SQLSaturday Orlando 2018 – Planned for October 6

Just a quick note that we’ve reserved the date for our 12th SQLSaturday here in Orlando. It will be held on October 6, 2018, at our usual location at Seminole State College. Expect the call for speaker and registration to open up on June 1st. We’ll also publish information then about whether we’ll be doing […]

Parsing the PASS Blog Posts about FY 19 and SQLSaturday

In February PASS President Grant Fritchey posted PASS Priorities FY 19 followed by An Open Letter to SQLSaturday Organizers, and then held an online town hall for SQLSaturday organizers in March to address some of the questions generated by the two posts. For all the messaging, the story remains a bit unclear, at least to me. Let […]

Notes on SQLSaturday Tampa 2018

Quick notes: Same location as previous years, good! Parking was same place, but it was confused by a pay-to-park event on the same day. The attendants knew to let SQLSaturday attendees in at new charge, but I’m betting a few paid without asking or turned away Some of the rooms were in an adjacent building. […]

The Future of the SQLSaturday Tools

Every year when many of the SQLSaturday event leaders meet at the Summit the topic of improvements to the tools comes up. Certainly the site has seen changes and improvements over the years, plus at least two new coats of paint (on the public site), but it’s never enough (with software, it never is). Invariably […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2017 Notes – Part 3

This year we held our fourth Student to IT Pro Seminar for the students at Seminole State College. It runs from 9 am to 1130, concurrent with SQLSaturday but in a different building. Here is the schedule from this year: Time Description 8:30 to 9:00 Check-in & Informal Networking 9:00 to 9:05 Opening Remarks 9:05 […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2017 Notes – Part 2

SQLSaturday is really three sites. The public facing one (www) plus one for event admins and one for HQ to do overall admin. Most of the notes in this post apply to the site for event admins. These are all from my perspective which is biased in a few ways; I sketched the original concept […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2017 Notes – Part 1

Part 1 will be about things we did (or didn’t) do and some lessons learned. In Part 2 I will share some thoughts on the SQLSaturday tools/web site. Part 3 isn’t really about SQLSaturday, rather our student seminar that we run concurrently. I’ll get to Part 2 and 3 as soon as I can. We […]

SpeedPASS Download Naming Convention

This was the first time in a long time that I managed the check-in process of SQLSaturday Orlando and was surprised/dismayed to see that when I unzipped the download the filenames were all named with a less than helpful format; b9d73479-5a04-42a3-9f11-a56af7b56beb.pdf. The goal was to be able to quickly find the SpeedPASS for anyone that needed […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2017 Goes Live

Today we’re starting on our 11th SQLSaturday here in Orlando. Normally we rotate the leadership between oPASS and MagicPASS, but this year is a bit of change – I’ll be leading this year instead of just contributing. It’s a chance for Shawn and Kendal to take a year breather and a chance for me to give […]

Reflecting on Ten Years of SQLSaturday

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than 10 years since we started the planning for the first event in Orlando. The success of the idea seems obvious now – surely the time was right for something to happen in our space. Back then though it was far from obvious. We didn’t have doubts about […]