Within two weeks the wait is over: the first edition of dataMinds Connect! For those of you wondering what I’m talking about, dataMinds Connect is the new name of the SQL Server Days (the biggest Microsoft Data Platform event in the Benelux). I’ve been a regular speaker at the SQL Server Days for quite some years now, but this year I’ll be just attending (apparently sending a bunch of Power BI abstracts when Adam Saxton will be giving a Power BI precon is not the best approach

I’m looking forward to the event for two reasons:

• it’s a new location (in the Ghelamco Arena in Ghent), so I’m curious how that will work out
• the agenda looks amazing with many top notch speakers

My picks for the event:

• as mentioned before, YouTube and Power BI rockstar Adam Saxton is coming, so I’m definitely not missing his precon!
• Buck Woody is doing the opening keynote, which is always fun (he has a crazy sense of humor)
• The first slot is already difficult to choose from. I have my ex-colleague Bart with a data science session, Aaron Bertrand talks about T-SQL in SQL Server 2017 and Andrea Martorana shows how to integrate maps into Power BI (he has a great series on those at SQLShack). Choices choices! I’ll probably attend Andrea’s session, but I’m not sure yet. The SSAS session seems interesting as well, but seems to be for SSAS Multidimensional (while I’d like to focus on Tabular).
• If you though the first slot was hard, the second one is also impossible to choose from. Nico has a session on SQL Server messing up execution plans and he has always great sessions. SSIS scaling seems interesting, as well as Azure Data Lake. However, the PowerApps & Power BI session seems the most promising, as I know nothing yet about PowerApps so that’s where I’ll probably learn the most (it wins the prize for shortest abstract ever though).
• After lunch I’ll probably watch Adam Saxton again on Power BI premium. Advanced Analytics in the cloud (AzureML) will probably be interesting but since I’ve run though the Microsoft Data Science curriculum I already know the basics.
• The next session I’ll attend Bucks session on Devops for Data Science because Buck is awesome. (I already watched the intro to CosmosDB by Leonard Lobel at Techorama)
• The last session will be ETL in the cloud, because it’s one of the weaker points in the Microsoft Data Platform in my opinion so I’m interested to learn what our options currently are.

As usual, there are many great options and I already feel sad I can’t attend all of them. There’s a good mix between introduction topics and sessions that go more into detail.

I’m really looking forward to this agenda and to the event in general as the team behind it always does a fantastic job in creating such a professional but fun event. But that’s not all, they gave me permission to hand out one free ticket to the event (which is worth €375)! Just one small quiz and the ticket may be yours Answer the following question with your best guess:

How many versions of SQL Server have I worked with?

This is every version of SQL Server I had to deal with as a professional, even if it was for short interventions. One small tip: SQL Server 2017 is not included. Leave your guess in the comments and an innocent hand will draw the lucky winner. I close the competition at Friday 22th of September 2017 12PM CET. I’ll announce the winner at Monday 25 September.

Game on!