Jeff Pries

SQL Server, Power BI, and other Business Intelligence and data technologies

Tag: Alpharetta (Page 1 of 2)

Office Hijinks: Halloween 2019 – The ’80s Arcade

November 3, 2019 /

Halloween is already a great holiday all on its own, but what makes it even sweeter (other than all the candy) is celebrating with a costume and decorating contest!

For our 4th annual entry into the contest, we put together an ’80s themed display, featuring things inspired by a 1980’s arcade — a life size Pac-Man game, a giant Super Mario post-it mural, and of course fully functional arcade games (thanks to a few Raspberry Pis running RetroPie)

While we didn’t win the decoration contest (a Day of the Dead theme won this year), we did have a fantastic time building it and received many many compliments to how fun and creative it was — so that was a win in my book. As a little extra icing on the cake, my Friday the 13th Camp Counselor costume did win “Scariest Costume” so that was a great surprise.

Check it out below!

The life size Pac-Man board that we built as IT’s entry into the 2019 Halloween Decorating Contest

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SQL Saturday Recap: #919 – BI Edition – Atlanta, GA

October 22, 2019 /

With fall in the air and pumpkins and skeletons making an appearance, the third Saturday in October was the day for something else to make an appearance the annual SQL Saturday BI Edition for Atlanta, GA.

For the third consecutive year, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend the BI Edition of SQL Saturday, which was held conveniently nearby — once again at Alpharetta Microsoft office.

With the Atlanta events, it’s pretty easy to take for granted how well run they are. Registration was a snap for those with pre-printed SpeedPasses, GuideBook was available for keeping a copy of the schedule handy, and the venue offered just enough room (with one exception — a jam-packed session by Patrick LeBlanc) for all of the sessions.

The schedule was a good mix with plenty of great picks throughout the day and the whole event had the usual well-run feel to it. For anybody that hasn’t attended this event (or the May event) before, you should definitely look into the next one!

As always, I’m thankful to the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and great attendees for a fantastic and well-spent Saturday and look forward to the next!

Reza Rad presenting “Architecture Blueprints for Power BI Implementation.”
Ed Watson presenting “The Psychology of Better Power BI Reporting.”
Patrick LeBlanc presenting “Data Modeling and DAX Tips for Power BI” and “Power BI Performance in 6 Demos.”
Shabnam Watson presenting “Aggregations in Power BI.”
Raise your hand if you learned something today at SQL Saturday.
Outside the venue at lunch, in the rain, some event or filming was taking place as one street of the Avalon outside of the Microsoft building was lined with these amazing machines.
A whole lot of money parked along this street. Might’ve been cheaper to actually pave the street with gold.

Power BI Palooza – Atlanta Recap

June 12, 2019 /

The Microsoft Business Applications Summit was held June 10th and 11th at the Georgia World Congress Center here in Atlanta. While I wasn’t able to attend that event, a great benefit to the event being held locally was that the SQL Saturday Crew organized to have a much smaller event, titled Power BI Palooza on Saturday, June 8th preceding the event.

The event was held at the Alpharetta Microsoft Offices and followed a standard SQL Saturday format — a full day of 1 hour sessions, on a Saturday, made up of three tracks from which you could mix and match.

It was great seeing so many national (and international!) speakers present, with a great variety of Power BI topics. While I can’t see there being a repeat of this event in Atlanta next year (the MS Biz Apps Summit will be in Anaheim, CA next year), I’m very appreciative to the organizers and speakers for putting this event together!

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SQL Saturday Recap: #845 – Atlanta, GA

May 21, 2019 /

Saturday, May 18th marked the 10th anniversary for SQL Saturday Atlanta. As per usual, an army of organizers, sponsors, speakers, and volunteers helped to pull off another incredible event. The scope of SQL Saturday Atlanta never fails to impress and this year was no exception with no shortage of incredible speakers and fascinating topics, not to mention a very large number of folks who traveled multiple states to attend the event.

A theme is tradition for SQL Saturday and officially the theme was “Office Space,” which is a pretty fun one to work with. Unofficially, I think the theme was “Docker” and “Kubernetes” based on the number of sessions mentioning one of the other (usually both) and the huge amount of buzz about those topics in the halls. It’s going to be really interesting how these new technologies shape the SQL Server world over the next 5 years.

As always, a fantastic event and time very well spent for anybody in the field. The event organization was very professional and the entire day flowed great. Avoiding room capacity issues while still having huge Microsoft speakers such as Bob Ward and Buck Woody sessions is an accomplishment all in of itself!

Do yourself a favor and attend this event next year (if you missed this year)!

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Office Hijinks: Halloween 2018 – Haunted Mini Golf

November 4, 2018 /

Ever since our first entry into the annual office Halloween Decorating Contest, we’ve wanted to do a 9-hole mini golf course — but the logistics in doing so are pretty tough (it takes a lot of resources and space just to make the plain holes).  For our 3rd year entry, we decided this was the year to make it happen!

Rallying the entire IT department together, we put together a Halloween-themed, 9-hole mini golf course, complete with caddy desk, custom maps and scorecards, signage, realistic greens, a windmill, and plenty of variety throughout the holes.

While we didn’t win the overall contest (again), everybody involved had a great time putting it all together and playing through the course throughout the day.  Check it out below!

The starting point caddy stand for the Gruesome Greens IT Mini Golf course

 

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Office Hijinks: Halloween 2017 – Star Wars

November 3, 2018 /

While putting together my post for IT’s 2018 contribution to the comany’s annual Halloween Office Decorating Contest, I realized I’d never posted 2017.  Whoops.

So, here we are a year later, I give you our 2017 entry:  Star Wars.  While Star Wars costumes may be great for Halloween, it turns out decorating an entire office space for Star Wars is much, much more difficult.  In the end, it came off slightly like a young kid’s birthday party, but what can you do?    The crown jewel of our piece was a giant death star (which was a large weather balloon purchased from Amazon which was then painted by the team to resemble a Death Star.

Check it out below.

 

The IT Death Star in our entry into the annual Halloween Decorating Contest.

 

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SQL Saturday Recap: #800 – BI Edition – Atlanta, GA

September 28, 2018 /

SQL Saturday #800 – the annual BI Edition for Atlanta, GA, took place on Saturday, September 22nd at the new Microsoft Avalon offices in Alpharetta, GA.  This was the second large-scale event I’d attended in this space (the first being Azure Data Fest).  Initially, I’d had some reservations about the size of rooms vs. the number of attendees, but everything was planned excellently and no session on my wishlist was over capacity to the point where seats weren’t available.  No small feat for the planners!  The entire day went off great and the sessions were some of the best I’d attended to date.  Unofficially, it seemed the like underlying theme of the event was performance tuning SSAS Tabular and Power BI, which was very timely for me as that is currently an area I’m focusing on.

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Atlanta Azure DataFest #1 Recap

August 20, 2018 /

I just recently had the pleasure of attending the inaugural Atlanta Azure DataFest #1 ,which took place Thursday, August 16th and Friday, August 17th at the Alpharetta Microsoft office.  This two-day conference, primarily organized by Stuart Ainsworth, was similar in structure and content to SQL Saturday events, but with some interesting changes.  The biggest of which was that the conference was held over two days instead of one (and on week days no less.)  This allowed for more diversity in the structure of the offered sessions.

Day 1 included multiple sessions which were more “keynote” in nature, in which the entire conference attended the same sessions in one big room.  Day 2 included a choice of 3-hour workshops for some in depth lab work, more similar to a traditional pre-con.  Both days additionally had the three tracks of sessions allowing attendees to pick and choose the topics of interest.  While all sessions were Azure themed, there was enough diversity that anybody should have been able to find something of interest.  About my only critique of the sessions would be that too many of them were 3rd-party vendor-centric, spending the entire time going through the details of a non-free piece of 3rd party software rather than only using free or native tools.  That likely speaks more to the gaps in the Azure ecosystem (and not being able to do everything efficiently without 3rd party tools) than anything else.

At $50 for the two days, both of which included an excellent hot lunch, the event was a bargain.  Everything was very well run and hopefully this new event continues on to future years.

 

Organizer Stuart Ainsworth starting things off with some morning announcements and Trey Johnson presenting his “Whistle Stop Tour of SQL Server and Azure BI” on Day 1 of Atlanta Azure DataFest.

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SQL Saturday Recap: #733 – Atlanta, GA

May 25, 2018 /

This past Saturday, May 19th marked the 733rd SQL Saturday Event — SQL Saturday #733 – Atlanta.  Being my home event, and consistently a large and well-executed event, I look forward to this one every year and also volunteer to help out with room proctoring and any other help that is needed.  Since the loss of the GSU Alpharetta Campus as a venue, the event has bounced around looking for a new home.  This year, it was hosted at the Alpharetta Campus of Gwinnett Technical College, which I felt was an excellent venue (though not quite as convenient to me as last year’s Duluth Campus).

Like previous years, I felt the event was executed very well — with an army of organizers and volunteers, it seemed like everything was handled well with only minor mishaps here and there.  The new location was great and will hopefully end up being a new permanent home for the event.  As I was helping to work the event, I didn’t get to attend as many sessions as I would have liked, but everything I attended was excellent and time well spent.

 

Marco Russo presenting “DAX Optimization Examples” — my favorite session of the day. He easily could’ve filled multiple hours with his content and I look forward to seeing him speak again whenever I next get the opportunity!

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SQL Saturday Recap: #578 – Atlanta, GA (BI Edition)

December 12, 2016 /

Saturday, December 10th marked the 2nd annual SQL Saturday Atlanta BI Edition.  Atlanta is known for its massive SQL Saturday held every spring / summer, so I’m happy to see the smaller, more BI-focused winter event continuing on.  With such a large number of SQL Server professionals in the area, there is definitely room for multiple events.

As with last year’s event, this one was a well-run event with no flaws that I was aware of.  This year seemed to be a bit of a “back to basics” theme.  Many of the extras that are frequently seen at SQL Saturday events — lots of sponsors, attendee bags and printed materials, speaker shirts, paper session evaluations, and other extras weren’t present.  Instead, the focus was purely on providing a full day of content across multiple tracks, and you know what, that’s just fine.  (Many) free donuts were provided for breakfast and boxed lunches were purchased, and everything was adequate.  The core idea behind SQL Saturday is free training and networking, and the event delivered!  I particularly thought the session lineup for this event was a great mix of topics.

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