This past weekend was SQLSaturday159 - Kansas City.  I drove down with my wife and our sons (2 years old and 11 months old) and spent the first day sightseeing (Union Station & Crown Center) and scaring the wits out of our 2-year-old (T-Rex Cafe - he loves dinosaurs except when they are 15 feet tall and roaring at him!)

Friday night was the speaker dinner at Screenland Crossroads (a working movie theater although we were not actually in a theater).  I met up there with my House of Brick Technologies colleagues David Klee (blog/@kleegeek) and Jon Shields and we were greeted by one of the organizers of the event Bill Fellows (blog/@billinkc).  Bill presented us with one of the most unique parts of the dinner, the speaker gift bag.  Rather than giving out a polo shirt or t-shirt, the KC SQL Saturday team compiled the following collection of Kansas City-related or produced products:

• A jazz CD
• A package of special blend coffee with the SQL Saturday 159 logo from the Roasterie (pictured)
• A bottle of BBQ sauce from Gates Bar-B-Q
• A bumper sticker from this year's MLB All-Star Game (hosted in KC)
• A jar of mustard from Boulevard Brewery (non-alcoholic {-:)
• Velvet Creme popcorn
• Russell Stover Chocolates
• A Springbok puzzle (pictured - it's not a Coke can, it's a 3-D puzzle!)
• Last but not least, a Hallmark card

It was a very creative and well-executed idea.

 At dinner I met several people that I had interacted with online (mostly Twitter) but had never previously met in person, including Dave Valentine (blog/@IngeniousSQL), Rick Krueger (blog/@DataOgre), Chris Shaw (blog/@SQLShaw), Andre Dubois (@MtnDBA), and Jason Kassay (@JasonKassay).  We had "heavy hors d'oeuvres" for dinner and chatted for quite a while.

After a long night of our two little boys not wanting to go to sleep (or stay asleep) in the hotel, I rose far too early on Saturday morning looking forward to giving two presentations and participating in several others.  We arrived at the Cerner Corporation Riverport Campus (actually an old riverboat casino dock building - very cool!) and immediately found that there were issues with the Guidebook application scheduling the sessions (changes weren't synchornizing properly).  Bill and the team jumped in and quickly produced printed schedules and everything went off without a hitch.

John did an excellent job of playing to his audience in a large room (actually the former sports bar) and conveying some good tips - thumbs up.

The next session was the one I was most excited for, mainly due to the two presenters giving the session - Karen Lopez (blog/@DataChick) and Thomas LaRock (blog/@SQLRockstar).  The session, Database Design Throwdown, was a Point-Counterpoint-style debate on a variety of subjects (NULL's - yes or no?) between Karen - the architect - and Tom - the DBA.

Karen & Tom prepping for the session

At the end of each topic, Karen and Tom polled the audience for input, and it was fun and informative for all.  They are scheduled for the PASS Summit with the same concept so I would definitely recommend the session.

Next up was another collaborative session - Choose Your Own Adventure: Performance Tuning - given by LaRock and Jason Strate (blog/@stratesql).  Tom and Jason started with a broken process and then polled the audience as to what steps to take tried to resolve the issue in 60 minutes or less. ("The server has been down for 10 minutes - we've lost $10 million dollars!)  I won't give away the ultimate solution here - if you get a chance go see the session at a future SQL Saturday or at the PASS Summit and find out for yourself.

Lunch was Kansas City BBQ from Oklahoma Joe's (don't ask me why there is a Kansas City BBQ joint named "Oklahoma" Joe's) - it was definitely tasty.

After lunch was my first session, and it was a new session I have just created - Maintain Your DBs with Help from Ola Hallengren.  I highly recommend the Ola Hallengren Maintenance Solution for backups/reindexing/CHECKDB and it just made sense to me that it could be a good topic for a presentation.  I knew that Ola occasionally presents on the topic himself, so I wanted to verify that he was OK with my creating such a presentation.  To my amazement, he was incredibly responsive, agreeing that I could create the presentation as long as I didn't submit it to this year's Summit (since he was going to submit himself).  He also offered to review my slide deck once I completed it and in the weeks that followed sent me several unsolicited suggestions and notes on new features as suggestions to include in the presentation.

A note on Ola Hallengren (and most of the other developers of the free tools that we all use) - this is a side effort on top of his regular job.  He develops and maintains this widely recommended piece of code on his own time, and then on top of that was offering to help me with this presentation - I can not thank him enough.

I ended up with a full room (~40 people - I was in one of the smaller rooms)

Picture stolen from a Tweet by @sqlrus - http://bit.ly/OYUd6B

Overall I thought the presentation went well for the first run, but I did end up about ten minutes short.  I am modifying my presentation to add a demo database with fragmented indexes and out-of-date statistics so that I can add some demos for next time.

Next up was smoothies, sponsored by Xtivia - yum!

The last information session of the day was Virtualizing Business Critical SQL Servers.  I give this presentation with my House of Brick colleague David Klee.  He sometimes gives it alone, but it does add an extra layer when we present it together (plus he doesn't have to talk about licensing SQL Server on VMWare when I am there to do it.)

Our room was almost full and we had a very engaged audience.  We have given the talk several times and we get more refined with it each time - some day we'll present it at the PASS Summit...some day.

The final session of the day was the awards and giveaways, and even with some vendors giving out dozens of book and t-shirts, we still didn't win anything (oh well).

Overall the experience was amazing, both as a presenter and as an attendee.  The SQL Saturday phenomenon has exploded in the last couple of years and if there isn't one near you, contact Karla Landrum (blog/@KarlaKay22) and PASS and they will help you set one up - it is definitely worth it!

Next up for me (after SQLSkills Immersion Event 2 in Seattle, but that's a different blog post) - SQL Saturday 154 in St Louis - be there!