Last night Andy Warren ( blog | twitter ) shot me an email and asked if I could come up with a map of all the cities in the US that haven’t held a SQL Saturday yet. Sadly, I love this kind of stuff so much that I knew right off the top of my head that in the US “cities” are broken down into “Metropolitan Statistical Areas” and there are 366 of them (I’m glossing over the 29 sub-areas of some of the big cities). I said Sadly because not only did I know that 366 number but I also cary a list of the 14 largest cities not to hold a SQL Saturday yet in my wallet.
In any event I figured I might as well generate a map of a more complete list of cities so I grabbed my handy-dandy copy of the 2009 Census estimates and I was off. I selected only the 100 largest cities and then removed any of the cities that had held or are planning a SQL Saturday. I was left with 62 cities most of which are at least an hour away from a city that has held a SQL Saturday. (The cities I didn’t remove aren’t among the 29 sub-areas of larger cities.**)
I fired up MapPoint 2010 to Link my data and discovered two things that I was really happy about. The first is that MapPoint recognizes Metropolitan Areas. This meant no parsing was required on my part. Secondly, since I had copied out the population figures with all of the cities, I was able to make the legend for my cities different based on the size of the population. While I was playing around with that I found out I can further scale that legend again based on how densely populated the area is.
This whole process literally took a handful of minutes.
Here is what the results tell us:
- The largest section of under-served SQL Saturday areas is in a nice strip from St. Louis, MO to Providence, RI (Bragging rights go to Kansas City)
- California is the most underserved state.
- Texas really is bigger. Just look at the number of underserved folks who aren’t near Dallas or Houston
- Despite 5 regular/annual SQL Saturdays in the state of Florida there are still 3 cities of note that are not within an hour of a SQL Saturday and are missing out.
Here’s a list if the top 25:
| Rank | Metropolitan Statistical Area | Latest Population Estimate |
| 13 | San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 4,317,853 |
| 14 | Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 4,143,113 |
| 18 | St. Louis, MO-IL | 2,828,990 |
| 20 | Baltimore-Towson, MD | 2,690,886 |
| 22 | Pittsburgh, PA | 2,354,957 |
| 24 | Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN | 2,171,896 |
| 25 | Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA | 2,127,355 |
| 28 | San Antonio, TX | 2,072,128 |
| 30 | Las Vegas-Paradise, NV | 1,902,834 |
| 31 | San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 1,839,700 |
| 34 | Indianapolis-Carmel, IN | 1,743,658 |
| 35 | Austin-Round Rock, TX | 1,705,075 |
| 36 | Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC | 1,674,498 |
| 37 | Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA | 1,600,642 |
| 39 | Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI | 1,559,667 |
| 41 | Memphis, TN-MS-AR | 1,304,926 |
| 44 | Oklahoma City, OK | 1,227,278 |
| 45 | Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT | 1,195,998 |
| 46 | New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA | 1,189,981 |
| 50 | Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY | 1,123,804 |
| 51 | Rochester, NY | 1,035,566 |
| 52 | Tucson, AZ | 1,020,200 |
| 53 | Tulsa, OK | 929,015 |
| 54 | Fresno, CA | 915,267 |
| 55 | Honolulu, HI | 907,574 |
**You would think that since I started with 100 cities and ended up with 62 that means there are 38 cities that have held a SQL Saturday in the US but you’d be wrong. 2 cities that aren’t even in the top 100 largest cities in the US have held SQL Saturdays! So why isn’t your city in there?
0 Responses
While it’s not a SQL Saturday, Indianapolis has their IndyTechFest (http://sqldiner.com/) event, which is similar to the SQL Saturday format but it combines the local .NET user group as well as the local PASS user group.
Thats’s a great point Noel; I’ll have to come up with an icon to point out cities that are holdng non-SQLSaturday SQL events.
I was actually thinking that it would be cool to show case either a google or bing map that plots all the held events along with the upcoming SQL Saturday events on the SQLSaturday.com site. This way some who navigates to the site can click on a point of interest and get driving directions and nearby information.
Yeah I can do that for the most part with the static map that I have. But when I thought about if an event changed the address or something I started worrying about breakdown points.
I think what I may do is put something together like Rob Farley did for the Chapters: http://www.sqlpass.org/PASSChapters.aspx
As far as the data analysis goes though, MapPoint has been extremely easy to use to crunch numbers and display them on the map (so far).