See you at SQLSaturday Dallas!

Both my wife and I will be speaking this weekend at SQLSaturday Dallas, back-to-back in room 1.102, and both on topics perfect for entry level IT pros, job seekers, and students. We're honored to be on a SQLSaturday schedule filled with some of the biggest names in the industry, so I hope to see you there! Looking forward to seeing so many #SQLFamily there again.

I'll be presenting on SQL Security Principals and Permissions 101, a ground-level introduction to SQL Server authentication, security principals and even some security principles. We'll go through some code demos about how stored procedures assist the DBA by abstracting the permissions necessary for execution, and how you could design a database security model using role-based, least-permissions pattern. I think everyone can learn something from this session, from DBA's to developers, and how better to secure their databases.

See you at UT Dallas this Saturday, June 1!

How do I learn SQL Server despite limited SQL duties at work?

Got this email from a client in the southern US asking how to up their game in SQL Server, frustrated by a lack of hands-on opportunities to administer SQL via current job duties. I also felt it necessary to discuss whether or not cert exams were appropriate, leaving it up to them, and then my preferred training methods.

To: William 

Subject: SQL Certification Questions

I am trying to gain a deeper knowledge to go and sit for the certification exams. What would be your best suggestion to immerse myself into SQL and learn the skills I need to sit for each exam. I have tried to just create tasks to force myself to learn and practice SQL query skills and that works but it has some limits. I learned a lot from that, but I learned so much more with some direction and a course structure.  I have taken a couple of online SQL training courses and everything seems simple and logical. I start feeling like less confident when I look at sample questions. They seem to go into deeper detail than what I have seen in the training classes and deeper than what I see day to day. What would your suggestion be for the best method of gaining the skills needed to effectively manage my SQL environment?

From: William

Hi! Honored that you reached out, hope this email helps. I actually give a presentation on this topic, based on my experience as a writer for the last three generations of SQL certification exams for Microsoft. The exam writers are instructed to test experience by asking questions in the frame of tasks that test whether or not the exam taker has “do this job” before. The exam writers are told to test for someone with 3-5 years of experience at a minimum, by testing things you can’t learn from only reference docs (and especially on brand new features of the latest version of SQL). So that’s who I advise taking the tests: 3-5+ years of xp. 

So my opinion here may be different from others and especially from some managers, but I don’t feel it’s appropriate or productive to ask inexperienced resources to pursue exams. What’s more likely than a passing score is a person becoming disillusioned, frustrated, or disengaged from career progress, or they try to cheat (with brain dumps), or they quit and/or change career path.
 Given that, gauge for yourself whether you think an exam makes sense for you at this stage. Regardless, as for training resources:Again experience is the best teacher here, but I understand the frustration about not being exposed to much variety, as far as SQL development/administration goes. This blog post of mine has links to many resources, I’d point out specifically the “Stairways” and the MVAMicrosoft Learn. If you don’t already have a copy of my book, the Sparkhound office near your area can totally arrange that. Joining your local SQL User Group is good free training, as well as all the virtual user groups that PASS provides for free. Highly recommend joining PASS, it’s free. There’s a SQLSaturday conference in Atlanta next weekend, again more free training, later this year there are SQLSaturdays in Memphis and Baton Rouge and Pensacola, and there are SQLSaturdays that usually happen annually in Birmingham and Columbus, GA/Phenix City, AL (thought I don’t see either in the upcoming events list on sqlsaturday.com right now…)  The wife and I like to make little weekend trips out of those Saturday conferences, and before our kid went off to college, we’d bring them along too for fun.
 As for trying to get hands-on experience, I would give you the same advice I often give my team: “lab it out.” Use your local workstation or laptop, install SQL Server Developer edition, have a local instance to play with at all times. Sign up for an Azure account and use your free credits to run an Azure VM with SQL Developer edition, or if you have an MSDN account through work or otherwise, you get monthly credits for Azure spend. If Azure isn’t an option, use a home PC or server, the hardware doesn’t have to be production-quality to facilitate learning basic concepts and testing admin actions you shouldn’t try on production. I have learned and developed a lot of my toolbox “lab” scripts by just playing and breaking and fixing and dropping and recreating on my SQL sandboxes… all outside of production. So if you don’t have an admin sandbox, get one, just setting it up, breaking and fixing it will be a learning experience.  

I can’t speak personally to any of the paid training classes, other than the SQLSkills folks literally wrote big parts of SQL Server and their training is considered top notch. The PASS Summit conference in Seattle is the biggest/best SQL Server conference with two days of all-day deep dive trainings followed by three long days of sessions, if you have that kind of training money.
 Let me know if you have any questions and best of luck!

See You Next Weekend at SQL Saturday Houston!

Looking forward to speaking next weekend at SQL Saturday Houston 2015 on June 13!

If you haven't already registered for this great event, here's the link: https://www.sqlsaturday.com/408/registernow.aspx

This event will be held at San Jacinto College in Houston, and admittance to this event is free but there is a $10 lunch fee.

I'll be presenting on SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals at 9:45AM in room 1.115. My session, which I have done at other SQL Saturdays in the past, will be a ground-floor introduction to SQL Server permissions starting with the basics and moving into the security implications behinds stored procedures, views, database ownership, application connections, contained databases, application roles and more. This class is perfect for DBA's, developers and system admins.

SQLSat Birmingham: SQL Server Admin Best Practices with DMVs

Thanks for attending my session today SQL Server Admin Best Practices with DMVs at 8AM!

Here's the link to a .zip file to download the slide deck and all sample files: http://1drv.ms/VH3mda

SQLSat Birmingham: SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals

Thanks for attending my session today, SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals at 9:15AM!

Here's the link to a .zip file to download the slide deck and all sample files: http://1drv.ms/VH3lpx

SQL Saturday Birmingham 2014

I'm looking forward to geauxing with a handful of Sparkhound colleagues and friends to speak at SQL Saturday Birmingham on August 23 at Samford University.

Fun trivia fact: This will be the first time I'll have spoken at a SQL Saturday east of Baton Rouge since SQL Saturday Pensacola stopped happening annually after 2012, but, the second time I'll have spoken this year in the state of Alabama.

I'll be presenting the first two sessions of the DBA track at 8AM and 9:15AM on the topics of SQL Admin Best Practices with DMV's and then SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals.

My colleague Cody Gros will be speaking on PowerShell Fundamentals for SharePoint 2010/2013 at 10:30AM in the PowerShell room, then we'll get together for the Sparkhound lunch session at 11:45AM, also in the PowerShell room. My wife will then be giving two presentations after lunch in the Prof Dev \ Misc Room as well, so I'll be there for the duration!

I'll see you there! Don't forget to print your SpeedPASS doc!

Here's the links to downloads for my two presentations:

SQLSat Birmingham: SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals

SQLSat Birmingham: SQL Server Admin Best Practices with DMVs

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/

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

SQL Saturday Pensacola presentation file downloads

I had a great weekend at my fourth annual visit to Pensacola for SQL Saturday, which had many great sponsors, the biggest of which was water.

I presented in the lunch-hour Lightning Talk competition and won Best Content with my five minute presentation, "Finding Missing Indexes In Your Ill-Begotten Databases", a title that the presentation picked up when I was presenting mainly to Developers at the Baton Rouge .net User Group.  You can download the presentation slidedeck and sample files here.

At 3:15pm I presented to a full room on SQL Server Permissions and Security Principals.  I was happy with the positive feedback I received, as this was the first time I'd presented this topic at a SQL Saturday.  You can download my slidedeck and samples files here, including the two-part demo demonstrating how stored procedures and views allow you to minimally-provision users with direct table permissions.

SQL Saturday Houston #107 - SQL Server Best Practices with DMV Presentation Files

Thanks for joining me for a standing room only presentation this morning at 9:45am at SQL Saturday #150 Houston.  This is the second year speaking at SQL Saturday Houston and the event was one of the best I've been to, kudos to the organizers.  I was especially impressed that all ten tracks were solidly SQL server related - very little was not related SQL Server, and that isn't easy to draw.  Bravo!

Click here to download the slidedeck and all sample scripts - including the ones we skipped - from my DMV presentation.  Thanks for all the great questions and feedback during the session, it was one of the most enjoyable I've had at a SQL Saturday event - including Baton Rouge's, and despite the fact that my presentation mouse batteries died!

SQLSaturday #107 Houston

About 3 weeks to go until SQLSaturday #107 at YES Prep Public Schools - North Central Campus, 13703 Aldine-Westfield, Houston, TX, 77039!  Register today if you haven't already!

Remember, in addition to traditional DBA topics, the event will have some topics of interest to developers that work with SQL Server. We also have a full slate of BI sessions (Data Warehouse, Reporting, Integration Services, etc.) as well as several sessions which will focus on the newly released SQL Server 2012.

I will be giving my SQL Admin Best Practices with DMV's presentation in the DBA Track at 9:45 AM.

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

WRKF Feature Story on SQL Saturday #64 in Baton Rouge on Aug 6

Check out this link for a feature story on SQL Saturday Baton Rouge from local radio station WRKF:

http://www.wrkf.org/batonrouge&newsID=1794

SQLSaturday Baton Rouge #64

Free SQL Server and .Net training!  Chance to win great prizes!  What more could a SQL Server Professional ask for? If this sounds good to you then don’t miss your opportunity to attend SQL Saturday! #64, the largest FREE training event dedicated exclusively to SQL Server, .Net, Development and Business Intelligence in Louisiana.

SQL Saturday! #64? What is it? When is it? Where is it? How do I get involved? Let me fill you in.

What:
An all day FREE training event with SQL Server and .Net sessions spread out over six tracks of Business Intelligence, Database Administration, SQL Development, and .Net.

When:
Saturday, August 6, 2011. Online registration is now open, but it is filling up fast so reserve your spot now. Attendee check-in will begin at 7:00am until 8:45am with opening comments from 8:30am to 9:00am and the first sessions beginning at 9:15am. A full list of session tracks and schedule is available.

Where:
Louisiana State University, College of Business
1109 Patrick F. Taylor Hall
We’ve posted a Google map on the Location page, but just in case here is the location and text directions!
Link to directions: http://www.eng.lsu.edu/misc/directions.html

Lodging:
The Cook Hotel
3848 West Lakeshore Drive
Baton Rouge, LA  70808
Call:  (225) 383 2665
Note:  Mention SQL Saturday when making reservations for event rates.  All reservations must be received before 7/13/2011.
www.thecookhotel.com

Hotel Map: link

How: All you have to do to get involved is register online to reserve your spot. Show up and attend the sessions that you like.

So what are you waiting for? Register today to be a part of SQL Saturday! #64!

SQL Saturday! #64 is presented by the Baton Rouge Chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) and brought to you by these sponsors.

Twitter info:
The event hash tag is #sqlsat64.  Follow the official SQL Saturday Baton Rouge twitter account at @SQLSatBR!  The Baton Rouge chapter of PASS tweets at @BRSSUG.