SQL Saturday #294—It’s a Wrap! #sqlsat294

I just finished organizing my third SQL Saturday event in Philadelphia, this one being our biggest ever. I’d like to thank all of my volunteers for making this event happen and be successful again. This year, we were on either side of TechEd, so I feel like that helped us with speakers. Also, for the first time ever we decided to have a precon day with myself and Stacia Misner (b|t) talking about Big Data and Power BI, and Allan Hirt (b|t) doing a really well regarded lab session on Always On Availability Groups. These were well received—I was surprised at how late most of our attendees registered. The last week saw a significant increase in registrations with a couple of attendees registering the night before. I did offer speakers a healthy discount on pre-cons—we had a few speakers sign up for some extra learning.

We are fortunate enough to have a really fantastic facility at Microsoft and a great representative there. The venue is central, close to my house, and the layout allows good foot traffic for all of our sponsors. One of the issues we’ve had in the past, was having attendees not print out their SpeedPASSes, this year we had the budget to offer a Xbox One as a prize, and it seemed like we had about 85% of our attendees show up with their SpeedPASSes printed.

In closing, I would like to thank all of my sponsors, my volunteers (you were awesome), and my speakers. Putting these events on isn’t easy, and it takes a great team to do it all.