Notes:

• 30 registered, 11 attended. No weather or traffic issues. Same as the last meeting we did not send a day of reminder. Torn on that. Attendance matters, but trying to keep the meeting management as simple as possible. Thinking to send once for the next meeting on Dec 5th.
• Dale Sullenberger presented on temporal tables and it turned out to be a very good topic. Not a heavily used feature (yet?), its a concept everyone gets, but yet there are a ton of questions as everyone thinks about how to use it instead of the old school way using triggers. Kudos to Dale for driving up from Tampa too!
• We only had one presentation this time instead of two. Feedback was that last time it worked because both were “cloud” presentations and complimentary, but everyone preferred just one presentation.
• We had more conversation at this meeting than any I’ve attended. We were just talking shop during the 5:30 to 6:30 hour and we worked into someone bringing up a topic and then going around the table. Topics included “what is your DR plan”, “what monitoring solution do you use”, and more. It gave everyone a chance to participate. I think scaling this is just a matter of creating groups if we have more than 10 or so.
• We had three first time attendees and all three remarked that they felt welcome and comfortable. That’s a win!
• We started our presentation a little late and that meant that the pizza would arrive mid presentation. We decided to just break when it arrived. We ended up taking a good 20 minute break and then Dale resumed the presentation smoothly. It wasn’t ideal, but it didn’t cause a lot of pain either.
• Quest sponsored us again (thanks so much to Gordon Cornelius!) and had the pizza delivered, I just had to sign the receipt. We didn’t deliver what we hoped on attendees, but I think we offset that by having Dale deliver a great demo of Spotlight.
• Logistically we have a couple issues to work on. One is providing beverages, it’s easy to get food delivered, harder for tea/soda/etc and decent sized disposable cups. Going to see if we can get that stuff stocked up beforehand so we don’t have to get it on the day of the meeting. The other one is kinda funny, there are two long high top tables that we use to serve the food, but both times the hot pizza boxes stuck to the finish (shellac maybe?) badly and we had the whole group scrubbing away trying to get the cardboard off the finish!
• We had more conversation after the presentation too, thinking about topics for upcoming meetings and deciding to meet in early December for a presentation, holiday meal, and 2019 planning.

Though our attendance was low, this felt like a really good meeting. I believe that creating those relationships across the attendees is the long term value for them and for the Orlando community.