This year I somehow forgot to say “No!” when I was asked to head up the selection process for SQL Saturday Atlanta. Call me slow but I will not make that mistake ever again! However, we did manage to accomplish several things this year. If memory serves (and don’t count on that), we hadn’t surveyed the user group for which sessions they wanted to see since SQL Saturday #41 back in 2010. This year we were able to survey both the Atlanta MDF user group and the Atlanta B/I user group before making our final selections. We received 133 abstracts submissions this year but we didn’t want to make the people taking the survey to have to sift through all of those. There were a good number of sessions that the team felt were no-brainers to be picked so we went ahead and removed most of those from the population before we sent out on the survey. I trust the content team (Kristy, Mike, Michael, the other Michael, & Stuart) who voted to select the initial list of speakers and trust them to have picked the entire schedule if we had gone down that route. Surveying the user group however gave us the chance to calibrate our own judgment. It also gave us someone not on the [all-volunteer] team to blame if attendees are unhappy with the sessions that were picked :-p (not that we’d do that). There were very few surprises in which sessions the community voted for. The only thing that stood out was a few topics that just weren’t very highly ranked at all.
The upside
Not so much that we have a better idea what the community wants to see, we were actually pretty on-target, but now we have more confidence in our already well-formed opinions of what they community wants to see.
The downside
It took *a lot* of work to get the internal voting and then the survey pulled together. This unfortunately led to a much longer than anticipated amount of time to get the full schedule selected and the speakers notified. Absolutely no one on the team wanted it to take as long as it did. In retrospect, it would have faster to immediately take the 133 sessions submitted and send all of them out on the survey; that would have reduced some but not all of the delay. Unfortunately, we just had no way of knowing that at the time and I take full responsibility for not knowing what we didn’t know! Thankfully, the team was able to overcome the challenges and pull everything together. The silver lining is that we now have experience in surveying our groups and can do it much more quickly in the future.
Drumroll please…
Alright, enough about surveys and what-not. Here is what YOU picked:
| Start Time | Advanced – Room: Advanced | B/I 1 – Room: B/I 1 | B/I 2 – Room: B/I 2 | B/I 3 – Room: B/I 3 | DBA 1 – Room: DBA 1 | DBA 2 – Room: DBA 2 | DBA 3 – Room: DBA 3 | DBA 4 – Room: DBA 4 | DBA 5 – Room: DBA 5 | PowerShell – Room: PowerShell | Zero Level – Room: Zero Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09:00 AM | Dan Holmes The Last Mile: Dynamically Created ObjectsLevel: Advanced | Andy Leonard Using BIML as an SSIS Design Patterns EngineLevel: Advanced | Melissa Coates So You Want To Be A Rockstar Report Developer?Level: Intermediate | Yelena Pavlyuk Report Builder: Reports made Easy.Level: Beginner | Aaron Nelson SQL Server Database Development with SSDTLevel: Intermediate | David Klee Squeezing the Most Performance from your VMware-Based SQL ServerLevel: Advanced | Jon Boulineau T-SQL: Beyond the BasicsLevel: Beginner | Stuart Ainsworth Working with “Biggish Data”Level: Beginner | Timothy McAliley A Walk Around the SQL Server 2012 Audit FeatureLevel: Intermediate | Mike Robbins PowerShell Fundamentals for BeginnersLevel: Beginner | Mike Walsh What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a DBALevel: Beginner |
| 10:15 AM | Chris Skorlinski Enhanced Phone InterrogationLevel: Intermediate | Carlos Rodrigues Data Warehouse physical design – better practicesLevel: Intermediate | Paul Waters Automating SSIS Development with BimlLevel: Beginner | Teo Lachev Building Dashboards with the MS BI StackLevel: Intermediate | Adam Machanic 5 Query Plan Culprits That Cause 95% of HeadachesLevel: Advanced | Eddie Wuerch Page Latches for Mere MortalsLevel: Advanced | Joseph D’Antoni Using Compression to Improve Database PerformanceLevel: Intermediate | Tim Radney Know Backups and Know RecoveryLevel: Intermediate | Ben Miller SQL Server TDELevel: Intermediate | Thomas Stringer Managing Enterprise Environments with PowerShellLevel: Intermediate | Geoff Hiten Smart Rats Leave FirstLevel: Beginner |
| 01:00 PM | Jeremy Carroll Software-Defined Storage: The Future of Storage?Level: Advanced | Jason Thomas GeoSpatial Analytics Using Microsoft BILevel: Beginner | Pam Shaw Tips & Tricks for dynamic SSRS ReportsLevel: Beginner | Thomas LeBlanc Attributes & Hierarchies in Analysis Services 2012Level: Intermediate | Adam Machanic 5 Query Plan Culprits That Cause 95% of HeadachesLevel: Advanced | Denny Cherry Storage for the DBALevel: Advanced | Eric Peterson High Availability with SQL Server 2012Level: Intermediate | Steve Busby SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse 2012 Deep DiveLevel: Intermediate | Jim Christopher Taming Complex Tasks with the Psake ModuleLevel: Beginner | Kevin Kline Team Leadership FundamentalsLevel: Beginner | |
| 02:30 PM | Javier Guillen DAX Formulas: Evaluation ContextLevel: Advanced | Justin Stephens BI – Practical Date CalculationsLevel: Advanced | Leo Furlong Expanding Self-Service BI with Excel 2013Level: Beginner | William E Pearson III Bridging the Chasm: BI Theory vs. PracticeLevel: Beginner | Kevin Boles TSQL Road Less Traveled: APPLYLevel: Advanced | Janis Griffin Looney Tuner? No, there IS a method to my madnessLevel: Intermediate | Kat Meadows SQL Server Maintenance PlansLevel: Beginner | Richie Rump New T-SQL features in SQL Server 2012Level: Intermediate | Ben Miller SMO Internals for High Performance PowerShellLevel: Advanced | Audrey Hammonds Database Design for BeginnersLevel: Beginner | |
| 03:45 PM | Wes Brown Storage Tuning Deep DiveLevel: Advanced | Julie Smith Matching with Data Quality ServicesLevel: Beginner | Mark Tabladillo Applied Enterprise Semantic MiningLevel: Intermediate | Stacia Misner Troubleshooting MDX Query PerformanceLevel: Advanced | Benjamin Nevarez Dive into the Query Optimizer-Undocumented InsightLevel: Advanced | Kevin Boles TSQL Road Less Traveled: MERGELevel: Intermediate | Louis Davidson Database Design FundamentalsLevel: Intermediate | Denny Cherry Using SQL Server 2012s Always OnLevel: Intermediate | Jonathan Walz PowerScripting Live! (PowerShell podcast / BoF)Level: Beginner | Robert Cain The Decoder Ring for Data Warehousing / BILevel: Beginner |
I look forward to see you at SQL Saturday #220 in Atlanta and can’t wait to hear your feedback on the sessions you attend!
