SQLSaturday Denmark re-cap

This past Saturday, Microsoft Denmark hosted the first SQLSaturday event in Denmark, orcestrated by Régis Baccaro (blog|twitter) and David Peter Hansen (blog|twitter). I was fortunate enough to be selected as speaker, and was presenting the title “The Power of Custom Assemblies in Analysis Services” which I have blogged about here.

Prior to the event, three prominent guests were each presenting a pre-con. Jen Stirrup (blog|twitter) on “Data Visualisation Deep-Dive using SQL Server 2012”, Denny Cherry (blog|twitter) on “SQL Server 2012 in a Highly Available World” and Mark Rasmussen (blog|twitter) on “A deep dive into the depths of the SQL Server storage engine and MDF file format”. I attended the latter.
The pre-con was a really great, and hard, session on how to decipher the MDF file from SQL Server, using OrcaMDF. Hats of to Mark for doing a hell of a show 🙂

The Friday was finished off with a tour on the Canals of Copenhagen with several of the other speakers and volunteers. After the tour, we went dining at Tony’s, an New York/Italian style restaurant, and it seemed that everbody had a great time. I enjoyed the immediate company of Mark Rasmussen (blog|twitter), Erik Svensen (blog|twitter), Andre Kamman (blog|twitter), Bob Duffy (blog|twitter) and Daniel Lewandowski (LinkedIn) and had plenty of good disussions and red wine during the evening. At 00:30 I signed off…

As far as my own presentation goes, this was my first time presenting on an international stage. And as the room started filling, it struck me what I was about to face. A room full of equally or better talented SQL Server professionals, ready to dissect my presentation.

As we got closer to the beginning of my session, I got more and more nerveous. I think it even showed through, and that’s when it’s too much. I believe you have to have some thrilling sensation going “on stage”, but it’s too much when it interferes with the performance. I’m going to Work on that 🙂
Otherwise I got some really good and qualified questions from the audience and I think I managed to answer all of them to a satisfying degree. All in all I am looking foward to seing the session evaluations.

After the nerve wrecking experience, I was free to attend any session I wanted. At first I just sat in the presenters room, contemplating, going over what had just happened. After a Little while I started to chat with Daniel Lewandowski, who was presenting later on that afternoon on Security in Analysis Services. A topic I’m only too familiar with, ref: Analysis Services Dimension Security. I also got to talk to Mihail Mateev (blog|twitter) who showed me the capabilities of the Infragistics suite. Very impressive. I have been using the Infragistics suite in earlier Work situations, but haven’t had a chance to look at it for the last couple of years. They haven’t been sitting on their hands in the meanwhile, I can tell you that much.
I missed a couple of sessions, but gained connections and insight into components and tech anyhow, so that’s kinda of a win anyhow.
I went of to attend the session on security in Analysis Services and saw that Daniel Lewandowski did an excellent job presenting the topic. He got jinxed by what I believe is a bug in SSMS, so he had to redo some steps in his demo. But he kept his calm and got through in style. In between this session and the last, I tended to my volunteer duties, got to chat with other attendees and got a feeling of the general mood the approx. 150 attendees. As the last seesion of the day, I went to see my old boss, Erik Svensen who did a brilliant presentation on “Design a metro style dashboard in Excel & PowerPivot“.

Finally the raffle was held, and the sponsors could hand over some really really cool presents to the Winners. A mountain bike valued at app. $2000 was by many seen as the main prize, but two courses, and iPad mini, a Nokia Lumia 920, a ride in a Ferrari, an Xbox and big bowl of candies was accepted by the individual Winners with just as much joy.

After spending 3 hours on cleaning the volunteers and some of the remaining speakers went to dine at Wokbaren, a Thai inspired restaurant in the center of Copenhagen. Here I got to chat with Niko Neugebauer (blog|twitter) with whom I’d talked to at past SQLRally Nordic, and to my surprise, he remembered our conversation in great, almost creepy, detail 🙂
After finishing dinner the party broke up, some going for a night in town, and others for a night in bed. I was on the latter team.

In hindsight, I am very happy to have been a part of the volunteers who made such an effort, and was paid a smashing event in return. It’s not my last SQL Saturday, and certainly not my last as volunteer. I can only hope, that if I apply another SQLSaturday, that I get to speak again. That was an awsome experience. Now I’m going to catch up with the latest episode of Game of Thrones 😀