SQLSaturday Exeter 2015
Woohoo! The kind and crazy folks at SQLSaturday Exeter accepted my submitted training day for their roster. Before I wax lyrical on the virtues of being locked in a room with me all day, I thought I’d better cover the fundamentals of the event itself!
First, the awesome video…
SQLSaturday Exeter
- What: A two-day conference, one day of paid training, one day of free sessions, focusing primarily on SQL Server and BI
- When: The training day is April 24th and the free day of sessions is April 25th
- Where: The home of SQLSaturday Exeter is Jury’s Inn, Exeter
- Who: The local user group, SQL Southwest, run it exceptionally well and it;s targeted the spectrum of developers, database administrators, and BI peeps at most levels from beginner to advanced
- How: You can find out more and register for the Friday and/or find out more and register for the Saturday
Leaving the best til last – you should attend SQLSaturday Exeter because:
- SQLSaturday’s being FREE and on a weekend mean you can soak up knowledge from top-notch speakers without having to rely on a training budget, using holiday time, or having to go through administrative hurdles. This means it’s a great event if you work in a small business, SQL Server stuff is new to you, or the knowledge is tangential to your day job.
- Mr & Mrs Fatherjack, the key organisers, are absolutely awesome at running a conference. You won’t feel more welcomed and looked after at any other event.
- There’s lots for the family to do around Exeter so you could make a small family trip of it.
- It’s pirate themed!
Training days
I mentioned earlier that there is a training day. The pre-conference training day, or pre-con, is a dedicated day of training. These days often have a number of topics that you can get training on and the proceeds supporting the SQL Saturday free day, the local user group, and the speakers’ bar bills.
The training typically costs less than an equivalent day’s training with a major training provider. The SQLSaturday Exeter training days are £150 before the end of January, rising to £200 in April. This is still less than half what I would expect to pay for a standard course.
What’s great about these pre-cons, having been an attendee to at least one a year for the past few years, is that the knowledge is communicated by people who know their stuff, know the latest developments in their field, and are part of the community. You get lots of useful knowledge and how to practically implement it in a format that’s long enough to get a strong grasp of a topic but short enough that you don’t forget everything from the beginning.
The Exeter Pre-cons
The Exeter training days are focused primarily at folks needing to support databases. The SSIS, SSAS/SSRS, and R sessions are more for the BI peeps.
- William Durkin: SQL Server: An Introduction
- Mark Pryce-Maher and Richard Douglas: Performance Troubleshooting for the (Accidental) DBA
- John Martin: How to give your SQL Server a health check in four easy steps
- Andre Kamman: Hands On SQL Server Troubleshooting (Bring Your Own Laptop)
- Tobiasz Koprowski: WASD-A Journey from Zero to be Hero A full day on using cloud databases and evaluating whether theyre for you
- David P Hansen: Understanding SSIS internals and performance tuning
- Bob Duffy: Optimising Reporting Services for MDX Data Sources
- Me: R: from analysis to integration
I’ll be following up this post with more info on my pre-con and you can watch my commits fill up the repository of training materials.