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 
