Its been a couple of weeks since SQLBits XI happened in Nottingham and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts for posterity.
First the venue. I think its fair to say that the overall consensus was that the East Midlands Conference Centre was the best SQLBits venue these has been so far – I’ve been to more than half of them and based on my experience I would agree with that sentiment. The hotel especially was top quality – I was pleased with my room and the breakfasts were way better than the Travelodge standards I’ve become accustomed to at such events. Perhaps the great weather over the weekend helped lift the spirits but I’d say the bar has been set high, I hope future SQLBits conferences are at similar standard venues.
You may have noticed that many of my blog posts over the past year have been related to SSDT and my SQLBits sessions this time around followed that trend. I delivered a session on the Friday, jointly with Craig Ottley-Thistlethwaite, entitled “Real World SDDT” and also delivered my first ever day-long pre-conference seminar on the Thursday entitled “SSDT Database Projects from the ground up”. Delivering a pre-con was slightly petrifying and I spent a large part of the three months previous preparing for it; I hope it was worth it. I had 30 attendees which I was delighted with (especially given this was my first pre-con) and we established that the furthest anyone travelled was from Romania, though I’ll assume it wasn’t just so he could come to my pre-con 
. I had some pleasant feedback via Twitter afterwards from some of the attendees and I’m crossing my fingers that the official feedback is in a similar vein.
The session I did with Craig went fairly well I thought. I did the first 30minutes where I covered the basics of SSDT deployment from a high level before Craig ratcheted the complexity up a few notches by demoing some interaction between SSDT, MSBuild & Git – really great stuff for those who like to get into the nuts and bolts of this stuff. I was delighted that Craig was willing to do the session with me (in fact it was his idea) as this was his debut public speaking gig and I’m hoping its given him the desire to do more in the future.
On the Saturday my wife’s uncle, John Milne, came to the conference. John has been working in customer service for years but of late has decided that he wants a change of career and to that end has been studying an Open University course in IT. He told me he had particularly enjoyed the database-focused modules of his course and hence I suggested he come to the free Saturday of SQLBits to try and get a flavour of what the industry is all about and perhaps learn about some real-world experiences to add to his academic travails. By the end of the day John told me he’s had a fantastic time, learned a lot, and was hooked. Mission accomplished I’d say. John lives in Leeds so I introduced him to Chris Testa-O’Neill who helps to run the Leeds user group and John should be going along to some user group events in the near future – if you happen to meet him there please welcome him into the fold!
All that remains for me to say is a massive thank you to the SQLBits committee who do such an amazing job, all voluntarily, in putting this all together. Thank you Simon Sabin, James Rowland-Jones, Chris Webb, Darren Green, Allan Mitchell, Tim Kent, Chris Testa-O’Neill & Martin Bell. I also want to thank all of the volunteer SQLBits helpers that worked tirelessly on the weekend to make sure the whole thing ran smoothly.
Bring on SQLBits XII!
