I just returned home from a fantastic SQL Saturday in Iowa City. Ed Leighton-Dick (Blog|Twitter) and his team did an excellent job. Many thanks to them and to all of the folks that worked so hard to make this event what it was.

I had the joy of presenting twice. In first time-slot of the day, I co-presented Hailing Frequencies: Analysis Services Terms and Concepts with my friend, Doug Lane (Blog|Twitter). In the final time-slot, I gave my MDX Trek: First Contact presentation. Both went well and I want to thank those who attended these sessions when there were other great topics to choose from. I LOVE presenting and the chance to do it twice at a single event was outstanding.

In addition to presenting, I went to great sessions as well. Ed Leighton-Dick gave an excellent introduction to Service Broker, a topic near and dear to him. It was very clear and concise and provided troubleshooting tips and lessons learned. I also went to a great session by Time Mitchell (Blog|Twitter) on SSIS Incremental Load Design Patterns. In addition to quality content, there was meaningful discussion. I went to Doug Lane’s session, From Minutes to Milliseconds: High-Performance SSRS Tuning. Doug gave great tips on memory/IO as well overall architecture choices. I learned valuable new things in every one of these sessions.

In addition to seeing #sqlfamily down in Iowa, I brought my wife and kids along this time. We stopped at the Field of Dreams baseball field in Dyersville, Iowa on the drive down from Minneapolis. That was really cool. My wife, a far bigger baseball fan than I am, absolutely loved it. Actually, she is watching that movie with my ten-year-old as I type this. 🙂 It was great to turn a SQL Saturday into a mini-vacation for my family as well. If you have a chance to do that some time, I highly recommend it.

SQL Saturday is such an important part of PASS and the overall #sqlfamily. It makes me so happy to see how SQL Saturday has grown so mightily over the years and spread across the world. That wouldn’t happen without people like Ed Leighton-Dick and his team who put in so much work to make these events happen. The people that give so much of themselves to put on these events deserve our Thanks and appreciation. 🙂