Last weekend was SQL Saturday Dublin, and it was a good one.

My session on An introduction to SQL Server & Containers was the first one of the day, scheduled for 8am; now for me that’s great as I tend to get a bit nervous beforehand so having the sessions right at the start gave me less time to stress out.

I have to admit though, I was kinda worried about how many people were going to turn up as not only was my session early on a Saturday morning, the weather was absolutely stunning which does tend to hurt attendance at tech events.

However around 20 people turned up so I was really chuffed and think the session went well. I’ve delivered that session a couple of times now so enjoy presenting it, the feedback I received was all positive and once it was over I could relax and enjoy the day.

The main highlight for me (other than my session of course) was the session on PowerShell ? SQL Server: Modern Database Administration presented by Chrissy LeMarie (t) & Rob Sewell (t).

If you’re ever at an event and they are presenting, I can’t recommend that you go to it enough. They have a great dynamic when presenting together and it makes the session really fun. It’s also a plus that the topic they’re presenting about (dbatools.io) is absolutely awesome! If you haven’t checked it out, go and do it now.

SQL Saturday Dublin has prizes for things like best lightening talk, best new speaker etc. Rob & Chrissy won best session which if you check out who else was there (Paul Randal, Kimberly Tripp, Buck Woody…) you can guess at how good that session was!

Other highlights include having probably one of the funniest conversations with a vendor at a technical event (which I won’t go into detail here, I like to keep this blog relatively clean ), the lightening talks hosted by the indefatigable Buck Woody (t) and having a couple of beers with everyone in the blazing sunshine afterwards.

If you work with SQL Server and have never been to a SQL Saturday event, I highly recommend that you go as it’s a day of free training from top (present blogger excluded) professionals and it’s a great way of meeting people within the industry. Have a look at the website and find your nearest one.

Have a good week!