Quick notes as it is already Thursday!

The speaker party went well. Well attended, I spent a lot of time chatting with Richie Rump, John Welch, and Joe Celko. It was interesting to see how many speakers I didn’t know – just a different crowd for the BI event, clearly I need to network more there.

The event was at the Kforce Building, with about 120 attendees present for the four tracks. Smaller event, but still entirely viable. I had 15-20 in my professional development talk, and of course true BI topics did better than that. Lunch was excellent, overall logistics was good, building is easy to find, really no complaints.

I think this is the second “BI Edition”, the first was in Dallas,and I was curious to go,see if seemed like a good idea. After attending I can’t say I’m totally done thinking, but I think if you were a BI professional the event was a win. I think I’d have rather seen a larger event with four BI tracks and four more DBA tracks, but that assumes you have a building that big – Tampa doesn’t. The logistics are simpler with the smaller number of attendees, a good thing. The only risk is overloading sponsors, but for this crowd it will end up being a different set (and smaller) of sponsors. As in all things SQLSaturday experimentation is good, I walked away thinking about what other edition would work and not hurt the sponsors or the other SQLSaturday in the same city. Not sure on that yet.

Thanks to Jose for organizing the event and thanks as well to the volunteers, nicely done!