Thursday, July 10, 2014

SQL Saturday Baton Rouge 2014


Since I have been involved with and eventually head of the Baton Rouge SQL Saturday planning committee each year since 2009, my July's annually have been pretty hectic. Putting together orders for shirts and supplies, drinks, coordinating speaker communication, wrangling volunteers, working with sponsors, etc. But each year I am part of an awesome team of volunteers and sponsors from the Baton Rouge technical community and our efforts culminate in the annual SQL Saturday Baton Rouge event, one of the largest and longest-running annual SQL Saturday events in the world!

SQL Saturday is a global event to bring Information Technology speakers and professionals together for a community-driven, community-attended free day of technical training. The Baton Rouge SQL Saturday 2014 event is produced by the Baton Rouge User Groups, and will be our sixth annual event on campus at LSU. We expect ~600 regional IT professionals and national speakers to join us.

This free conference is open to the public and is perfect for students, database administrators, .NET developers, business intelligence developer, SharePoint admins and developers, IT managers, server admins, network admins, and job-seekers.


We've got almost 70 one-hour sessions in 13 tracks and a broad range of expertise in technologies coming to our event at the LSU Business Education Complex on August 2.

SQL DBA Foundations
DBA Advanced
Business Intelligence
SQL Dev
.NET 1
.NET 2 / ALM
Web / Mobile Dev
SharePoint
IT Pro
PowerShell
Career Development
CIO / IT Manager
Special Blue Cross Blue Shield Track

Register today! sqlsaturday.com/324/

"What You Need To Know About Being a DBA and What You Need To Know That You Don’t Know Yet"

Last night was a big success for the first annual Baton Rouge User Groups Networking Night, an all-user-groups invited event that saw members of the Baton Rouge SQL Server, .NET, Java, IT Pro, SharePoint, Women in IT user groups, plus members of user groups in Hammond, Lafayette and New Orleans (all about one hour away) join for a night of short-format speeches on career and professional development. We also were joined by a bunch of new folks from the public who'd never been to a user group meeting before - they picked a great first meeting to attend!



To the ~60 folks in attendance last night, the other seven speakers who made it a great event, our two Platinum SQL Saturday Baton Rouge sponsors, my all Sparkhound colleagues who joined me to speak, my wife who was volun-told into speaking from an HR perspective, and my friends in the user group community, thanks for being a part of that great event last night!

I was one of the eight community speakers and enjoyed presenting a thrown-together talk with a simple and concise title: "What You Need To Know About Being a DBA and What You Need To Know That You Don’t Know Yet". It was a ton of fun to present and share in the laughter!

It's a short slide deck and I pushed my 10-minute window a little bit, but thankfully our timer and stage-hook-master Jeremy Beckham from BCBS allowed some lenience.

If you are curious to see the "big list" of things you need to know to be a DBA, here's a link to download my PowerPoint slidedeck.