(2020-Dec-31) PASS (formerly known as the Professional Association for SQL Server) is the global community for data professionals who use the Microsoft data platform. On December 17, 2020 PASS announced that because of COVID-19, they were ceasing all operations effective January 15, 2021.
PASS has offered many training and networking opportunities, one of such training streams was SQL Saturday. PASS SQL Saturday was free training events were designed to expand knowledge sharing and learning experience for data professionals.
Photo by Daniil Kuželev on Unsplash
Since the content and historical records of SQL Saturday soon will become unavailable, I decided to log the history of all my past SQL Saturday presentations. To create this table I give full credit to André Kamman and Rob Sewell, that extracted and saved this information here: https://sqlsathistory.com/.
Closing notes
I think I have already told this story a couple of times. Back in 2014 - 2015, I started to attend SQL Saturday training events in the US by driving from Toronto. At that time I only spoke a few times at our local user group and had never presented at SQL Saturdays.
So while I was driving I needed to pass a custom control at the US border and a customs officer would usually ask me a set of questions about the place of my work, my citizenship, and the destination of my trip. I answered him that I was going to attend an IT conference, called SQL Saturday, a free event for data professionals. At that point, the customs officer positively challenged me and told me that I needed to start teaching others based on my long experience in IT, we laughed, and then he let me pass the border.
I’m still very thankful to that US customs officer for this positive affirmation. SQL Saturdays have been a great journey for me!