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

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.

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.

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