G’day,

I really am going to make an effort to blog more, and this post is really the start of that.

I figure that I’ll just have to be more disciplined and set aside some time to complete a lot of posts that I’ve started, but remain in draft form at the moment.

Anyway, I thought I’d start with letting people know what’s happening in the Asia Pacific regions at the moment and also at the start of next year.

Firstly, I’ll be speaking on Thursday 1st October at the Canterbury Software summit, here in Christchurch, New Zealand. This year, there is a track specifically for local user groups. We have the local .Net and Infrastructure groups joining the local SQL group, to help “learn, share and connect” in the local community.

Then on Saturday 3rd October I’ll be at the top end of the country for SQL Saturday 456 in Auckland to present my “Tips and Tricks” session that I’m now getting quite polished at. It’s a total mish-mash of very basic to mid range tips on becoming a better database professional – whether that happens to be on the development or DBA side, or maybe even both.

As I’m in my first year of acting as a PASS regional mentor for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, I’m trying to get to as many user group meeting and SQL Saturday’s as possible. That’s a bit challenging as distances are huge and events are not as frequent.

However, there’s two big events coming up in February that may interest some people. SQL Saturday Melbourne and SQL Saturday Sydney are on back to back weekends. This was planned to hopefully attract some international speakers to head down to this part of the word and enjoy some Australian sun while the northern hemisphere is still shivering!

Then we’ve got SQL Saturday Nepal, which was recently announced. It’s great to see these guys putting on an event so soon after the chaos that engulfed the capital earlier this year. I can certainly empathise with then coming from Christchurch.

Then we have “SQL Saturday South Island – NZ” in April, a collaboration between the three SQL User groups on the South Island of New Zealand. The event will take place in Christchurch, but will not be called “SQL Saturday Christchurch”. From now on we’ll either refer to “SQL Saturday South Island – NZ” or “The Event Formerly Known as SQL Saturday Christchurch”

I’m sure at some stage after this we’ll get a SQL Saturday out of Brisbane. Then it’ll be time to think about starting the cycle again.

So if you fancy a trip down to the region for one of these events – or maybe even two – be sure to check out the SQL Saturday site and maybe put in a submission. Just filter by the “Asia Pacific” region.

I’ll catch you all at PASS summit and look forward to finding out what all of the other regions are up to in the community zone this year.

Until then…

Take it easy and have a great day.

Cheers

Martin.