Just got back from the Atlanta SQL Saturday.  In this case the title is a literal and figurative one, since I just spent 4.5 hours looking at ATL from my car mirrors as I made the commute back to Charlotte.

This was my second SQL Saturday event and once again I was not disappointed.  In fact, I’m kind of jacked…

There were many similarities to Charlotte’s SQL Saturday in April and there were some differences.  The one thing they had in common is they were both great events, from both a speaker and attendee perspective.

Speaker Dinner: Apparently it is tradition for the main sponsor to provide a “speakers dinner” on the Friday night before the main event.  The dinner was held at Bahama Breeze, which was a short and straight forward drive from the recommended hotel.  Making the dinner event easy to find from the hotel is a key point for the non-local speakers.  Not knowing your way around Atlanta, even the suburbs, can be real intimidating if you don’t have a GPS.  The traffic can be very heavy, the lights are long and if the daylight has expired, it can be tough to read the road signs.

I left Charlotte on Friday afternoon and arrived in the greater Atlanta area at 5; the peak Friday rush hour crush.

I’ve made the mistake before of arriving in Atlanta at 5PM on a Friday and paid the price of taking an hour to get through the last 10 miles on the outer beltway, I-285.  Fortunately I was able to never get on the beltway (the way Google Maps suggested) and cut over from exit 107 off I-85, cut through a suburb highway 120 to my hotel destination.  (When I went home I took the Google all-interstate approach and, even with no traffic issues, it seemed much longer).

When I arrived at the restaurant at 7PM the front parking lot was full so I swung around to the rear lot.  On my way to an empty slip I noticed a bunch of computer-nerd-looking folk on a umbrella festooned deck on the side of the building.  Sure enough, it was my crowd.  Never even went inside of the restaurant… there was a foot ramp that took me right up to the food, festivities, and for the most part, new colleagues.

There were a couple of familiar faces…  Kendall Van Dyke from Orlando and Chris Skorlinski from Charlotte.  The atmosphere of the event was very relaxed and the weather was perfect to be hanging out on an outside deck.  Had I not known any better I might have guessed that I was at an ocean side event.

I was promptly greeted by the main organizer, Stu Ainsworth, and the main sponsor reps, Nadine (sorry about the last name) and Janis Griffin from Confio.  I’ve been attending business networking events for years… but it can still be a bit uncomfortable walking into a room or patio full of “strangers”.  The greetings were very welcoming… thank you all.

Even though my intent is to meet everyone there, I basically failed to get past the first table, as usual, and quickly settled into a table with a couple of local gents…  Tejas Patel and Mark (again, sorry about the last name).  In doing so I got well acquainted with Tejas and Mark but missed the mark of the event… to meet all.

Unlike the Charlotte event where the speakers dinner was basically “order anything you want off the menu” of a high end restaurant, the Atlanta event was a buffet of hot, heavy finger food.  It was good stuff (not necessarily from a nutrition perspective, hahahah) and there was plenty, but I tend to not eat right in these networking scenarios.  That being said, I was actually quite hungry after the long drive and probably would have eaten more had I had a dinner instead of a buffet.  I made one trip to the buffet and spent too much time BS-ing with my new acquaintances, and eventually, with Chris from Microsoft.

After dinner and a couple of frosty beers, Stu passed out the speaker shirts, another apparent tradition with SQL Saturdays, and gave us a good rundown of the event.  Stu really did a great job of not only organizing the event, but making everything perfectly clear for us speakers, whom on event day, are supposed to know what’s going on.

The shirts were a very nice golf / polo shirt with the SQL Saturday logo emblazoned on the left breast.  It didn’t explicitly say “Speaker” which will make it a little appropriate to wear in the general public.

Facility: The event was at Microsoft’s sales office in Alpharetta, a not so sleepy bedroom community on the north side of metro Atlanta.  The drive from the hotel was less than 2 miles.  There were ample, professionally printed signs on the roads to guide the mis-guided visitor right into the parking garage.  Once in the parking garage it wasn’t obvious which floor to take the elevator… 1 or 4.  Fortunately I picked up and that was correct.

Going into the facility still was a little uncertain… the door was unlocked but there was no sign of life that this was the correct place.  Once in the building, however, the sounds of a bustling reception area guided me to the main reception.  The line was not too long and the volunteers were cheerfully greeting the guests, issues name badges, issuing some paperwork, and handing out nice screen printed SQL Saturday tee shirts.

The event was held on the 3rd floor, and the elevators where right there.  The only clue I had that the event was on another floor was I saw people taking them while standing in line.  I had to ask one of the volunteers at the desk which floor to take, since I didn’t see any signage indicating which floor to go to.  A minor oversight at worst…

Once on the event floor we were greeted by SQL Server MVP Geoff Hiten who showed up the “speakers room” and a room where the books that were to be used for raffles were.  I grabbed Itzik Ben-Gan and Lubor Kollar’s book T-SQL Querying for my session’s raffle.  I then went into the speakers room and dropped off my computer and raffle book.

The speakers room was a good concept and I noticed that many of the speakers were busily in there working away on, what I assume, their presentations.  They also ate their lunch in there.  I did neither.  For starters it seemed like a sort of “serious” atmosphere, and it also appeared somewhat disconnected from the rest of the conference / attendees.  Sort of like the press room at a golf tournament or perhaps the teachers lounge in a high school.  The idea of a place to drop off my computer and raffle book was a welcome idea that I appreciated.

The sponsor’s display area, as is probably the typical case, was in the main thoroughfare but seemed a bit crowded.  Some of the sponsors in the back may have had a challenging time getting people to visit their table.  Since I wasn’t a sponsor I’ll let them speak to this issue as they see fit.

The classrooms for the sessions consisted of three “large” rooms and 4 smaller rooms.  I’m guessing the large rooms had a capacity for about 100 people; the smaller rooms 40-50.  Overall the rooms seemed to be a nice size; rooms that are too big and predominately empty can be more challenging to create a buzz during a presentation than a packed, smaller room.

Unlike the Charlotte facility, where the rooms were spread out two buildings, the Atlanta rooms were all together.  Rest rooms and food and drink were close, sufficient and plentiful.

Included in the paper work available at the reception desks was a master schedule for the day.  They did a particularly nice job with this because they also included each speaker’s bio and their presentation(s) synopsis.  It also included a modest sized map of the classrooms which was helpful.

Related to the class rooms, they actually hand wrote the presentation titles and start times in the window adjacent to each door for each classroom.  As each presentation was completed someone took the time to erase the presentation so what remained at the top of the list was the next session and time.  Very nice.  Maybe even over the top!

Breakfast / Lunch: I ate breakfast at the hotel so I didn’t pay much attention to the breakfast food that was out.  I did grab a bottle of water and a apple-nut muffin which was quite good.  They had a variety of coffee options, that I think were outsourced by Starbucks.  It seemed like plenty.

By the time lunch rolled around at noon I was hungry again and paid more attention to the food choices.  There were lunch boxes by Jason’s deli which were excellent to the taste buds.  I had a roast beef sandwich that was piled high with meat and tomato slices on a whole grain bread.  No additional condiments were needed.  It camp with a 1/4 slice of dill pickle, a bag of chips and a large chocolate chip cookie.  It was large enough that I was not hungry at all for the rest of the day, though I did grab a snack of crackers-n-cheese around 2:30.

The lunch line was rather long, as would be expected, but moved quickly thanks to the several teenage volunteers that worked the counters.  They really did a great job of keeping everyone, best I can tell, happy and moving forward.  While not a vegetarian myself, I do know they had the forethought to order some vegetarian lunches before hand, which needed to be requested by the person wishing one.  There may have been some vegetarians that missed that point because they didn’t know otherwise.  On the other hand, had the vegetarian box lunches been put out with the roast beef, turkey and ham options, inevitably they would have been mistakenly by someone who wasn’t looking for a veggie option.  Perhaps a sign that indicated “vegetarian available on special request” could have helped.  It wasn’t an issue for me… and I think they did a great job of handling the lunch event quite well.

Later in the afternoon there were crackers, candy bars, water and soda a plenty… No one should have left the event hungry.

Presentations: Since my presentation was dead last, I had the opportunity to attend several presentations throughout the day.  Each classroom had a dedicated proctor who greeted everyone coming into the room and provided them with 2 pieces of paper: a session survey AND a raffle ticket for the book give away.  At the end of the session the proctors collected the surveys and the raffle was drawn.  No survey; no participation in the raffle.  And the best part…  The speakers got the survey results handed to them right there on the spot.  What a GREAT concept.  My survey results will be published in a separate blog post.

I went to Mike Femenella’s session on Intro to Performance Tuning for 3 reasons: I knew Mike was from Charlotte;  I didn’t know Mike;  and the topic was near and dear to my heart.  I got to his first session at least 20 minutes late.  When I got there he was doing some of the things I was doing in my Query Analysis session… working on query plans against the AdventureWorks person.contact table.  He did a good job of explaining what he was doing, then moved on to a discussion on temp table vs. table variables.  My take away was that Mike was a competent presenter and thoroughly knew his material.  Good job Mike!

The depth and breadth of the next presenter, Kevin Boles, was in a league by himself.  Kevin is a no nonsense, highly technical SQL Server engine type of guy.  He presents himself as an expert, and he is.  His “deep dive” session on memory was in fact quite deep.  He also had the best power point deck of the day (that I saw), but he admits and gives credit to a business partner.  (Sorry, didn’t catch the name).  Kevin has already submitted 5 sessions for the SQL Saturday event in Raleigh in September.  He will definitely be on my short list of must see speakers.

The next session on SQL Server R2 was by David Rodriquez, an unabashed salesman from Microsoft.  The world needs sales people, and if I wanted to make lots of money, and who doesn’t, I wish I were one.  David gave an energetic, high level presentation on the features and benefits of R2.  Some of my takeaways…  Master Data Management which may have application to address cleansing and constituent matching and Complex StreamInSight… which may have applications to control system, real time data processing and web log analysis…  And massively parallel data warehousing appliance…  Sort of like a Netezza or Teradata solution.  His session was high level which is exactly what I was looking for.  I just wanted to learn what all the fuss was about the product… and I got it… in an entertaining way.

The post lunch session was by Meredith Ryan-Smith on work / life balance.  It was supposed to be a panel discussion, of which I was one of the members of the panel, but the layout of the room lended itself more to a round table format, which worked out great.  I think everyone had an opportunity to share some aspect of their own personal struggles with juggling family and work demands.  It’s also good to see other people struggling with the same issues as you…

Back to the technical sessions…  The next session was by Louis Davidson.  I went to Louis’s session on database design patterns for really one reason…  I was curious about the speaker himself.   He was at the speaker’s dinner the night before but I never talked to him, regrettably.  He was also in Meredith’s session… In both environs he stood out, in a positive way.

It turns out Louis, in my opinion, is a very interesting chap.  He reminds me of another tech friend…  A very large man, gregarious, super smart, and very witty.  For sure, just like Kevin Boles’s session was the most technical, Louis’s session was the most entertaining.  I’ve found that even some of the best MVP, regularly featured speakers are not really candidates for the National Speaker’s Association.  They know their technical stuff, and some more than others can add pizzazz to the topics, but few really make their sessions fun, to the point of entertaining.  And that’s Louis’s greatest draw.  Don’t get me wrong, his knowledge is insightful and deep, but his energy and wit are contagious.  Louis, the next time we will meet!

T-SQL really is the basis for my original involvement with SQL Server, and it continues today.  That being said, Jennifer McCown’s session on T-SQL Code Sins was right up my alley of interests.  Jennifer has an outstanding, could-be-a-radio-or-TV-celebrity, type of voice.  Lots of energy, inflexion and “in command” presence.  I thoroughly enjoyed the topic and the session.  It was much more interactive then any of the other sessions, including my own, since the nature of the session and the speaker spurred attendees to share their own code horror stories.  It was a fun session, timed in the middle of the afternoon, when our circadian rhythm is otherwise telling us to take an afternoon siesta.

And then there was my session… last one of the day… 4:45.

My Presentation: I arrived at my session 10 minutes prior to start time.  Jen’s previous session actually ended a little early but I ended up in a conversation with a couple other gents in the back of the room continuing with our own renditions of bad code; Atlanta traffic; the US Interstate mess (build more roads, bring more congestion) and who knows what.  Always aware of the time, I figured I better get to my own session in the room next door.

When I walked into the room it was full, settled, and everyone seemed to be looking forward.  So much so that I thought the previous session was still in progress… but there was no one at the podium.  It turned out the were waiting for me; I had a full house…  No seats left, and the proctor was turning people away at the door.  I swear this is the truth… Until I arrived the attendees were concerned that I was pulling a no show.

Since the attendees were all in place, I was able to start my session right away, as soon as I was ready, about 5 minutes early.  After about 5 minutes into the presentation the proctor did let some people in.  It was a little surreal seeing the people in the hallway looking in through the glass adjacent to the doors.

My session in Charlotte’s SQL Saturday was also the last session of the day, and the attendance was full, not not beyond capacity.  Since I know they weren’t coming here to see me, it was confirmation that I really lucked out and picked a topic that appealed to a broad audience.

For sure this was the largest group of people I ever presented to, 10 – 12 chairs per row, at least 10 rows deep (after all, this was one of the “large” rooms) there had to be at least 100 people tightly packed in.

The audience was pleasant, asked questions, and challenged me…  the later not being too hard to do.  I made some mistakes, fumbled with one or two of the demos, but overall believe I got my message across: Execution Plans are a springboard to new avenues of learning.  Thankfully I had some experts in attendance who contributed to the discussion.  I wish I got all of your names… but Rob Volk was one of them.  This only reinforced my mantra: If you want to learn it, teach it.

At the end of the day while walking to the parking garage I met up with 2 people that indicated the session inspired (might be too superfluous of a word but the only one I can think of at the moment) to restart their previously failed attempt to read and understand Grant Fritchey’s book on Execution Plans.

Overall Experience: At this point in time I’m being advised by my wiser half to get outside and enjoy the day.  SQL Saturday ATL #41 was an absolute success for me;  personally, professionally, and I believe for all who attended.

Thanks to Stu, the sponsors, and the numerous captains and volunteers that it took to pull this event together.  I recommend y’all for The Apprentice.    I rekindled some previous relationships, initiated some new ones, and learned a bunch both about databases and, more importantly, people.  If there’s a SQL Saturday coming near you sign up, put it on your calendar, and don’t let anything stop you from attending.  To find out of there’s an event coming to you… go to www.sqlsaturday.com.

I regret not sticking around to help clean up at the end of the event but I was looking down the barrel of a 4 hour plus return trip to Charlotte, braving thunderstorms coming in from the west.

Keep learning… stay curious,

Dave