We started the planning of this event in May/June, which is a bit late for an event of this size. We pulled together a great group of volunteers from the area to help us out and that made all the difference. It is great to see so many people that are willing to give up some of their free time to make sure that we had a successful event. Without them this event would not have been as good as it was, so thank you to everyone that volunteered to help!
The number of sponsors that we had was also a huge help to make the event such a success. Big kudos to Confio Software, they are a local Colorado company and they came through big as a Gold sponsor with lots of last minute support in various forms. I also want to send out a big thank you to Quanta Intelligence for sponsoring the Speaker/Volunteer dinner on Friday, everyone had a great time before all of the hard work on Saturday started. Another big thanks to Datavail who came in as a Gold level sponsor and sponsored the After Party on Saturday evening. Without these sponsors and all of the others - DawaBI, Pragmatic Works, Xtivia, PASS, Red Gate, Fusion IO, Quest Software, COZYROC, Qortex, SQL Cruise, Sapien Technlogies, McGraw Hill, Wrox and Pluralsight we could not had this event.
Since this was the first time that I was the lead coordinator on this kind of an event I decided early on that I would not present a session, since I knew that I would already have enough stress for the day. That was a good decision because there were many challenges that needed my attention throughout the day. We have a list of things that we know about now and will keep in mind for the setup of the next event, and for those wondering, yes I'm sure that we will be having another SQL Saturday in the near future. Overall it was a great learning experience I'm looking forward to the next one and being able to enjoy it more and to roam around and soak it all in more.
To get a different perspective on the event, check out the following blog posts that have been posted by others:
Thanks again to everyone that was involved in our SQL Saturday and a big thanks to everyone that attended the event!
