Emphasizing STEM Community Education at your SQLSaturday

Was honored to speak to fellow SQLSaturday Organizers at the PASS Summit SQLSat organizer meeting on Tuesday. Here's an outline, detail and links to some of the things I mentioned.

In 2018 we celebrated our 10th annual SQLSaturday Baton Rouge event. Several years ago, our event leveled off as far as attendees go, around 500 per year, pretty steady.

One of the reasons we are a small town with a big SQLSaturday is that we are not an insular SQL Server event. Sure, we attract tons of SQL Server sessions, and the name is SQLSaturday, but we've reached across technology lines and now, across community lines. Look, it's not like we're partnering with Oracle here, we're still very much the game in town when it comes to SQL Server and business intelligence knowledge, including helping to launch a second local PASS chapter, the BR Analytics User Group.

A few years ago, we started coming up with a theme for the event, that generally dictated little but our swag. One year a brand new STEAM magnet high school was opening near LSU campus in Baton Rouge, the fancy new campus was being constructed. We decided to have a "building careers" theme, thus the bulk order of construction helmets with SQLSaturday stickers on them.

We kept going from there, wondering how more we could get involved in the community, what could we as a gathering of hundreds of IT professionals do for a city and a state that, aside from the new high school, was dis-investing in public education, healthcare, infrastructure, especially in north Baton Rouge which is just a few miles north of campus.

So we started collecting money for the Foundation for the public school system, with the help of an organizer, we got in touch with the local Star Wars cosplayers. So yeah, we made a loose alliance with the Empire and so far we've raised a few thousand for the Foundation for the EBR School System.

We've helped to spread the word on the Futures Fund, which is an organization that provides digital arts and web design and coding training to underprivileged youth in Baton Rouge, with training from local professionals in the community. We gave opportunities to their organizer and instructors to speak at our Friday night speaker's banquet and a time slot to discuss their important mission and strategy on Saturday.

This year, with help and advice from organizers of kid's tracks in Dallas and Jacksonville, we hosted our first STEM Kid's Track. It was a logical addition to our goal of getting more involved in our community, it attracted speakers and attendees alike to make it a fun parent-child Saturday. I'm hoping to expand and look for more new ideas to get involved in the local community, especially to add opportunities for young and disadvantaged kids a learning opportunity to share with their parents.

We're hardly experts at this. One of the reasons why we partnered with STEMupBR was to have volunteers, actual professional educators, using well-prepared plans for teaching stop motion animation with Minecraft and coding with littleBits inventions. Similar to the strategies we apply every day in our jobs, we didn't reinvent the wheel here, and we were fortunate to find awesome volunteers, and we let good people do what they're good at.

We're not perfect, and we're not done at reaching out and trying to make SQLSaturday as meaningful as possible for volunteers, attendees, sponsors, and the next generation of IT professionals.

Thanks for reading, but in short, here's some ideas for your SQLSaturday:

• Reach out to local STEM education programs and initiatives. Offer them free space to do their thing in your event, with a built-in audience of tech savvy or tech enthusiast families
• Reach out to the local public school system to see if they have any weekend or after-school programs that could easily be adapted to a one-day event.
• Reach out to nonprofits and STEM education initiatives in your city. Face it, as an organizer for a large and free tech event, there are folks in NGO's and outreach organizations would will listen to you and are eager to partner. Partnering with a free event like SQLSaturday could be valuable to them when it comes to their grant-writing.
• Reach out to local tech community charitable arms and foundations, who are always on the look-out for tech-focused ways to donate time and effort. If they're anything like the Foundation at my employer, they're also not just looking for places to donate money, but opportunities to get their employees involved in STEM education.
• Reach out to STEM and STEAM-focused schools, technology incubators, and tech entrepreneur organizations, offer them a free booth in your sponsor area in exchange for volunteers, supplies, or curriculum.

Best of luck to you and your fellow organizers as you efforts to give back to your local STEM community.

Connect with your SQL Community on Slack

Slack is a popular tool for team interaction. To describe it quickly, it's a feature-rich persistent chat room, with threads, multimedia, alerts, etc. There is a web interface, a desktop app, and a mobile app.

In addition to Twitter, which is also extremely popular in the SQL Server community, there are a couple Slacks to be aware of, specifically setup for the SQL Server community:

• pass-slack.slack.com - the international PASS Community 
• Signup: https://dbatools.io/slack/
• sqlcommunity.slack.com - general SQL Server community 
• Signup: https://sqlps.io/slack/ 

If you're a user group leader or SQLSat organizer in the PASS US South Central Region (NM, TX, OK, AR, LA):

• passscrl.slack.com - The PASS South Central region leadership
• Signup: email for an invitation: rm.us-southcentral@pass.org

And if you're in my hometown Baton Rouge, join:

• https://batonrouge.slack.com/ - developers, designers, marketers, business people, hobbyists, students, and other professionals involved in technology in Baton Rouge
• Signup: https://brslack.com/

Of course, Slack is a neat tool, but it cannot replace the in-person networking, training, and professional development that comes from User Group meetings and SQLSaturday events, so don't miss out on the IRL stuff too. :)

SQL UG Leaders: Reach Out to Your .NET Friends

In Baton Rouge we make no secret that our user groups and our 578-person SQLSaturday combines the volunteers and attendees of our local PASS chapter with our neighborly Baton Rouge .NET User Group. It's not just SQL folks attending our monthly meetings and annual event.

When discussing this, I've always been very honest and enthusiastic that holding joint events of local technical communities really works.

We all joke that developers and database administrators don't get along. The playful banter back and forth between devs and DBA's in Baton Rouge is never mean spirited, and is actually embraced (see image to the right). I personally work with 20+ developers every day and enjoy the dialogue and camaraderie, at both a technical and social level.

I'd recommend collaborating with your local .NET UG community to any PASS user group looking to
1) increase the number of folks available for networking at monthly/annual events
or
2) increase the ROI to sponsors of monthly/annual events.

If your SQL Server User Group isn't reaching a critical mass of folks at your monthly user group meetings or annual SQLSaturday events, reach out to your .NET group. They might be in the same boat. 

Gaining a critical mass of attendees is important. That doesn't mean they all have to do the same job. That critical mass of attendees each month makes the room feel full, it makes folks want to invest in becoming a technical speaker, user community leader, and recruiter for future user group attendees. IT professionals are far more likely to recommend to their friends and colleagues a meeting that monthly gathers twice as many people.


Here's how we meet in Baton Rouge with both .NET and SQL User Groups:

5:45pm: Meet in one room for professional networking, dinner (usually pizza)
6:15pm: Introduce the user groups and each group's leadership. Give out announcements about upcoming events applicable to both groups, facility information, etc.
6:20pm: Announce the sponsor for the meeting. (Thank them for the pizza!) If present, the sponsor can give a demo or a talk or a giveaway.

• Also allow for your host facility, whatever it may be, to talk briefly about their mission/purpose as well. In our case, the Louisiana Technology Park sometimes sends us a representative (or CEO!) to give a short pitch on what the Tech Park does and the kind of companies they foster.

6:30pm: Sometimes, a member of the user group will give a lightning round (10-15 minute presentation) on a topic that applies to both .NET and SQL crowds.

• Past examples: SQL Server Reporting Services, Power BI, source control, professional development, communication skills, tools and utility applications, Visual Studio tips and tricks, security, cool upcoming tech gifts for holiday shopping.  

6:45pm: The crowd splits up into different rooms for their main .NET and SQL presentations
6:50pm: Once separated, sometimes each user group will have its own Lightning round and announcements.

• For example, the Baton Rouge SQL group shows the monthly PASS slidedeck now, not to the combined crowd.

8pm: The crowd gets back together in the big room for raffle giveaways, see-you-next-time, more professional networking.
9pm: Usually, folks are still networking and chatting in the facility by the time we need to kick them out! Sometimes, they'll continue the tech talk and networking at a nearby bar or restaurant.

You may find that technology professionals will attend your joint SQL+.NET meeting, then decide which one to attend based on the topic. Many .NET coders know and work with SQL Server, and vice versa. In practice, we very rarely hear the complaint that they cannot attend both meetings. It hasn't happened in recent memory. User group presenters frequently make their presentation slidedecks available for download after the fact, or have the content recorded otherwise. Attendees can still visit with presenters from both presentations, regardless of what room they choose.


Here's what you may need to invite the .NET folks:

1. Find a two-room venue, typically with one big room and one smaller room. Already have a meeting venue for your monthly meetings? Ask if they have another room you can use.
   
   Don't have a venue?
• Reach out to universities, specifically the alumni coordinators or faculty members who are interested in connecting students with professionals in the field. Ask for a consistent, scheduled-in-advance location, don't get moved around every semester, it will hurt attendance.
• Reach out to technology parks or incubators who cater to tech startups - tell them that your attendees are their target audience for future startup tenants.
• Reach out to local consulting firms or training providers who have conference rooms in use during the day but vacant at night.
• Reach out to local Microsoft offices or facilities.
2. Don't get caught up in leadership competition, don't propose merging the user groups or taking away group sovereignty. That's not the idea. Figure out which folks among the user group leadership can emcee the meetings, remembering that it doesn't have to be one person.
3. Recruit sponsors using the edge that you have a wide audience of technology professionals on the front end and back end of application development. Consider sharing finances between the two user groups for the purpose of user group sponsorship and supplies instead of splitting the sponsorship income and the food bill and arguing over "who pays for who". This is very similar to a marriage. :) If one user group has already incorporated as a not-for-profit, this means the other group doesn't need to go through this expense and hassle to enjoy the benefits.
4. Order more pizza :) and drinks, make sure you have space and supplies to serve more folks. Combine resources when it comes to bulk purchases of cups, paper plates, napkins, etc.
5. You don't have to combine main topic presentations, but sometimes it's possible. We've had the SQL and .NET groups stay together for topics like Database Performance tuning for Entity Framework, or SQL Server security and permissions.
6. Host everyone-invited events like Networking Nights, Speaker Idols or Holiday Parties, where multiple speakers from both groups can give soft-skills, non-technical or highly-entertaining presentations, or no presentations at all.
• Our Networking Night is the July meeting preceding our annual SQL Saturday event in August. It's our largest meeting every year, features short-format (<10 minute) entertaining presentations on career topics. It's part of the SQLSaturday sponsorship package too, giving a Career Night speaking opportunity to Gold and Platinum sponsors. 
• Our Speaker Idol nights are entertaining and informative "competitions" where speakers create short (<10 minute) demos or "tips and tricks" presentations. "Celebrity judges" can include local CIO's or IT professionals who are witty with a talent for giving constructive feedback, congenial heckling and creating a fun, positive atmosphere. 
• Holiday Parties are really tricky to schedule in December because of all the conflicts every night of the week. But we have in the past tried and had success with hosting a User Groups Holiday party. No main presentations at all, just networking. Perhaps do a "white elephant" or "sneaky santa" gift exchange. Find a restaurant with a low rental fee for a private room. Find a sponsor interested in connecting with the groups on a less formal level, like consulting companies or recruiters. (For liability purposes, don't have any of the user group funds pay for alcohol.)
7. Add and recruit .NET tracks to your local annual SQLSaturday and ask .NET UG leadership to help recruit and select speaker sessions for the event. Expanding your tent can attract more folks, helping the event get a critical mass of attendees and greatly increasing the ROI for sponsors.
8. Adding a partner group your PASS Chapter is not just for .NET by the way. You may find a lot of topical crossover and technical interest with a local Windows Server, PowerShell, virtualization platform, or IT Pro User Group, or perhaps with a SharePoint user community. 
• Regardless, reach out to leadership of other user groups and introduce yourself. At your user group meetings, evangelize for other groups in the area, even non-Microsoft ones.

In summary, try reaching that important critical mass of attendees by making a bigger, wider tent. Yes, this will have much more appeal to sponsors, especially recruiters and staffing agencies, and this isn't an insignificant reality. 

But it will also incentivize attendance by exponentially increasing the monthly opportunities for:

knowledge transfer,

cross-technical training, 

professional and social networking, 

development of new local technical speakers,
fostering leadership enthusiasm in user group leadership, 

and fun.

If you'd like to discuss this more, please do not hesitate to ask via Twitter, LinkedIn or the comment section of this blog post.

SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2016!

Free SQL Server, SharePoint and .NET training

SQLSaturday 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 SQLSaturday event is sponsored by the Baton Rouge SQL Server and .NET User Groups, and will be our 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, CIO's, database administrators, developers, IT managers, server admins and job-seekers. 

REGISTER HERE

Then...

VOLUNTEER HERE

What: 

An all day FREE training event with SQL Server, Development and SharePoint related sessions spread out over multiple tracks of Business Intelligence, Database Administration, SQL Development, SharePoint, IT Pro and .NET development. 

Who Attends SQLSaturday? 

Folks with the following skillsets are drawn to SQL Saturday Baton Rouge because of the professional networking, free training, and giveaways:

• SQL Server Administrators
• Business Intelligence Developers
• Data Analysts
• ETL Developers
• C#/VB.NET Developers
• Mobile Developers
• Windows Server Admins
• SharePoint Architects
• SharePoint Developers
• Network Administrators
• Quality Assurance Analysts
• IT Managers
• Students
• Project Managers
• Hiring Managers
• Jobseekers of all levels of experience
• Students
• CIO's
• CEO's

At the end of 2015, we polled our user group membership and got this amazing feedback on SQLSaturday Baton Rouge #423 in August of 2015:

"As a former speaker and attendee at Sql Saturday, I must say you guys knock the ball out of the park with SQL Saturday. You guys put on a top notch event for both presenters and attendees."

"SQL Saturday is always top-notch!"

"SQL Saturday is always on point. Love this event and always promote it to other groups."

"I am happy that the talks are open to more topics than just .Net and MSSQL"

When:

Saturday, August 6, 2016. Online registration is now open, but it is filling up fast so reserve your spot now. Attendee check-in will begin at 8:00 AM first sessions beginning at 9:15 AM. A full list of session tracks and schedule is available.

Live Microsoft Event - Power BI Dashboard in a Day - Baton Rouge

Join BRSSUG Founder and Microsoft TSP Patrick Leblanc to learn how to use Microsoft’s self-service Business Intelligence platform, Power BI. In the first part of the session, the instructor will lead you through a Microsoft dataset and demo teaching you the basic elements of Power BI.

Each attendee should bring his or her laptop with a copy of Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus or Professional Plus 2013 installed, specifically Excel.  In addition, each person should ensure that Power Query has been installed on their machine.  Power Query can be downloaded from this link: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39379. 

As part of this course, students will be creating:

·         Data Mash-ups: Discover and Combine Data using Power Query

·         Create Data Models using Power Pivot

·         Share Data: Learn how to add your data to the catalog for others to use

·         Explore, Visualize Data using Power View

AGENDA

12:00 PM – Arrivals & Networking
12:30 PM– Introductions and Overview
1:00 PM - Power BI Lab Walk through
2:30 PM - Break
4:15 PM – Wrap-up & Close

Space at these exclusive events is limited, so please reserve your spot today.

Registration Required!

Starts: Tuesday, April 14, 2015 12:00 PM Ends: Tuesday, April 14, 2015 4:30 PM Time zone: (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada) Welcome Time: 11:30 AM Location: Sparkhound Corporate Office Suite 600 (6th floor, look for signs) 2900 Westfork Drive Baton Rouge Louisiana 70827

Registration Page Link Here

SQLSaturday Baton Rouge Business Intelligence and Recap - 2 of 2

(This is the second part of a two-part post on a SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2014 recap.)

Out of a total of 614 attendees in house on August 2, 264 responded to our post-event cross-platform flurry of online survey invitations to surveymonkey. After reviewing this valuable feedback, it is definitely something we should have also been doing all along. We got some great feedback and testimonials, like these actual responses:

• It was great networking, learning, fun and there were light-sabers.
• Some very good talks with great content, large community of very smart, talented developers, great networking, and awesome SWAG/goodies
• Great networking opportunity, good way to get to know the community. Some talks were really excellent presentations on state of the art database techniques.
• Lots of companies with great networking opportunities; lots of free training and free stuff. High quality and free is very unique.
• It was a fun way to network and learn about how everyone is using technology that we can bring back to our own organizations. It is a chance to learn something new, and meet new people.
• My first sql saturday and certainly not my last. Had a very nice time.

We also got some great info on stuff that we, our speakers and our sponsors could do better in 2015. You better believe we are listening to those and will follow up on it. I highly recommend to SQLSaturday organizers to followup your event with a survey like this.

As for what sessions people want to see next year? More demand for content at both sides of the spectrum, from expert level to beginner, and lots of requests for new technology topics, summarized by these actual responses:

• I would like to see more "deep dive" presentations. Those submitted were good, but would like to see some that go more in-depth. Some did, but several were very high level. It's good to have variety, but I feel there could have been more "deep dive" sessions.
• More advanced areas in each track 
• more intermediate or advanced BI/BA

• Cover beginning concepts to persons new to SQL
• Basic SQL Server Indexing, Generally more SQL Server basics
• Even the "beginner" level seminars were way above the heads of people like me who are truly beginners and who don't yet have real world experience with SQL. A few sessions truly targeting newcomers to the field would help.

• Anything new and upcoming to keep me up to date with technology.
• SQL 2014 specific stuff
• Machine Learning
• Underwater basketweaving

We asked attendees about their attendance during the day:

I was there all day!	75.10% 196
I missed some of the afternoon sessions.	19.54% 51
I missed some of the morning sessions.	5.36% 14
Total	261

We asked attendees how we could best reach them to tell them about SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2015:

Answer Choices–	Responses–
Email from SQLSaturday.com (back in March)	34.10% 89
Social Media - (Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFace)	18.77% 49
A colleague at work	11.88% 31
User Group meeting	8.81% 23
Email from the User Group or tech community	8.81% 23
Friend	6.13% 16
Events Calendar from media outlet (newspaper, TV, radio)	4.21% 11
My manager	3.83% 10
Other (please specify)	3.45% 9
Someone I manage	0.00% 0
Total	261

We asked attendees who their favorite booth was (by any measure they liked), and envoc's shag-carpeted, comfy-couch swag pad was the winner:

We asked who was the favorite speaker at the event, and the world-travelling Kevin Boles and his two auditorium-sized SQL Dev sessions carried the day. However, a whopping 37 different speakers received at least two votes their "favorite speaker", so great job to the 13 track, 5 session schedule lineup of speakers this year!

	Percent	Count
Kevin Boles	8.2%	19
Raghu Dodda	5.6%	13
Jennifer McCown	5.6%	13
Brian Rigsby	5.2%	12
Sean McCown	4.7%	11
George Mauer	4.3%	10
Cherie Sheriff	4.3%	10
Carlos Bossy	4.3%	10
Thomas Allsup	3.9%	9
Mike F. Robbins	3.4%	8

We asked about our jambalaya lunch (from Pot & Paddle Jambalaya Kitchen):

Answer Choices–	Responses–
Lunch was great!	63.01% 155
Lunch was just OK.	23.17% 57
I chose not to eat the free lunch.	10.98% 27
I missed lunch.	2.85% 7
Total	246

We got lots of good feedback about improving next year and praise for the this year. Too much to summarize here, other than that rest assured - we hear you!

Finally, on the suggestion of my wife with a business degree, we asked the classic "Would you recommend SQL Saturday" question. 

'Nuff said.

SQLSaturday Baton Rouge Business Intelligence and Recap - 1 of 2

(This is the first part of a two-part post on a SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2014 recap.)

Been quiet on this blog the past few weeks as the crush of one of the world's largest SQLSaturday events arrives.

SQLSaturday #324 Baton Rouge this past Saturday was a big success for us and made me very proud of my alma mater (which made attendance mandatory for the entire Masters of Science in Analytics program), my city (except for its traffic), our 2014 sponsors who filled the atrium with booths, and the crew of the Baton Rouge SQL Saturday planning committee, who worked to clean up two full-size trailer loads of garbage. A big public and personal thanks to all of the volunteers and planning committee members who helped this year!

We had 614 verified attendees in 2014. This is a great accomplishment for Baton Rouge and a 9.4% increase from last year's actual attendance. Here's our photo album of the event.

Here's the final numbers on some of the business intelligence we worked up using registration data from the last five years of Baton Rouge SQL Saturday events, which includes all but our first year of the event in Baton Rouge in 2009.

Note in the first graph below how we registered 274 attendees in the final workweek of the event, that's 31% of our total registrants and 45% of our actual attendance. Look for the plateaus in the lines - those are weekends.

Building on my feelings from last year at this time, I believe that doubling the number of registered attendees one month away from the event is a decent indicator of actual attendance. In this case, roughly 300 registered on July 2 turned into 614 folks through the doors.

Registered volunteers this year gratefully rose to meet the occasion. We had new volunteers, older and young, who we'd never met before, hauling garbage out the back door well after the raffle ended. I couldn't thank enough and still feel indebted grateful from my tired feet for helping move and clean.

Curious when your folks register? Tuesday is the most popular day for folks to register but Monday at 9AM and Friday at 9AM at the hottest hours of the week. This data has been compiled over 5 years of registration data. Note the impressive spike at 11AM on Saturday morning - prime lawn-cutting time turned into productive stall tactics?

Twitter is staggeringly popular among the SQL Saturday speakers - many of which were pulling their hair out as I10E crawled to a halt on Friday afternoon before the much-anticipated banquet at Baton Rouge's best churrascaria. This was the first year that more than a quarter of our attendees registered with their Twitter accounts, and judging by activity on #SQLSatBR it was a popular event.

This isn't a big surprise - Louisianans overwhelmingly make up the attendees of Baton Rouge SQL Saturday...

 ... but this part I am proud of. As we continue to grow the conference to its (theoretical?) limit, the percentage of locals in our natural gas-boom-bound city is rising, this year overtaking the number of folks from outside the city. That's word of mouth marketing for you.

Finally, and this may be related to some of the anonymous feedback we received in our post-event SurveyMonkey, we saw vegetarians make a resurgence in attendance after slipping in each of the past three years. It looked like they were headed for extinction until a big bounceback in 2014. Perhaps this should have prepared us for an anonymous comment excoriating us for the lack of cruelty-free vegetarian lunch alternatives.

Thanks to everyone who was a part of SQL Saturday Baton Rouge! There is a post-mortem meeting this week for the 2014 event and to begin prep for the 2015 event, if you'd like to get involved, please email sqlpassbr at gmail com.

(This is the first part of a two-part post on a SQLSaturday Baton Rouge 2014 recap... continue to part two)

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.

Baton Rouge SharePoint Saturday 2014: SQL Server Best Practices for SharePoint Databases

Thanks for joining us at the first annual Baton Rouge SharePoint Saturday!

Here is my presentation for the 1:15 presentation in Room 1, "SQL Server Best Practices for SharePoint Databases". Great discussion, great questions!

Click here to download the PowerPoint 2013 presentation.

Acadiana SQL Server User Group - Introduction to SQL Server Security Principals and Permissions

Great crowd last night and a great job by organizers Glenda Gable and Jill Joubert for the very first meeting of the Acadiana SQL Server User Group! I'm looking forward to seeing another solid SQL Server networking community in place and growing, just an hour west of us in Baton Rouge. If you're a fan, Glenda will be our speaker for the Baton Rouge User Group on March 12.

Download my slide deck and sample scripts to show the abstraction of permissions by stored procedures and views here.

Upcoming Special Events for the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Groups

I'm happy to announce a big slate of upcoming events for Baton Rouge User Groups and especially the SQL Server User Group in the next three months:

December 11: Holiday Party at On the Border - free for user group attendees, door prizes from sponsors! http://www.brssug.org/group-news/december13batonrougeusergroupsholidayparty


January 8 '14: Two speakers from Microsoft will present to the User Groups on all the new things happening with Azure. This is going to be big! http://www.brssug.org/group-news/january14batonrougeusergroupsmeeting


February 12 '14: The day of the user groups meeting, we'll have two national Business Intelligence speakers presenting a paid all-day training at the Louisiana Tech Park, then hanging around to present at the SQL Server User Group meeting that night!


Tim Mitchell’s Real World SSIS: A Survival Guide:https://www.eventbrite.com/e/real-world-ssis-a-survival-guide-tickets-9555728441


Bill Pearson's Practical Self-Service BI with PowerPivot for Excel:http://www.eventbrite.com/e/practical-self-service-bi-with-powerpivot-for-excel-tickets-9450327183


Please visit our website for complete details: www.brssug.org
Info on the Tech Park Location is here:www.brssug.org/where

Recap from SQL Saturday Baton Rouge 2013

As the head of the planning committee for SQL Saturday Baton Rouge this year, I had the distinct pleasure of welcoming several hundred colleagues from around the world to Baton Rouge on August 3 for a day of free training, networking, professional development and fun.

The day-ending raffle in the Auditorium of the LSU Business Education Complex (photo credit: Cody Arnould)
from L-R: Mike Huguet, Justin Yesso, Seth Valdetero, Dave Baxter, William Assaf, James Coolman

According to the official SQLSaturday.com website admin page, we had 750 people register for the event in total, a staggering and exciting number for us to prepare for.

But as any SQL Saturday organizer knows, the conversion from registered "planning to attend" and "on site" attendees is not 100%. This is a topic for a future blog post, but based on my experience over the past four years and watching the pre-registration trending, doubling the number of pre-registered attendees roughly 29-31 days away from the event is a strong indicator of actual headcount.

Our final headcount onsite at Baton Rouge SQL Saturday was 560, give or take a few stragglers, just 12 folks short of breaking SQL Saturday Atlanta's record of 571. This puts us on par with what we pulled in last year to Baton Rouge SQL Saturday as well.

With pride, I still can call Baton Rouge SQL Saturday one of the largest in the world, or in the universe, according to our keynote speaker Ob Soonthornsima, CIO and Chief Security Officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield Louisiana, our Diamond Sponsor this year.

Having spent countless hours over the past three months preparing for the event (with a lot of help from my friends), I breathe a sigh of relief but also of excitement. We were that close to breaking our record, and yet the fundamental parts of the event were in place to hold even more. LSU's brand new Business Education Complex is a fantastic host, with 15 classrooms of 60+ or more and a large auditorium for keynotes and raffles, all in very close proximity.

Sparkhound, home of my managers, coworkers and best friends, was our Platinum sponsor this year and led the charge with nine speaker sessions by Sparkhound Baton Rouge employees, at least one in each time slot, including back-to-back-to-back sessions in our CIO/CTO/IT Manager track from three members of Sparkhound upper management. 

Also huge thanks to my wife Christine Assaf (hrtact.com), who spoke twice, in the Career Track and CIO track, and also spent her free time between talks in nine 15-minute coaching sessions for attendees of her sessions. Christine and entrepreneur/author Tonia Askins each offered free one-on-one coaching for attendees via a signup sheet after their sessions on "Mastering your Resume and Interview" and "Exploring Entrepreneurship" respectively, a great idea that future SQL Saturday organizers should consider.

Also big thanks to Microsoft as usual, who was represented very well at our conference, including the entire speaker lineup of the Windows Server Infrastructure track with Nicholas Jones, Randy Nale, Steven Rachui, and Matt Hester. Mike Huguet of Microsoft was a member of the planning committee and also spoke three times, including a lunch session on "What's it like to Work for Microsoft?"

I want to extend a huge thank you to everyone on the planning committee to helped make this conference a great one this year, to our twenty one generous sponsors and to 560 of my closest friends and colleagues this past weekend at SQL Saturday Baton Rouge!

I received a lot of help from these good friends and members SQL Saturday Baton Rouge Planning Committee, in no specific order:

Mike Huguet of Microsoft

Laurie Firmin of Ameritas

Jacques Steward of Turner Industries

Stacy Vicknair of Sparkhound

Kenny Neal of Amedisys

Adrian Aucoin of Corporate Services

James Coolman of Sparkhound (and family!)

Justin Yesso of Blue Cross Blue Shield

Diann Kelley of Sparkhound

Cody Gros of Sparkhound

Beth Curry of Antares

Kyle Summers of Sparkhound

Christine Assaf of Waste Management Inc

Cherie Sheriff of GE Capital

Cody Arnould of Sparkhound

Paul Barbin of Amedisys

and countless volunteers as well, thanks!

See you next year!

SQL Saturday Baton Rouge 2013

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 2013 event is sponsored by the Baton Rouge SQL Server and .net User Groups, and will be our fifth annual event on campus at LSU.

We expect over 500 regional IT professionals and national speakers to join us. This free conference is open to the public and is perfect for students, CIO's, database administrators, developers, IT managers, server admins and job-seekers. Please visit sqlsaturday.com for complete details on this free community event.

What does SQL Saturday Baton Rouge look like?

We've got 60 sessions in 13 tracks and a broad range of expertise in technologies coming to our event at the LSU Business Education Complex on August 3.

SQL DBA Foundations
SQL Dev
Business Intelligence Foundations
Business Intelligence Advanced
Dev .net Foundations
Dev .net/ALM
Dev Web/Mobile Dev App Support
SharePoint
Powershell
Windows Server Infrastructure
Career Development
CIO/CTO/IT Manager

Register today! http://www.sqlsaturday.com/234/eventhome.aspx

Performance Tuning Presentation from October 2012 BRSSUG Meeting

Thanks to the 15+ folks who attended the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group meeting last night!  I hope everyone enjoyed "everyone gets a book" night!

I presented on SQL Server Performance tuning, which began with Michelle Ufford's article from GoDaddy on how she saw massive performance gains just by correcting columns to more appropriate data types.  Here's a link to that article: https://web.archive.org/web/20130629210916/http://inside.godaddy.com/scaling-database-data-types/

Then we went through database compression, indexing and execution plans, index INCLUDE structure, the missing indexes feature, how foreign keys can affect performance, isolation modes and MAXDOP.

I've uploaded all my sample scripts in a .zip file to the brssug.org website here for you to download.

Thanks for attending, see you November 14!

UPDATE 20141104: Link to a cached copy of Ufford's article.

SQL Server DBA Tool Kit

Right next to my batarang and bat-zip-line-hook-shooter-gun on my utility belt is my SQL Server DBA Tool Kit, full of scripts I've picked up along the way.

I take little credit for some of these, as I've picked them up from various sources.  I have modified them, for example, adding the ability to see the cached execution plan to MS PSS's "worst queries" query, or adding a blocking chain and cached execution plan to the typical dm_exec_sessions and dm_exec_requests queries out there to replace sp_who2.

There are some of my handwritten queries in there, for example the query to find the largest objects in the database and their compression state, a proof of sql_modules vs INFORMATION_SCHEMA.routines, and the "sessions and requests" with blocking chain query that I've presented on before and use daily.  Nothing novel or ground-breaking, but real practical utility queries I use personally as a SQL Server consultant.

I presented my toolkit last night to the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group and it turned out to be one of our best meetings in a while - over an hour of solid, experience-based conversation about queries, best practices, example experiences that was a wealth of information.  Thanks to everyone who attended and helped make it a great meeting - it certainly wasn't all me and my fancy tool kit.

You can view my SQL toolbox on Github.

EDIT: 20140813 Updated toolbox link.
EDIT: 20140929 Updated toolbox link.
EDIT: 20170830 Updated toolbox link to include Github.

New website, exciting future for BRSSUG

Just wanted to push out an announcement that the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group has a new website.

www.brssug.org

We've got a great few months ahead of us with our buddies at the BR .net User Group!

October's meeting is on the topic of Change Data Capture (CDC) as a real-world replacement for transactional replication, presented by one of my colleagues Matt Maddox from Lamar Advertising.  November will feature Microsoft's own Patrick Leblanc talking about one of the many new features of SQL Denali.  December's meeting will be replaced by a User Group social.  In January, I'm very excited to host Devlin Liles, who will speak to the joint audience of BRSSUG and BRDNUG.

BRSSUG is coming off a 20-person meeting and a very applied, original talk on Data Mining in SQL Analysis Services by Sona Pal, a recent graduate of LSU.  We're definitely on the upswing!

SQL Server Maintenance Best Practices with DMV's - SQL Saturday 64

First off, big thanks to the 375+ people who showed up for SQL Saturday 64 in Baton Rouge on August 6. It was a fantastic event.

Major thank-you's to Mike Huguet, Laurie Firmin, Thomas LeBlanc, Mark Verret, Stacy Vicknair, Justin Yesso, all our volunteers, and the great sponsors we had both local and nationwide.

A final thank you to our speakers, you were part of one of the biggest and most accomplished lineups of SQL and .net speakers I've ever seen at a SQL Saturday. I don't want to name-drop, but check out the schedule for the all the recognizable faces from the user community at large. WOW.

My employer Sparkhound had a whopping six speakers at the conference: Stacy Vicknair (VS Lightswitch), Justin Yesso (SSRS for .net developers), Ryan Richard (MVVM), Mike Huguet (Open XML), Victor Chataboon (Sharepoint admin) and myself.  This is just a sample of the capable, communicative and competent coworkers I have the pleasure of working with.

Here's the link to download the slidedeck and all sample scripts (including the few that we skipped) from my presentation on SQL Admin Best Practices with DMV's at SQL Saturday #64 yesterday in Baton Rouge:

Download scripts here