Tag: Atlanta (Page 1 of 2)

Data Saturday Recap: #28 – Atlanta, GA

October 2, 2022 / jpries

I attended my first Data Saturday, this past Saturday — Data Saturday #28 – Atlanta, GA. Data Saturdays are the successor to SQL Saturdays and this was the first one of those in Atlanta since the pandemic shutdowns of 2020.

Being the first event since the pandemic shutdowns, it was a smaller event than the mega events of the past, but that didn’t hinder its quality. The event was held at the Atlanta Station Microsoft office — my first time visiting this office (prior events were held at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta).

I appreciate the hard work of the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and speakers and thank you for putting on a great event!

Matthew Roche presenting “The Unplanned Career: 25 Years in Tech Without a 3 Year Plan”

Matt Gordon presenting “This is Fine – Firefighting for the DBA”

Joey D’Antoni presenting “Understanding Azure Active Directory for Data Professionals”

Tim Rayburn presenting “Help Your Teams Avoid Burnout and Apathy”

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

October 22, 2019 / jpries

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.

SQL Saturday Recap: #845 – Atlanta, GA

May 21, 2019 / jpries

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)!

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

September 28, 2018 / jpries

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.

Atlanta Azure DataFest #1 Recap

August 20, 2018 / jpries

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.

SQL Saturday Recap: #733 – Atlanta, GA

May 25, 2018 / jpries

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!

Fun Local User Group Presentations – 2017

August 26, 2017 / jpries

Going through my notes, I thought I’d highlight some of the most fun or innovative local user group presentations I’ve been to so far this year.

Atlanta is fortunate to have many user groups, two specifically which I attend are the “Atlanta MDF” user group which usually meets the 2nd Monday of each month, and is typically focused more on the core SQL Server technologies and the “Atlanta BI” user group which usually meets the last Monday of each month and is focused on BI-specific topics. There are a number of other user groups, such as .NET and Excel, but its hard to find time to visit them all on a regular basis.

It is common for each user group meeting to have a main event, which is usually a speaker speaking on a topic for 1 – 1.5 hours or so. While it is great whenever anyone wants to volunteer their time to teach others, there have been a couple this year that really stood out to me, either for their creativity, content, or “fun” factor.

In March, a couple of the guys from Slalom, Dave Tangren and Nelson Davis, gave a talk on the benefits of Power BI vs. Tableau at the Atlanta BI meeting. This is interesting in of itself since these two products are direct competitors which are in an active battle, but what made this presentation really fun was that they modeled it as a political debate, with each product being a candidate. They had a moderator who would ask questions and then each candidate would give his answer. A really creative way to present this information!

Dave Tangren and Nelson Davis presenting “Comparing Power BI to Tableau” at the Atlanta BI March Meeting.

In April, Mike Bruce and Alex Higgins from Acuity Brands presented “Using Power BI to Track Software Development Performance,” in which they talked about their experiences using Power BI to connect to Visual Studio Online’s TFS repository to track their Agile projects. This was very interesting for a number of reasons — the integration between these sources of data, what they were trying to accomplish (and the road they’d traveled so far to get there) and their projects in general. Completely unrelated to Power BI, the store of how Acuity had transitioned from a manufacturing company (manufacturing lighting) to a software company (developing highly intelligent lighting technology, including lights which interface with retail store apps to locate a person in a store) was very interesting.

In August, Rob Collie presented “Ten Things Power BI Can Do For You” at the Atlanta MDF August Meeting. In this talk, Rob gave a history of Power Pivot (Project Gemini) from his time at Microsoft as well as his experiences in transitioning to a consulting organization specializing in Power Pivot. The entire presentation was non-technical and talked about the benefits of using Power Pivot (and DAX) with or without Power BI. A very interesting topic and Rob was a very good speaker, not afraid to call things as they are. I got a bit of an Office Space vibe from the style (in a good way!) I highly recommend you check out one of Rob’s presentations if he ever presents again in the area!

Rob Collie presenting “Ten Things Power BI Can Do For You” at the Atlanta MDF August Meeting.

Those are a few of the presentations from local user groups which have really stood out to me so far this year. Here’s to hoping for many more excellent presentations to come!

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

December 12, 2016 / jpries

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.

SQL Saturday Recap: #521 – Atlanta, GA

May 22, 2016 / jpries

SQL Saturday Roundup: #521 – Atlanta, GA

This past Saturday marked the annual event that many of us look forward to all year long. Called by some to be the “Summit of the South,” SQL Saturday Atlanta is always a large and very professionally run event which draws hordes of SQL Server Professionals nationwide. Again, this year, the event did not disappoint. Despite the initial overcast and rainy weather which opened up the day, a record number of 590 attendees attended this awesome event!

For the second year in a row, I volunteered my time to help make the event as great as it could be. For the first time in the past few years, I was did not attend any of the event’s preconference sessions, which typically run all day on Friday. That being said, the sessions that were being given were excellent topics which were presented by some truly great speakers. I’m sure everyone who attended learned a ton and had a great time.

While I didn’t attend any preconference sessions on Friday, SQL Saturday Atlanta did still begin for me on Friday when I headed over to the site Friday afternoon to begin helping with prep. We had a great group of organizers and volunteers onsite to perform the bag stuffing and venue setup. Additionally, this year, the decision was made to pre-print all of the attendee admission tickets, name badges, and raffle tickets (rather than relying on attendees to pre-print their items at home prior to the event to bring them with). This allowed for nicer name badges and perforated raffle tickets to be used, but was a very laborious process collating and assembling the packets for the morning’s registration. I ended up spending all of my time Friday afternoon helping out with the registration packet assembly process.

SQL Saturday Recap: #477 – Atlanta, GA (BI Edition)

January 13, 2016 / jpries

SQL Saturday Roundup: #477 – Atlanta, GA (BI Edition)

This past Saturday marked a great landmark for Atlanta — the first “BI Edition” SQL Saturday, and, for many of us, our first SQL Saturday of 2016! Atlanta has been hosting a regular SQL Saturday event for many years now, always with tremendous attendance. Based on the amount of interest in the regular SQL Saturday (usually around May of each year), it was great to see a BI focused edition launched.

With the regular event in the Spring, having this event in January was a great way to space out the two Atlanta events probably about as equally as they could be. And, for a first event, it seemed to be a tremendous success with a registration wait list and around 300 in attendance.

The event was held at the local Microsoft facility in Alpharetta, GA, where the monthly Atlanta MDF user group meetings are held. All told, the facility was a pretty good choice of venue (and definitely a convenient location), but suffered from some overcrowding. The facility had about half the sessions in roughly classroom sized rooms and half the sessions in much smaller conference room sized rooms. While these smaller rooms made for an interesting and more intimate setting, they ultimately filled up very quickly.

Unlike many SQL Saturdays, the event kicked off with an opening keynote and presentation in the large room (multiple rooms joined together technically). I enjoy it when a SQL Saturday begins with some sort of all-attendee opening remarks, it provides nice symmetry to the event (which always has a final closing remarks session), so hopefully more events will adopt this.

Dandy Weyn presenting the opening remarks at SQL Saturday Atlanta 2016, BI Edition.