SQL Saturday Atlanta Schedule Announced–May 18th, 2013

image 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 TimeAdvanced – Room: AdvancedB/I 1 – Room: B/I 1B/I 2 – Room: B/I 2B/I 3 – Room: B/I 3DBA 1 – Room: DBA 1DBA 2 – Room: DBA 2DBA 3 – Room: DBA 3DBA 4 – Room: DBA 4DBA 5 – Room: DBA 5PowerShell – Room: PowerShellZero Level – Room: Zero Level
09:00 AMDan Holmes The Last Mile: Dynamically Created ObjectsLevel: AdvancedAndy Leonard Using BIML as an SSIS Design Patterns EngineLevel: AdvancedMelissa Coates So You Want To Be A Rockstar Report Developer?Level: IntermediateYelena Pavlyuk Report Builder: Reports made Easy.Level: BeginnerAaron Nelson SQL Server Database Development with SSDTLevel: IntermediateDavid Klee Squeezing the Most Performance from your VMware-Based SQL ServerLevel: AdvancedJon Boulineau T-SQL: Beyond the BasicsLevel: BeginnerStuart Ainsworth Working with “Biggish Data”Level: BeginnerTimothy McAliley A Walk Around the SQL Server 2012 Audit FeatureLevel: IntermediateMike Robbins PowerShell Fundamentals for BeginnersLevel: BeginnerMike Walsh What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a DBALevel: Beginner
10:15 AMChris Skorlinski Enhanced Phone InterrogationLevel: IntermediateCarlos Rodrigues Data Warehouse physical design – better practicesLevel: IntermediatePaul Waters Automating SSIS Development with BimlLevel: BeginnerTeo Lachev Building Dashboards with the MS BI StackLevel: IntermediateAdam Machanic 5 Query Plan Culprits That Cause 95% of HeadachesLevel: AdvancedEddie Wuerch Page Latches for Mere MortalsLevel: AdvancedJoseph D’Antoni Using Compression to Improve Database PerformanceLevel: IntermediateTim Radney Know Backups and Know RecoveryLevel: IntermediateBen Miller SQL Server TDELevel: IntermediateThomas Stringer Managing Enterprise Environments with PowerShellLevel: IntermediateGeoff Hiten Smart Rats Leave FirstLevel: Beginner
01:00 PMJeremy Carroll Software-Defined Storage: The Future of Storage?Level: AdvancedJason Thomas GeoSpatial Analytics Using Microsoft BILevel: BeginnerPam Shaw Tips & Tricks for dynamic SSRS ReportsLevel: BeginnerThomas LeBlanc Attributes & Hierarchies in Analysis Services 2012Level: IntermediateAdam Machanic 5 Query Plan Culprits That Cause 95% of HeadachesLevel: AdvancedDenny Cherry Storage for the DBALevel: AdvancedEric Peterson High Availability with SQL Server 2012Level: IntermediateSteve Busby SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse 2012 Deep DiveLevel: Intermediate Jim Christopher Taming Complex Tasks with the Psake ModuleLevel: BeginnerKevin Kline Team Leadership FundamentalsLevel: Beginner
02:30 PMJavier Guillen DAX Formulas: Evaluation ContextLevel: AdvancedJustin Stephens BI – Practical Date CalculationsLevel: AdvancedLeo Furlong Expanding Self-Service BI with Excel 2013Level: BeginnerWilliam E Pearson III Bridging the Chasm: BI Theory vs. PracticeLevel: BeginnerKevin Boles TSQL Road Less Traveled: APPLYLevel: AdvancedJanis Griffin Looney Tuner? No, there IS a method to my madnessLevel: IntermediateKat Meadows SQL Server Maintenance PlansLevel: BeginnerRichie Rump New T-SQL features in SQL Server 2012Level: Intermediate Ben Miller SMO Internals for High Performance PowerShellLevel: AdvancedAudrey Hammonds Database Design for BeginnersLevel: Beginner
03:45 PMWes Brown Storage Tuning Deep DiveLevel: AdvancedJulie Smith Matching with Data Quality ServicesLevel: BeginnerMark Tabladillo Applied Enterprise Semantic MiningLevel: IntermediateStacia Misner Troubleshooting MDX Query PerformanceLevel: AdvancedBenjamin Nevarez Dive into the Query Optimizer-Undocumented InsightLevel: AdvancedKevin Boles TSQL Road Less Traveled: MERGELevel: IntermediateLouis Davidson Database Design FundamentalsLevel: IntermediateDenny Cherry Using SQL Server 2012s Always OnLevel: Intermediate Jonathan Walz PowerScripting Live! (PowerShell podcast / BoF)Level: BeginnerRobert 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! 

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