop and burning the midnight oil until 7pm!

SQLCruise was an absolutely amazing experience and thankfully this social experiment went so well that there are already plans in the works for two more next year! Not only did I walk away from this class-cation with a wealth of new technical knowledge (now I know what round-robin is/how it works as well as what a merry-go-round scan is!) but also some extremely valuable relationships and friendships. When was the last time you walked away from a training event and actually MISSED the attendees and classes? I cannot stress to you enough how highly I recommend you attend one of these events in the future! I guarantee not only will you better yourself as a SQL professional but you’ll have a greater appreciation for what an amazing community we’re fortunate enough to be a part of. If you’re interested in joining a future SQLCruise adventure make sure you sign up for the mailing list to get all of the latest news and updates. Thanks again to our sponsors and Tim and Brent for putting together such an amazing event!

I'M ON A BOAT!

This is just a quick note to say that I’ll be in South Florida this weekend presenting at SQLSaturday #40. This weekend and the following week are particularly awesome for a few reasons:

1. My birthday is Friday!
2. Look at this lineup, it’s PACKED with #awesomesauce
3. SQL BBQ on Sunday
4. SQL Cruise next week!!!!

So…yeah, it’s going to be an awesome week for sure. On Saturday I’ll be presenting two sessions:

• SQL University 101 – Starting the SQL journey
• SQL University 202 – Managing a SQL Server pt 2

If you’re there please come say hi, even better come to my sessions! If not, don’t worry I won’t be offended as I’m going up against some awesome sessions (although I’ve noticed a trend where I always end up in same time slots as Brent!). So if you’re in South Florida area come join us, it’s free! Sessions start at 8:30 and go until about 4:30-5. Also even if you’re not attending you can connect with all attendees and speakers via the networking page. Hope to see you there!

My wife Jessica (Blog | Twitter) and I arrived into Chicago Friday afternoon. We had time to catch a bite at Grand Lux Cafe with some friends and my sister. Pretty nice place, kind of like a Cheesecake Factory but a little better. My wife’s a foodie so she was loving it! After lunch I got the pleasure of meeting Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter), Jeremiah Peschka (Blog | Twitter) and Jeremiah’s friend John Jakubowski (Blog | Twitter) as they picked me up and we headed out to the ‘Burbs for the speaker’s dinner. We had plenty of time in car to talk about all things geek such as NoSQL, Ruby on Rails, PASS and a few other choice subjects not fit for print. Let’s just say I learned some strip clubs in Ohio have free steaks for lunch.

The venue for the dinner was great in that we got our own private side room. Once inside it looked like we were one of the last ones to arrive. Quickly met Jes Borland (Blog | Twitter), Ted, Wendy (who is surprisingly really short btw), Aaron, Bob Pusateri (Twitter), Kevin Kline (Blog | Twitter), Brad McGehee (Blog | Twitter) and many more! Everyone was kind of freely chatting it up with everyone else so I went over and wound up talking with Adam Jorgensen (Blog | Twitter) for a good long while. It’s funny because we’re both from Florida yet we travelled all the way up there to end up chatting it up with each other! Aaron Nelson (Blog | Twitter), whose daughter has an iron grip that shatters wine glasses at will, wasn’t shy in joking with us about the fact that we’re both from Florida and we could chat anytime. I say, a good conversation is a good conversation, doesn’t matter with who or how often you see them so enjoy it. Funny thing is while Adam and I attend many of the same events in Florida that’s the first time he and I have had the chance to sit down and talk at length. Great guy and if you’re in the Business Intelligence field and looking for consulting opportunities with a fantastic organization I suggest you contact him.  Well since I was wrapped up in conversation the whole time I missed the appetizers and was pretty hungry. Some of us placed food orders but they never came so we wound up leaving (sorry Spaghetti Warehouse).

Early the next morning Brent and Jeremiah picked me up at we set out to the event. As per any good presenter I was still working on my slide deck in the car on the way to the event.  The hotel the event was held at had a pretty good setup going for it. I liked the room they placed the vendors in as it was in very central place with easy access in and out of the room. The main room where the opening keynote was held was huge (made up of two large rooms with a pullaway wall pulled back). I really liked this room setup as well as it accomodated everyone beautifully. The only dings I would have against the setup we had was the folks on the left side of the room probably couldn’t see anything from the projector that Kevin and Brent were speaking from since it was so far. Maybe setup a second projector that mirrored the other one so that everyone could see it? I don’t think that was a huge deal but something to consider for next time. After the entertaining keynote by those two clowns, we started straight into our first of many great sessions for the day.

I went to Tim Ford (Blog | Twitter)’s DMV session first as I hadn’t seen Tim present in person before. The room was packed to standing room only (way to go Tim!) so I took a seat on the wall up front. He did a great job with the topic and I even got a chance to pimp the Quest’s DMV posters for a minute during the session. I think I cursed Tim, however, as his fragmentation demo went South but like a good SQLAgentMan he soldiered on. Unfortunately I had to dip out of the room early as I was presenting in the next time slot in another room and I wanted time to get prepared. Also, which is another lesson learned for organizers, there was no transition time between sessions. Leave 10-15 minutes between session start/stop times as it gives presenters time to wrap up, attendees time to transition rooms and possibly visit vendor booths and also the all important bio break.

My first session of the day was SQL University 201: More DBA Fun which delved a little bit deeper than my 101 presentation on basics of SQL Server and its management. Since I wasn’t presenting my 101 that day I gave the audience a choice on hearing either the 101 or the 201 presentation. They overwhelmingly picked the 201. It’s funny because this was the first time I’d done this presentation and for something I had 1) Hadn’t practiced yet 2) Had a general idea of what I was going to talk about but left it “open” it went pretty darn well! I even got a chance to do some giveaways during the session. I contend I pretty much had to since I was going up against Kevin and Brent in the same time slot and they just wrapped up their comedy hour not too long ago so I needed to bribe anyone and everyone!

I was on my way to the next session when I went by the vendor area to check it out and the FusionIO booth called to me like a Siren. It wasn’t until last night’s Tampa Bay SQL User Group meeting that I got to see the full presentation on this product but MAN do I want a FusionIO card. 100K potential IOPs?!?! After that I did the vendor rounds and wound up taking early lunch with Brent and Jeremiah in the restaurant in the hotel. Funnily enough there was some sort of online poker seminar going on in there and they kept trying to get SQLSaturday folks to come play. We DID however find out that the guy’s poker software was powered by…SQL SERVER! After we ate we headed to the main room where the event lunch was going to be as well as vendor sessions during lunch. I think the space worked decently for this. They had a pizza buffet where they setup a long table in the middle and attendees made two lines that wrapped around the room. It seemed a little hectic but seemed to work out.

After lunch I checked out Brent’s session Blitz! 60 Minute Server Takeovers where he shared lots of good insight on things to think about and scripts to run when going into an environment you don’t know and you’re about to manage. He’ll be doing the presentation again online so click the link and sign up for it, definitely worth a watch. I had to leave early to get ready for my second presentation of the and couldn’t make it out of the room without being heckled about doing so. So much love.

My second presentation was on Policy-Based Management. I’ve done this presentation many a time so I was very comfortable with it. Unfortunately I don’t know if I was sidetracked by giving stuff away during session, discussion points that came up in class (which I love, don’t get me wrong) or the the transition time between sessions but I was cut short as I ran out of time during demonstration. I deeply apologize to those who attended and if you ever want to jump on a Ustream session with me sometime and want me to demonstrate something you didn’t see, the offer’s out there.

Next up was Jeremiah’s session on SQL Server Internals which I was very excited about as Brent had been raving in the car about how awesome his slide deck was. Plus, I haven’t had a chance to see Jeremiah present in person so this was defnitely a must. Man, was I glad I stuck around for this session. SQL Server internals isn’t the most exciting topic but for us geeks its defnintely an interesting topic. Plus I think you’re a much more effective DBA if you know the how’s and why’s SQL Server can or can’t do something based on what’s going on under the hood. Jeremiah did a great job explaining some pretty complex stuff and Brent was right, his slide deck is AWESOME. At one point I leaned over and asked if he had a graphic designer do the deck. Afterwards I realized how much my deck sucks. Sad trombone.

After this session my brain was fried and my body was mad at me for running on empty. Somehow or another I wound up in the lobby with Brent, Jeremiah, Aaron Nelson, Paul Randal’s evil twin: Norman Kelm (Blog | Twitter), and quite a few others. The group kept growing as we wound up staying there for the length of two sessions. This is one of those great networking opportunities that always crops up during these events that one should always take advantage of. If you’re an attendee at an event and you see a bunch of speakers just kind of sitting around chatting (and possibly eating ice cream sandwhiches) jump on in! Yes, me might only be discussing Trolololo, LOLCat bibles and iPads at the time but it gives you the opportunity to create new relationships and further your network of resources. Always keep in mind, speakers want to talk to you just as much as you’d like to speak to them. That being said, it’s a two-way street. If you’re a speaker at an event reach out and network with folks. If you see someone by themselves, strike up a conversation! I challenge EVERYONE (both speakers and attendees alike) to meet and talk to 5 people they don’t know at an event. You can thank Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) for this networking mindset that has been drilled into me!

Finally we wrapped up the day with a pretty cool ‘Ask the Experts’ panel which I was invited to participate in for some reason. This was cool in that each person on the panel had a specific “specialty” announced and the audience could ask the panel anything they wanted. For instance I was answering questions relating to virtualization, Brent on performance tuning, etc. This was held in conjunction with the raffle giveaways which went pretty well. Jes Borland acted as Vanna White as she Wendy read off tickets. All in all I think this event was fantastically successful as there were easily over 250 people present. Another thing that struck me was the diversity in the crowd. At the events I’ve gone to thus far the proportion of women attendees has been somewhere in the 10-15% range. I don’t know what’s in the water in the Midewest but women attendees I would put easily in the 20-30% category! Very cool, hopefully that number keeps growing as the Women in Technology movement keeps gaining momentum. For those interested in Women in Technology group, check out the PASS Virtual Chapter for WIT. After the event there was a karaoke afterparty that I unfortunately couldn’t make due to prior plans but you can check out the pictures over at Pat Wright’s (Blog | Twitter) links below. Also I’ve included a Flickr gallery below of the pictures I took from my iPhone during the weekend. Thank you again to the organizers and sponsors for giving me the opportunity to be a part of your first of many successful events!

Pictures/Videos
Posted by Pat Wright SQLAsylum
http://www.flickr.com/photos/asylumphoto/sets/72157623893463642/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp438CzaGxQ

Posted by Michael Kappel
http://www.flickr.com/photos/m-i-k-e/sets/72157623750844255/

Posted by Eli (@Tarwn)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tarwn/sets/72157623756551635/

Blogs

Ted Krueger
http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php?p=814
John Magnabosco
http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/johnm/archive/2010/04/18/90688.aspx

Tim Ford
http://thesqlagentman.com/2010/04/sql-saturday-31-chicago-follow-up/

Wendy Pastrick
http://wendyverse.blogspot.com/2010/04/when-does-fat-lady-sing-or-tips-for.html

Jes Borland
http://jesborland.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/sql-saturday-31-chicago-wrap-up/

UPDATE: Ok Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter) has brought to my attention that internet at the event might be spotty at best so this live event may or may not happen. Follow me on Twitter for updates as they happen…

Policy Based Management 101 (10:15 am-11:15 am EST) – LiveMeeting Link

Twitter and SQL Server:A Perfect UNION (1:15-1:30 pm EST) – LiveMeeting Link

I’m going to try and have the sessions recorded, let’s see how it goes!

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To save time before the meeting, check your system to make sure it is
ready to use Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
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Unable to join the meeting? Follow these steps:
1. Copy this address and paste it into your web browser:
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2. Copy and paste the required information:
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Entry Code: dnP`2rr&G
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THE MAIN PRIZE: Free attendance at any of the seminars next week, a $149 value!

THE CONSOLATION PRIZE: We’ve got three runner up prizes, a super discounted price of $99 for any seminar next week.

THE CONTEST: Correctly answer all three of the following questions:

1. Which speaker ‘spins’ a good story?
2. Which session seems to be the most fishy?
3. Which speaker (hint: could be multiple answers) is speaking at a SQLSaturday for the first time?

HOW TO SUBMIT: Email your answers to sqlsaturday21@sqlsaturday.com with a subject of ‘Seminar Contest’. Entries must be received by 5 pm on Sunday and will be announced later Sunday evening – along with one more exciting contest!

Good luck! 

SQLSaturday #21 is gonna be HUUUUUUGE!

I’m excited about next weekend’s SQLSaturday as its going to be one HUGE event. If you live anywhere in the Southeastern United States you should be excited as well! Why? Well for starters next is, for all intents and purposes this is going to be like PASS Summit: East Coast Edition.

For starters, the week leading up to SQL Saturday will feature some top-notch seminars. Each seminar is $149 and includes full-day training as well as lunch. Here’s the seminar schedule for the week:

Monday: Essentials of Managing SQL Server by Andy Warren (Blog | LinkedIn)

Tuesday: Learn BI in a Day by Brian Knight (Blog | Twitter)

Wednesday: Real World Performance Tuning by Kevin Kline (Blog | Twitter)

Thursday: From Zero to SSIS by Andy Leonard (Blog | Twitter)

Friday: Performance Tuning Methodology by Buck Woody (Blog | Twitter)

In addition use code “KKLINE” to get a 20% discount if you register for two or more seminars! Even better if you sign up for the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday sessions together you can knock $200 off the price by using the discount code ”Bundle” at checkout. Also worth noting is that Kevin Kline will be visiting various user groups around the state next week. Here’s the schedule:

And that’s just the week leading up to the main event!!!EXCLAMATIONPOINT

On Saturday we have a plethora of great speakers and sessions. In addition to all the guys I’ve previously mentioned in this post we also have guys like Chad Miller (Blog | Twitter), Joe Celko (Blog), Joe Webb (Blog | Twitter), Kendal Van Dyke (Blog | Twitter), Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter), Ken Simmons (Blog | Twitter) and more presenting! This SQLSaturday is also seeing the introduction of the mini-sessions. Mini-sessions are 15-minute presentations aimed at first-time speakers to encourage them to present at a big event without the pressure of having to fill that hour time slot.

So what are you waiting for? Oh what you want one more thing to entice you? Ok, how about free T-shirts for the first 150 to arrive to the event? Swag? We got it in spades. We only have a few seats left so hurry up and register!