The long overdue review of SQLSaturday #333 St. Louis

Wow, that was completely unexpected.  Almost a month has gone by since I attended St. Louis' SQLSaturday (#333) and it was a blast!  It totally deserved a review sooner than this, but work and home just swamped me ever since.  So, here's a brief rundown that I'm putting together in five minutes...

First off, I got to volunteer and I don't think I could have gotten in with a nicer group of folks dedicated to making the day great!  They really had made the day, as without the facilitation of the event, it would've devolved into chaos.  I got to hand out shirts to all the attendees, which was also great because I got to meet not only people from St. Louis, but from all over the country.  That blew my mind that they were able to come in and learn, as I've only been able to attend when it's been in town (as now I've attended two in two different cities).

The presentations were great overall.  Each deserves more than the little I go over here, so make sure to find these either online or see if the people are presenting them somewhere else:

• Agile Development with Aaron Stanley King: being an agile practitioner myself (practicing, not a master by any stretch) I was hoping to get some methodology with Aaron's presentation, but it tended towards overall good practices in code development.  The high point for me was hearing about using CLR in a stored procedure will protect the code by showing blank when looked at in system.  This made me want to read more about it.
• Partition Management with Dan Guzman:  I had heard Dan talk about this same topic this summer at a user meeting, and it's great for mega data situations.  He's really on top of database management today.
• Pivots/Unpivots in SQL with Jeff Foushee: Pivots are a topic that leave me mystified, and Jeff did a terrific job in explaining what really happens behind the scenes.
• Intro to file tables in 2012 with Warren Sifre: I got a chance to talk with Warren as we attended sessions together, he's a huge wealth of knowledge, and a great guy.  File tables bridge the gap to the windows explorer, which was mind blowing to learn about and I hope an opportunity comes up for me to work with them in the future.

We closed out the day and while I wished I could have attended the after celebration, I had to get home.  Please do not hesitate to get to SQLSaturday in your own area, or if one isn't coming, get involved with your local user group to make it happen.  It's well worth the investment.

Woof woof,

Jason