The SQLBits conference has a special place in my heart – as I have written before, the previous edition of SQLBits was the best conference I have ever attended. I have already publicly declared that I would attend it no matter if I would be picked up as a speaker or not, and I cannot deny that naturally I am extremely happy and humbled to be selected again and to deliver 2 sessions for the conference that I love.

Last Sunday I have got great email notifications – my 2 sessions were chosen for SQLBits XIV and on Friday I will be showing how to import data into NodeXL (bring your XML hat and C# skills if you are in the attendance), and on Saturday join me for a “Monitoring & Troubleshooting Columnstore Indexes” session (I will be showing you what to do when Columnstore Indexes & Batch Mode do not function the way it is expected).

Besides speaking at the SQLBits, I am also planning to attend a number of great sessions, and most of all I am looking into attending the pre-conference seminar with Bob Ward which is called A Day Inside SQL Server. Bob Ward is a Principal Escalation Engineer in Microsoft Customer Service and Support and he is the guy supporting and solving SQL Server problems since version 1.1.

A great news for my company is that there will be 6 sessions from OH22 speakers, spread over 5 different speakers – Oliver & Tillmann will be delivering 3 sessions on SSIS & HDInsight, Alarm for Data Governance! Self-Service BI is coming, Under Construction-Power BI for Developers; while my colleagues Julian Breunung and Gabi Muenster shall deliver a “RMan and ReportingGirl-joined forces for clean reporting” on Saturday.

Since this SQLBits edition is dedicated to the Superheroes (the previous editions were themed as Steampunk (XII) Medieval(Nottingham) ), and after some serious thinking I decided to become a Super-Vilain for the upcoming event – my superego naturally will not be revealed until the event – because hey, the super identity is always a super-secret.