- That weekend was a bit of a whirlwind adventure but good stuff all the same! I left Friday morning to head over to Olympia Washington for the SQL Saturday to do a presentation. Was excited to get over that way for a SQL event (hopefully another one in October as well but that’s a work in progress). There were a lot of folks I hadn’t met yet so was pumped. We got out there in time to catch the speaker dinner which was really nice. Got to meet some really nice folks like Rick Morelan twitter | blog.
- Then comes the event. The hard part is always having to choose which sessions to attend. I caught Greg Larsen’s nice one with an Alice in Wonderland back story. Then came one of my favorite topics…PowerShell. You can’t tell from my lack of blogness about it but highly addicted to Powershell. I guess my only tech blogs so far are ones devoted to it so guess that’s at least saying something. So I was excited to catch Nicholas Cain’s twitter | blog session on it and was bummed missed it the other week in Chicago. Mr. Joe Cool Smooth was not fazed by demo VM issues with licenses. Very good stuff and some nice nuggets I am going to try out soon. Up next was my presentation right after lunch. It was nice to have the time at lunch to get setup. I’m always sweating bullets until the slides come up on the overhead 🙂 It came up so had that going for me but was a bit bummed. There was one question I am kicking myself I wasn’t able to answer. My new theory to help me exorcise those demons is to blog on them later. Thank you to Scott Stauffer twitter | blog for helping me out during one of those moments I started to get flustered. Its always nice to have those friendly presenter faces in the audience to help. After my session the shoulders relax and can get on with grabbing sessions of others for the rest of the day. My next one I attended was Buck Woody twitter | blog. This was the first time I had gotten to see one of his in person so was very excited for that one. Very good stuff on Azure but was really impressed by his style and presentation. Some folks just have this presenting stuff down. Then wrapped up the day with Ron Talmage (link) session on his experiences with data warehousing. Love to hear folks actual working experiences so was a nice one.
- Then comes my favorite part of these events…the aftermath. I LOVE the networking that goes on after the events. This one was held at The Office Bar and Grill. So got to hangout with SQL folks, enjoyed a burger, and got to try a nice local brew called Mac & Jack (good stuff). Got to put faces to twitter handles like Argenis Fernandez twitter | blog. One of my favorite conversations of the night though was when I got to meet and talk with Mike Decuir twitter | blog. He hasn’t done a presentation yet but is working toward it. I’m still a very big newbie to the game but was very excited to try to pay forward some of the encouragement I had picked up a long my way and pass it on to him. Go Mike! 🙂
- The journey on the red eye back was like an epic struggle with layovers and odd ball issues but would do it again in a heartbeat. SQL Saturday Olympia was a great event….thank you to all who organized it! Is it possible to get addicted to SQL Saturdays? Not sure but I may be on my way!
- Here are my slides too for folks looking for them.
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Hope Foley's Blog 
Glad you enjoyed SQL Saturday 68!! I wanted to catch Nick’s session too, but I was presenting at the same time, so no luck for me.