Wow! Just Wow! That’s all I can say to describe how great SQL Saturday 86 was on November 5th in Tampa, FL . I got so much positive feedback from every attendee, speaker and sponsor. Food was great, sessions were amazing, speakers were first class! I have to say thanks to everyone for attending, speaking, sponsoring and helping out with these great event put together by the Tampa Bay Business Intelligence User Group officers and volunteers.
Organizing Committee & Volunteers
I cannot take personal credit for this event. It was truly a team effort. Somewhere I read that in order to be successful you need to surround yourself with talented & driven individuals that are committed to your same goals. Maybe I’m paraphrasing or simply making that up, but this has proven to work with running our local Tampa Bay Business Intelligence User Group and the SQL Saturday #86 BI Edition event.
The organizing committee was made up by:
- Jose Chinchilla, President (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog)
- Andrew Brittain, Vice-President (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog)
- David Liebman, Treasurer (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog)
- Sanjeev Jha, Project Manager (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog)
- Stephen Murphy, Event Coordinator
- Jeff Steffel, Event Coordinator (Twitter | LinkedIn)
The volunteers that participated in our event included:
- Randy Borys
- Gloria Salcedo
- Chris Richardson
- William Sanders
- Pam Shaw
- Richard Pyra
- Wes Helton
- Tom Totten
- Denis Desault
- David Greim
- Lena Pavlyuk
- Lyn Taylor
Speakers
Our speakers were world class speakers to say the least. The speaker roster included Microsoft MVPs, field engineers and evangelists and other professionals that committed their time and paid for their own travel to support our event. We had just a few speakers that cancelled for personal, health or work-related conflicts. We still want to express our appreciation to them for willing to support our event as well. Thankfully, we managed to secure alternate speakers who did a great job even though it was last minute. Thank your SQL Saturday #86 Speakers!
Sponsors
Our sponsors made our event a quality and epic event by sponsoring with cash, items and swag to giveaway. Thanks to them we were able to sponsor great Cuban food from LATAM restaurant, coffee and donuts throughout the day, swag and raffle prizes and provide our speakers with a thank you dinner.
- KForce provided their facilities for our event.
- Convergence Consulting Group (Twitter | Website) did an amazing job with our speaker and event organizers’ shirts.
- Quest Software (Twitter | Website) raffled an iPad and a $100 Amazon gift card.
- Redgate Software (Twitter | Website) offered a great variety of books to give away.
- Pragmatic Works offered a free training voucher for any of their online classes.
- LaSalle Computer Learning School offered a training voucher for any of their in-person SQL Server certification classes.
- Fusion-IO raffled an iPad.
- Idera raffled one their SQL Serve monitoring software suites and gift cards.
- Soaring Eagle, ElSavier and Wrox each provided SQL Server and Business Intelligence books to raffle.
To all our sponsors thank you for supporting our SQL Server and Business Intelligence Community!
Panel of Experts
In this event I decided to put together a panel of experts to discuss several topics relating to SQL Server and Business Intelligence as well as a discussion of what’s new in the upcoming release of SQL Server 2012. The Panel of Experts took place at LATAM restaurant right after lunch. Our panel of experts included:
- Adam Jorgensen, Pragmatic Works (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog)
- Brian Mitchell, Microsoft (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog)
- Sanjay Soni, Microsoft (Twitter | LinkedIn| Blog)
- Michael Antonovich, Orange County School District (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog)
- Mark Tabladillo, SolidQ (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog)
We invited our sponsors to briefly talk about their products and services and prizes they were giving away during the event. Following our sponsors I decided to recognize Andy Warren, MVP and PASS (Website) Board of Directors, for his contributions to the SQL Server community, SQL Saturday creation and 100 SQL Saturday milestone.
BI BootCamp pre-conference
Along with our free SQL Saturday #86 event we hosted a paid pre-conference titled “BI BootCamp” presented by SQL Server MVP and SSAS Maestro Instructor Adam Jorgensen. We exceeded our goal with 33 attendees paid attendees, all of which gave very positive feedback of Adam’s presentation. I did a star appearance, helping Adam present a section on SSRS Reports using OLAP cubes as a source.
Thanks to Mike Wells for (Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog) for taking pictures throughout the event. You can see more event pictures at:
https://picasaweb.google.com/116314811362928917852/SQLSat86
