• December 2023. Holiday Dinner
• April 2024. Happy Hour
• May 2024. Meetup (Fabric)
• June 2024. Happy Hour
• August 2024. Happy Hour
• September 2024. Happy Hour
• October 2024. SQLSaturday Orlando
• December 2024. Holiday Dinner
• May 2025. Happy Hour
• July 2025. Meetup (Migrating to Azure)
• August 2025. Happy Hour
• October 2025. SQLSaturday Orlando
• December 2025. Holiday Dinner

Meetups (traditional user group meetings) continue to be a challenge. Our average attendance is about 10 except when the topic is PowerBI/Fabric and then it jumps to 20-30. We’re lucky to have a stable venue (about our 10th one over 20 years) thanks to Chris Lagreca, but even with that organizing a meetup takes effort and I think as with most groups we struggle with the effort to reward ratio. I think having one or two a year is a reasonable/sustainable goal.

By comparison, our Happy Hour meetings (and the Holiday Dinner where we encourage plus ones to attend) are easy. We use the same bar & grill for all of them. Good parking, center of Orlando’ish, affordable, and they are easy going about setting aside space for us on their covered patio. All we have to do is add the event to Meetup and call the restaurant to let them know we’re coming. No speaker, no sponsor, no projector. Attendance is 10 to 15 people, with a few regulars and a lot of new faces each time. On average we’re there two hours, sometimes it will stretch to three depending on who is there. We’ve been targeting one per quarter which seems about right. These always seem to happen on days when work has been long and tiring and I’d rather just have quiet time, but I go anyway and it never fails to help me recharge.

Related to that, Doug has been customizing the logo using AI which I think is a great application. Not something we’d want to spend time or money on, but it does make the message more interesting. Example below, and you can see a few more at https://www.meetup.com/sqlorlando/events/past/.

SQLSaturday remains our key event measured by attendance and value provided. Attendance is still down compared to pre-Covid, averaging 150-175 each year, but for me that’s still a win and is the new normal. Our partnership with Seminole State College remains strong. Aside from having to provide an insurance certificate (about $125) the venue is free and we work hard to maintain the relationship. We no longer do the Student to IT Pro seminar for students. It was a fun and valuable, but it was basically running a second event on the same day. It was a bit of a relief when the college said that we could stop, preferring to just do a targeted session for students mixed into the schedule. We’ve also stopped doing printed raffle tickets as part of simplifying the event logistics. They added value, but they also added real work. Overall, we’re trying to produce an event that delivers value in a way that we can sustain over many more years. That doesn’t mean that some years we won’t do more, but I can’t say enough that even the simplest things take time, and it all adds up for the organizer and event team.

I think all of that adds up to something that is valuable to the local community and sustainable by a few key volunteers.

We’ll be at our usual venue this year, Seminole State College just north of Orlando. Doug Leal (LinkedIn) is leading the effort after putting in a lot of time learning the ropes for the past two years. I’m excited to see what he comes up with and pleased that we’re getting back to our pattern of rotating the task (and privilege) of making it happen.

I’ll still be lightly involved in the planning and will definitely be at the event, but looking forward to not having to juggle home, work, and executing the event this year.

• Speaker party was well attended, but an especially noisy venue (sports bar). Good to have time to talk, but the noise level was tiring
• Main event was on June 3rd. A nice start start to summer!
• Event was held at Nova Southeastern University as usual, but there was a last minute (week) change to the building, with the new destination being directly next door in the library, adding maybe 2-3 minutes walk from the garage. Didn’t seem like this had a negative impact on the attendees finding it.
• The event was the same day as graduation so traffic was much, much heavier than usual. Parking seemed to work out, but took more time than on a normal weekend. Adding to it, all the graduates and families were walking by the library to get the auditorium. It’s easy to miss these sort of collisions (when SQLOrlando was meeting downtown we had to be very mindful of events at the arena that would saturate parking).
• The library as the venue worked out ok, could have been better implemented. A big part of that was of course the last minute change. Anytime you host an event at some place new it’s a real effort to figure out how the traffic will flow and how to make it work with the rooms available to you. Check-in was on the second floor along with coffee and the sponsor tables, most sessions were on the first floor, and couple were on the third floor.
• I delivered my session as the first of the day, no AV issues for me, and lots of good questions. I think I saw Richie Rump in the back of the room!
• Lunch was a fairly plain boxed lunch. It was free for as a speaker, was edible, but was not exciting. My guess is they used the catering on campus, but not sure.
• 32 sessions this year, starting at 9 am and running through 4pm followed by the raffle. Not a huge schedule, but good variety and I like it when the day ends a little early
• I’m not sure of the attendance, definitely felt lower than in previous years. I’m sure part of that was the COVID hiatus and part was the event team was stretched to get it all done while balancing personal and work commitments. That’s ok, all around. A bunch of people got a nice day of training and I appreciate – always – the effort it takes to make an event happen and it was a happy thing to see South Florida resume!
• I spent a couple hours after lunch in the open study area on the second floor just talking with people as they had time to stop with a range of topics from technical to work to event logistics to sponsors to buying new vehicles. That was for me the best part of the day, the chance for a calm and quiet conversation.

Overall a good event and now I have a few months until SQLSaturday in Orlando in October.

They had three precons this year. I didn’t go as I drove up Friday afternoon, arriving early enough that I had time to try a new coffee place before going to the Friday night speaker party at a non-chain sub shop. I had a pretty good cheesesteak and after a couple of hours of good conversation called it a night. Earlier than I would have pre-Covid and perhaps also due in part to working fully remote and spending most of my work days on calls, I had less energy for extended conversation.

On Saturday morning I stopped for coffee, then headed to UNF and followed the usual signs to the garage. It’s a decent sized campus and there is more than one route to the event building from the garage, I think this is one place where a few more signs would be good.

We were supposed to meet at 8:45 for a speaker photo and that sort of happened, not full attendance but some. Not my favorite time as my session was at 9 am and I like to be in the room well ahead, both to get in presenter mindset and to greet earlier arrivals. That said, it’s hard to find a time that’s good for all the speakers. Lunch is busy and often not all the speakers have arrived, at the end of the day some will have left early. Maybe multiple options and show up for one might be a better plan.

A few more morning thoughts. The building was pretty warm when I arrived. That’s not uncommon, a lot of facilities turn the temperature up or the AC entirely off at night, the key is to make sure it’s turned on early enough for a special weekend event (or turned on at all). It warm enough that the chocolate on the donuts was melting down the sides. I’m going to skip the temptation to google the melting point for Dunkin chocolate covered donuts.

I had about 15 people attend my session on installing and configuring SQL. It’s meant to be a good primer for a total beginner that has never installed it and an inspiration/road map for those that manage SQL and haven’t really dug into the value of automating or looked at all the options for doing the automation. That went well and it was a good start to the day.

I went for more coffee, but alas, there was none. Luckily my family was with me on the trip so I could get delivery on another large coffee. Running out of coffee isn’t necessarily a fail. I’s entirely fair to say we have coffee (or donuts, or whatever) until it’s gone. It’s all about setting expectations and unless you set them, the attendees will expect whatever they think is normal or was at the last event or whatever.

From there I went to Architecting Zero Downtime Database Deployments by this guy I know. It’s an interesting topic and one that is still bleeding edge as far as I can tell. It’s interesting to listen to the questions as they start to realize that a lot is possible in this space. Not easy, but not impossible either. It’s also another place where perfect (always deploy zero down time) is hard, but doing it most of the time and still taking an outage when it’s easier/faster/safer is a much more achievable approach.

The rest of the day was smooth. Lunch was boxes from Panera, ice cream (Kilwins I think?), and lots of time to chat with old friends and attendees with follow up questions. I didn’t tour the sponsors this year which is unusual for me, but I wanted this to be mostly fun and not much work (finding sponsors for Orlando) or obligation. That said, there seemed to be having plenty of people stopping to see the sponsors.

The end of day wrap and raffle was in a building just across from the main event building in a large classroom. It felt like more people were present than last year. Lots of raffle prizes, Red Bull, and tshirts via the cannon. Easily 250 plus attended the event, which had an incredible 66 sessions across 11 rooms. No major complaints and even the coffee is a minor one. Jeff Taylor and the volunteers ran a solid and fun event. Jeff is putting a lot into SQL Jax as well as the Florida SQL community and is willing and eager to share both ideas and enthusiasm – if you run into him it’s worth spending some time to chat. As far as I know he’s the only one in Florida (or anywhere) that has figured out how to get his events on highway billboards.

I skipped the after party, ready for some quiet time by then, and had a nice dinner at The Bearded Pig. Events are always a mini vacation for me and while I hate to miss out on any part of the experience, I’ve grown to be ok with taking some time to do other stuff.

This was a low intensity year for us, by design. I didn’t have a lot of extra time and energy to put into it compared to most years and we knew going in that were probably going to be in the 100-150 range so it would be a smaller event. Doug Leal, Kendal Van Dyke, and Mike Antonovich all helped out, with a great assist from Adolfo Santiago on event day.

We did have a hurricane this year, about 2 weeks prior to the event and we paused marketing for a week, that may have had some impact on the final attendance but as far as storm recovery it was pretty much complete in our area. Just the nature of October in Florida that you might have a storm.

We used Sessionize for speaker and session management, Eventbrite for event registration, and Paypal for sponsors. I still miss the integrated tools from way back, but it works. I would say sponsor management is the hardest task between having to manually set up PayPal items, adding logos to the event site and getting them somewhat sized correctly, and tracking the list/lunch needs.

Sponsors this year were Cozyroc, Solarwinds, Quest, Redgate, SQLGrease, and Microsoft. I really appreciate sponsors continuing to join our event while we’re trying to build back to the old attendance levels.

The only thing we tried differently this year was our student seminar. In previous years we ran a separate registration and had the seminar in a separate building, inviting them to attend SQLSaturday after their morning session was done. This year we had just the single registration and had in the same building, though on a different floor. We had about 20 attend, lower than the usual 50-70. Doug and Gina Meronek did a great job delivering content to the students at a level right for them. Lots of good comments from the students and staff on the effort.

Most things went well. The Friday night volunteer dinner was well attended. We had BBQ for lunch and we had plenty of food. We had more than 30 people at the after party, far more than the 10-15 we expected. We ordered 15 dozen donuts and at the end there was one whole donut and two halves left, so we were pretty close on the count for those.

Of course not everything went well. We ran out of lanyards early because I left one box at home. We had one AV issue that we resolved by moving to one of our spare rooms. We had coffee left over for once because we ran out of cups sometime late in the morning and while we got more, less coffee interest after lunch. The most painful issue was that when I set up Eventbrite this year I used the “add-on” feature for the paid lunch option. Worked well enough, but when I downloaded the file I didn’t check the formatting and printed all the raffle tickets but no lunch tickets. I printed the lunch tickets separately and that was fine, but one extra bit of of stuff to manage.

Thank you to the speakers for attending and helping out, as always you make it possible for us to have a SQLSaturday.

We’ve set a registration goal of 300 and an actual attendance goal of 150, about 60% of a great year for us. If we see the registration numbers go substantially higher we’ll probably look to add a track to our current schedule of five tracks of five sessions each. The schedule has been published and this week we’ll start to really work on registration and sponsorship.

We’ll have our usual basic breakfast of coffee plus donuts. No sandwiches for lunch this year, it will be all out BBQ (and a vegetarian option) and we’re hoping to have many of our speakers working the lunch line. Definitely some kind of mid to late afternoon snack too!

We’re taking the Student to IT Pro seminar we always run for students and bringing it into the same building with SQLSaturday as we attempt to simplify logistics and try to really give them the sense of attending an industry event. Normally we run a completely separate registration, but this year it will be all done via the SQLSaturday registration with a checkbox to indicate they are students. They’ll attend four student focused sessions in the morning (not on the schedule yet) and then have the option to stay for the rest of the day.

We decided against pre-cons this year; they are a lot of work and a gamble in the best of years. Related to that, if you want to present a pre-con (which is a great experience to do at least once) consider adding your name to the list at https://callfordataspeakers.com/precon.

So far we haven’t figured out the “something new” to try this year. Definitely an emphasis on just doing the basics to support the event. We’re trying to do as much of the work as we can as a team on evening calls, feels less lonely and is a good way to knowledge share too.

The speaker/volunteer dinner was held at Angies Subs. It’s been in business a long time and has quite the eclectic decor, maybe a slightly less eclectic menu. We lined up to place our orders, then moved to the next line to order a drink and anything else we wanted. It moved fairly quickly and from what I saw all the orders came out correct. Easy to find, parking was good, and reasonably priced, all good things for a Friday dinner. Driving back to the hotel I looped through the campus of UNF and saw the direction signs were out already, nice to have it done instead of rushing around Saturday morning.

Saturday I was on site before 9 am and it all seemed normal. Lots of people, coffee, donuts, and sponsors too! Easily a dozen sponsors, a positive sign for resuming events nationwide. I watched Steve Jones talk about pipelines at 9 and at 10:15 I did a presentation on Devops for the DBA, a topic that makes everyone sit up a little when I talk about delivering database changes while customers continue to use the app – far different than taking an outage to make changes.

Lunch was boxed meals from Panera consisting of a sandwich, chips, and a cookie, plus plenty of soda and water (but sadly, no iced tea). Easy logistics, the meals were in a room off of the main hallway, a volunteer collecting tickets and pointing people to the right stack for their meal selection. A little bit of a wait, but not enough to be an issue.

After lunch still seemed to be a good crowd, not much of a drop off. I chatted with maybe half of the sponsors, all were having a good day and were glad to be back, and were excited about doing more. Around 2:30 they had the usual ice cream break from Kilwins, I think a choice of six flavors plus a table in the hallway with sprinkles and other toppings. The line for this moved somewhat slower, but most people are patient for ice cream.

At the end of the day we all gathered in the auditorium in the next building. Lots of thank yous to volunteers and sponsors, but the next part was the hit – the t-shirt cannon. Powered by compressed air, performance varied from close to fail where the rolled up t-shirt came apart and only went a couple rows to almost catastrophe as some narrowly avoided the overhead mounted projectors on the way to bouncing off the back wall. It definitely engaged the crowd and while I wouldn’t call it dangerous (other than worrying about projectors), if someone takes a t-shirt to the face it’s going to sting some. I’d be much for enthusiastic about doing it outside, but it did add a lot of excitement to the end of the day. Lots of prizes from sponsors to be given away which always take a while, but everyone stayed until the end.

The after party was at Buffalo Wild Wings in their screened patio and again, a good location. Close to the event, good parking, and the event provided a bunch of food (everything fried except carrots and celery) and drinks. It started around 6 pm and there still some people there when I left around 9:30.

Typical attendance in Jacksonville is 350-400, this year it was 222. So still down somewhat from pre-Covid and hard to know what the new normal will be, but as we start to plan for SQLSaturday Orlando I think our target will be about 50% of the old normal (usually 250-275, so we’ll shoot for 12-150). South Florida is hoping to have a SQLSaturday in August and I look forward to seeing those numbers as another hint of what should expect in October here.

Aside from the line for ice cream, everything went fine. Well organized, everyone good natured and having a good time. A few people wearing masks and I saw no issues related to that (the good natured crowd again). Kudos to Jeff Taylor and the volunteers for providing a wonderful event.

• It’s been less than a year since PASS folded, but seems like much longer
• The biggest difference between 2020 and 2021 was cost (not counting the change of ownership!) as the event this year was free
• Back in June 2020 as the PASS Board was trying to make a decision about cancelling the Summit or going virtual and how to stretch the money, how many of them were thinking that they would need to stretch to 2022 (or later) to get back to a normal revenue stream?

On to this year:

• Redgate ran the event for the first time and it was a decent effort, easily the equal of the virtual Summit last year as far as content and experience
• As I mentioned above it was free. Free is good! I’ll be interested to see what next year brings. Will it be paid in-person and free online?
• No option to stay logged in, a minor annoyance
• Lots of filtering options, but not quite the view I wanted somehow. I like being able to see the whole schedule even if I have to scroll in whatever direction.
• As far as I could tell few or no sessions were actually delivered live. The live ones were just not available until the start time. I get the risk of poor connectivity ruining a session, but still…a little blah.
• Options to speed up play was just 2x. Something like 1.1 or 1.2 would have been nice. If I’m going to watch a video, I want to be able to move along when it’s stuff I know, don’t care about, or just seems to be taking more time than I want it to
• No waiting room for live sessions. It seemed like you could only get in 1-2 minutes prior to start. Aggravating to have to refresh, and a miss as far as using that as networking/chat time with the people queued to enter.
• No transcripts. Ah, for synchronized transcripts! Also, the captioning was just ok. Can’t it be tuned for technical talks? The strangest miss I saw was “memory grants” being shown as “mammary glands”.
• Sponsor sessions weren’t called out. Why not tag this and leave it up to the attendee?
• Q&A live sessions were scheduled on Wed when it wasn’t clear you should have watched the recorded presentation first. The upside though was that while it was time boxed, I hear that it wasn’t enforced so a speaker could take more questions if they wanted to.
• Not all sessions had decks or attachments loaded at the time of the presentation
• No opening night ceremony, the one thing I missed compared to the 2020 event
• All the content was available by the end of the event. That’s sooo much better than for live events where it’s a month or more for video to get processed.
• The community zone was never well attended in the the times I dropped in. The most I saw was around 50 people and usually much less. The SQLSaturday room seemed to be the most popular, but I’m guessing that was because it was often the only room with people in it.
• The spatial chat software was decent. I struggle to remember what they used last year, but this seemed better. Takes a couple minutes to figure out. If you haven’t tried it, it’s worth a look.
• As far as presentations the thing I noticed the most was the varying degrees of sound quality, both across sessions and within sessions. I think you notice this kind of thing far more when going from video to video directly. It was never so bad as to be unusable or really even annoying (as long as you’re not expecting professionally produced video, which I’d say is not the goal of this event at this time).
• Another thing I noticed was the varying backdrops when the presenter was viewable. Some were too plain, some were too busy. No right answer here!
• Nice list of evaluations to complete based on sessions you entered and they move to “done” as you do them (though I didn’t do them all). One suggestion would be to put them on one page so I can score more quickly and think about relative scoring too.

The Great

• Free! Seriously, it makes it accessible to a LOT of people that couldn’t pay the $600 fee last year
• Content available for six months, all in one easy to find place.
• The event happened. It sure seemed in doubt back in the dark days of January when PASS folded
• It all worked

The Not So Good

• Networking remains an after thought. It needs far more than bolting on a chat application and thinking “networking done”.
• Didn’t really feel like an “event”. No emcee, no common thread. If you’ve been to the in-person event you can project that Summit frame of mind on to it, to a degree I guess.

Best Session Awards (as picked by me!)

• What Are You Worth by Doug Lane. This was a combination of a great talk about a complex topic combined with picking the right way to present it. Doug skipped the slides and looked into the camera and talked to you. If you’re running a user group, you should ask Doug to present this.
• “Black Arts” Index Maintenance – LOBs – Defragmented by Default by Jeff Moden. Jeff has his own style and focus and you can see all of that in this session. If you’re using LOB’s, this is worth watching.
• Become a Contributor to Microsoft Docs by William Assaf. Perhaps the smoothest session I watched. Lots and lots of good information, questions anticipated and answered, and not least, engaged me enough to make a note at some point to submit a PR on a doc just to see it all work. There’s some really interesting stuff here as far architecture, process, marketing, and more. Take a chance on this one, I think you’ll find it worthwhile.
• Day 3 Keynote — 5 Ways the Cloud Impacts Your Career by Brent Ozar. Brent delivered a thoughtful talk and found some good analogies to support his points, all without slides and no marketing. I also think it set a decent bar for what the Day 3 keynote should be going forward.

Next Year

• Supposed to be a hybrid with the physical event in Seattle. Dates and cost not yet announced and hoping it’s announced soon to give people time to work on the budget request.
• I’m curious how having a virtual option (free or reduced cost) impacts how hard it is to get businesses to approve sending people in person.
• Assuming things are the same or better, I’m planning to attend in-person.

The journey started at the end of 2020. We wrote up our plan for 2021 knowing there were a lot of unknowns, but hoping things would improve enough to resume doing the things we used to do as a local group and that included organizing a SQLSaturday. As this year has progressed attendance at our virtual meetings dropped, as did our enthusiasm for having them. Enthusiasm matters a lot when it comes to volunteer work and while I know many of you like the virtual format, it’s just not what I want to do. That narrowed the option list to having an in-person SQLSaturday or not doing one at all, not a great range of choices.

We usually start planning in May with the goal of opening up the event on June 1st for a mid October date. We know we can push that start date out to July 1st, but after that – in a normal year – it’s harder to get speakers and sponsors because of the busy fall event schedule. When I looked at the state of COVID in late May things were looking better, there were no local restrictions, and total vaccinations were still trending up nicely. Here’s a chart from the CDC for Seminole County (population is about 450k) where we have the event:

Thinking that having an in-person event in the fall seemed doable, I had lunch with our contact from the local college that has hosted all of our previous events, something we do each year to go over the plan and any changes or new ideas to either SQLSaturday or the parallel Student to IT Pro event we run. This year they had no idea what the fall would bring – they still had no official guidance as far as planning for their own classes and until that was decided it made no sense to even talk about hosting an event there. It wasn’t a no, it was an honest we-don’t-know. I decided to wait until July 1 and hope that the situation improved, having a strong preference for both sticking with a location that everyone knew and for not paying for space in an uncertain year.

By early July the situation was unchanged. We could wait and hope that eventually the college was a “yes” and then figure out what date might work, or see if we could find space elsewhere. It made sense to look at options and it didn’t take long to determine that free space was going to be difficult to book because no one wanted to deal with having a lot of people on site. I also found out that paid space was hard to find because it was rapidly being booked up, everyone thinking that by October we would be closer to normal. You can spend a lot of time talking to hotels; it’s rarely one call. Eventually I had two reasonable options, one in early October that I would grade as ok, one in late October that was really great. My goal was to stick to October, we’ve always slowed things down in November as people start to focus on the holidays.

At the time I was calling the prices were about the same as always, $500 for a room that would seat 50 to 100 people theater style (that means chairs side by side, you can also ask for classroom or round tables, but they reduce the room capacity). That’s $500 per room, plus a 23% service fee plus 7% local tax (those two combined are what the hotel trade refers to as “plus plus”). We’re tax exempt so we wouldn’t have to pay the 7% tax. AV from the hotel was $375 per room, plus plus. Wifi was not included, basically pay per user. Food was optional but you can’t bring your own food in. Coffee was $55/gallon, pastries were $30/dozen, a boxed lunch was $23-$25, and a seated lunch was $27-35 (plus plus!). My first estimate for four rooms, AV, coffee/pastries, and lunch was around $9,000. Not a good plan.

I spent at least a week wrestling with defining the scope and the options. We typically run 8 to 10 tracks at the college and plan for 250-300 attendees. At $500++ per room it wasn’t feasible for us to do 8 rooms and it seemed reasonable to guess that attendance would be somewhat less than normal (but how much?). Four rooms gave us a max capacity of 200 and also lowered the number of speakers we would need, which in turn lowers the cost. I thought that in the worst case we’d rely on local/Florida speakers and might have some do more than one session, but I also thought we would get some from out of state. Aiming for 20 instead of 50 seemed like the right direction. Paying $375 per room for AV was just too much, we could borrow or just buy projectors, with the biggest pain point having to set them up and tear them down (at the college it’s all just there, no effort). Interestingly there was no requirement to sign a contract that included hotel room nights, they treated them as two different things – be super wary of having a room commitment, it can really change your financial risk.

The real sticking point was the food cost. Normally we provide coffee and donuts and bananas at no cost and ask attendees to pay $10 for lunch. If we went with lunch on site we would have to ask for $25-30 per person for lunch. How many would pay that? We normally provide lunch for speakers, so we have to add that cost in. The hotel won’t let you wildly adjust the number either, you’re committed to x meals. One way was to just offer it as an option and see, the other was to just send everyone out for lunch. We’ve always had lunch on site, so it was hard to consider giving that up.

Going down this path is all about money. I had no idea if any sponsors would participate, so I was working on the assumption that we would have to cover all the costs. We’ve worked hard to save money for times like this, but I was also unsure what the following year would bring so I didn’t want us to be back at zero. I had in mind a maximum budget of about $5,000 and to spend less if sponsors decided to skip this year. $5k is a pretty serious constraint when the cost for the meeting space will be $2460. After a bunch of iterations and guessing about a lot of things, the proposed plan was something like this:

• 4 rooms, max attendance of 200
• 20 speakers max, no shirts
• no lunch on site
• coffee definitely, pastries if we were ok on budget
• provide our own AV
• speaker party
• limit to $5k spend
• no afternoon treat
• no big room for an event finale
• go minimalist
• learn as much as we can from the changes
• had to be done at 4 pm so they could rent the meeting space for evening events

There were a couple intangibles I was thinking about too. SQLSaturday is a lot of work and much of it is around breakfast and lunch. Having the event at a hotel greatly reduces the volunteer workload. We’ve run a student seminar as our ‘give back’ to the college for the past few years and it’s fun and absolutely worth doing, but it’s one more thing to coordinate and this year it was nice to have less to do.

As you read that you’re perhaps thinking, ok, it’s a plan, nothing to see here. For me though, it was frustrating to get there. Guesses I’m ok with, but doing less than previous years was a bitter pill, especially not providing lunch. I’m not saying that’s logical, at all, but it was tough to do less. As much as I often say that the perfect is the enemy of the good, it took some effort for me to get comfortable with the compromises. With still no word from the college, I signed the contract for the hotel with the better space and the Oct 30th date, not appreciating that some would be celebrating Halloween a day early.

Here’s what meeting area at the hotel looks like:

Decision made and die cast, the next step was to set up the SQLSaturday site. SQLSaturday the brand survived the collapse of PASS, being acquired by Redgate and then transferred to SQLSaturday Inc which is in the process of becoming a non-profit and separate from Redgate. What didn’t survive the collapse was the source code for the tools. The final discussion on whether to rebuild them in some form is still ongoing, but the present state of things is to just have a way to get a site going. It’s all hosted on Github and the configuration is all done using a yaml file, you can see the one for Orlando here. Fill in the blanks, submit a PR, and a few minutes later the updates are live. That gives you a static site, but it doesn’t give you registration, a way for speakers to submit sessions, or a way to collect sponsor funds. If you loved what the tools used to do you’ll be missing stuff. If you chafed at the restrictions that the tools imposed then things are looking up!

For registration I went with Eventbrite. I’ve used it a lot, it has a rich set of options if you want to collect money for lunch or whatever, and you can easily download the attendee list (critical for raffle tickets). You can see what I did here, basically putting all the info they needed to know in the event description. Easy to use, I’d go with this again next time unless something much better came along. The obvious alternative is Meetup, but it’s much harder to get data out for raffle tickets and the fees are higher if you are collecting money for lunch.

For the call for speakers and the schedule creation Sessionize was the easy choice. The first time you have to learn how it works, but it has more than enough features for what most of us need. Lots of flexibility arounds schedule creation (sessions can start at different times!) and a built in way to message speakers. Sessionize is free if the event is free (details here). It worked great.

For sponsor management, I didn’t see a good option. I was originally thinking to use a separate Eventbrite. It would be easy to set up sponsor levels as tickets and the event description would be the sponsor plan. The downsides are the fees, it’s about 2.5% higher than PayPal, and you don’t get the money until after the event. I went with PayPal because I thought many events would take that path and it works, but it has its own downsides – you have to create the sku’s for sponsor levels (not terrible), you have to host the sponsor plan somewhere else (I dropped ours here on the blog, but it probably should have gone into the repo), and no easy way to email the sponsors as a group, you have to track them somewhere else. I think right now I’d opt for Eventbrite next time, but I wish there was a better solution. As far as the SQLSaturday site you have to update the yaml with the sponsor name, url, and url to the logo, another small bit of friction.

Not at all a bad experience to get things ready to go, but far different than what we used to have. With all of that in place, Steve Jones broadcast the call for speakers to the list he has been building and I scraped through past years emails to build a sponsor list (plus contacts introduced to me by Steve Rezhener, thank you!), definitely missing the auto announce functionality we used to have. Now we could coast a bit and see what happened. A shout out here to Datavail, they contacted me right away to set up sponsorship. It sure felt good to get that email!

The call for speakers closed on August 6th and we had more than enough speakers to cover the 20 session slots. Building the schedule revealed that a few had not realized that it was in-person only, but we still had enough to do one session per speaker. The schedule was published around August 15th and things were on track.

We started to see some registrations, but lower than a normal year. Not unexpected that many would wait until closer to the event, to be sure of the state of the world. Worth noting here is that our out of the gate Covid policy was that we would at least comply with local restrictions and would finalize the policy a couple weeks prior to the event (not knowing how things would be). Marketing consisted of emailing to our Meetup list. We had moved to Meetup long before PASS shut down and sent out several emails to the PASS list before it went offline. As I write this we have about 1250 members of the group.

I needed an AV solution so I looked on Amazon and found this projector with a flexible screen for less than $80. Ordered one to trial. I set it up at home and it seemed decent. Not great, but ok and we could buy four for less than what the hotel was going to charge for a AV in a single room. Ordered three more. More on this later.

By the end of August the Covid numbers were trending the wrong way and I was stressing. I knew going in that we were betting the cost of the hotel meeting space and losing that money would be aggravating, but not catastrophic. Whether you like the rules or not, there was just about zero chance of Florida or the local officials initiating a lockdown. Would speakers, sponsors, and registrants change their minds? Would things get bad enough that I’d consider the risk too high to continue? Wait and see.

More sponsors joined while we waited. Tintri, Redgate, TekPartners, SQLGrease, and SQLGene signed up. With initial sponsor Datavail that was six sponsors and enough money to cover our budget. Ultimately three would have a table at the event (Tintri, SQLGrease, TekPartners). Tintri also signed up to buy boxed lunches for a sponsored lunch session, our first time trying that. I can’t say enough how much I appreciate these sponsors supporting us.

Another task to figure out was printing raffle tickets and name badges. Raffle tickets are a really important part of getting attendees to interact with sponsors and as much as they are a hassle, so far we don’t have a good alternative. PASS had SpeedPASS and while a little bit clunky, it worked. For this year I just needed a solution. I could get the list of registrants as a CSV from Eventbrite, so I needed a way to get the info formatted for the perforated paper I had on hand. I found the online Avery label printing software that included the ability to add a QR code on labels using template 5137 (2 columns of 5 labels each).

After a couple hours I had a process where I could manually download the file, then use Powershell to copy each line from the source file into the output file ten times (because I needed ten labels per user so that it would be one user per page). For the QR code it supported vCard as an embedded format and I used that, thinking it was somewhat easy to parse and easy for attendees to view using their phone so they could see what was being shared. The raffle tickets had their email address, name, job title, LinkedIn url, and company name. One name badge, six sponsor raffle tickets plus one for SQLOrlando left two spots remaining and we labeled those as “Connect With Me” so that attendees could share their information if they wanted to with another attendee. The Eventbrite download has an attendee id, so it’s easy to download the list and only filter to get only the new ones. Then you refresh the label project with the new data source and you can generate a PDF. Not the most elegant, but it worked and allowed me to print most of these early in the final week.

For the speaker dinner I chose a sports bar immediately next door to the hotel. Literally a one minute walk. They have a covered patio and could reserve seating for 20. Because the location was so convenient we also planned to use it for the after party.

Lunch. There were five restaurants within easy walking distance and a bunch more you could get to in five minutes by car, so I posted that list and marked that task as done.

By early October the Covid numbers had dropped substantially, so much so that Orange County next door ended their state of emergency. We were back in the same place or better than we had been in early July. Speakers were still onboard, no local restrictions, so we were ready to go. Here’s the final Covid policy we published:

We are requesting that all attendees wear a mask. Speakers presenting a session and sponsors at their tables will be exempt. We know wearing a mask isn’t fun, we’re just trying to do what we can to keep everyone safe.

I didn’t get any complaints about that one way or another. It does of course reflect my view of what was good enough for our event at the time it was held. My position was that everyone would assess the risk according to their own views and decide if they felt safe attending or not.

Thursday before the event we held an evening call to go over logistics. Far simpler than usual this year:

• Andy: bring the lanyards, badges, raffle tickets, raffle boxes projectors, and assorted office supplies, set up check-in
• Kendal: bring and set up the signs, handle unexpected issues
• Doug: set up the projectors and screens

Here’s a graph (via Kendal) of the registrations for this year. We did see the usual uptick at the end, but this is a lot lower than in a normal year for us.

Friday night we had the speaker party with 14 attending. A really nice evening, everyone seemed excited to be back at an event and to just sit and talk with peers. I was home by 11 pm, printed a few more raffle tickets and checked my list, called it a day.

Saturday morning I was at the hotel at 6:45, time enough to unload the boxes and drink some coffee waiting for the doors to open at 7. Here’s how we set things up, we were in rooms F, G, H, and Orchid (and we ended up getting some extra space in Orchid to use as a speaker room).

Pretty standard morning set up for check-in, badges and lanyards and raffle tickets. Doug arrived at 7:30 to set up the four projectors and not long after that we hit the first snag. Neither gaffer tape or Gorilla duct tape would hold the fabric screens to the carpeted air walls. Called our event contact for help and after seeing what we wanted to do he came back in a few minutes with a handful of magnets. Turns out the walls are steel with carpet on top for soundproofing. Worked great! Doug handled all that and the tear down at the end of the day, I’ll be buying him lunch soon. Kendal had the signs out by 8 am and for what I think is the first time ever we had no complaints about signs. Should we attribute that to a different location, or Kendal having a stellar sign plan? Both?

Check-in started at 8 am and by 8:15 I could see attendance was going to be down even more than expected. Nothing to be done about it, but it was disappointing. The upside was that those that did attend were as happy and as good natured as ever and soon we had a small crowd around the sponsors and the coffee and things were going ok. Sessions started at 9 and we were doing it, our fourteenth SQLSaturday in Orlando.

The rooms were ok. These are your usual hotel meeting rooms and they were dark, more so as we had to turn the lights down for the projectors. I tested the projectors way back in August, but I didn’t test them with SSMS – was usable, but barely. Just not enough lumens. We’ll keep these as backups, but we’ll need to do more testing to see how much we need especially if it was a longer room. We had to prop them up on stuff to get the right height and it was all on a tiny round table with barely enough room for the projector and a laptop. It worked, but it was definitely the big miss of the day.

Since we weren’t providing lunch for speakers we gave them each a $25 gift card. With the $3.95 fee for the card it was about the same as buying a boxed lunch and I thought they would enjoy going out more (and I wanted to see what they thought about going out). All the feedback I got on that was positive. As far as I could tell the fees are about the same everywhere, so I just ordered them from Amazon and had them the next day.

Our lunch challenge was making sure that the boxed lunches for the Tintri presentation went to those with a golden lunch ticket. Initially they put the food in a separate room, but we ended up moving it into Orchid and leaving it up to Tintri to manage it. It ended up working out well. The reviews on the food was that it was good, just not $25 good (how good can a boxed lunch be?).

With that in hand, we left for lunch. One sponsor was having food delivered and volunteered to watch stuff while we went for a pleasant lunch at the restaurant next door. It was nice to relax, not have to collect lunch tickets or worry about not having enough food. I checked the rooms after lunch and there seemed to be almost no drop in attendance.

After lunch I counted up the check-in tickets; the final count was 60 attendees. About a 66% drop from the total who registered and the registration total was about a 50% drop from a normal year. A long way from the usual 250 attendees and far below the 150-200 I had hoped would attend.

About 3 pm I dug out our scanner and started scanning raffle tickets for the sponsors. Basically you plug into a USB port, open up Notepad or similar, and scan. It’s far faster and less finicky than a phone, I think scanning 50 tickets was 2 minutes or so. You wind up with all the vcards in a file for later parsing (don’t forget to save!). Of course rather than being a hurdle a file that needed parsing had everyone scheming about how they would do it. The scanner is about $35, cheap enough to buy more than one, or for sponsors to invest in their own. If we can standardize on QR + some embedded format I think we wind up with a simple system that works. Attendees can use their phone to see exactly what is being shared, sponsors get the data the same day – no waiting on us, no extra work for us.

I asked a lot of attendees about the location and going out to lunch and all the comments were good. The most interesting one was that the college had a different feel, less corporate, more community. I can see that. Not so much better or worse, just different.

At 4 pm we did the raffle with Steve Jones giving away the prizes. Lots of good stuff, including a chrome book from SQLGene/Eugene Meidinger. At 4:22 pm we were done, all packed up, and back to the same sports bar from the night before. Probably 20-25 attended and it ran for hours, I finally went home around 10 pm. Many interesting conversations, especially about when and where other events might resume. A really nice evening.

Thank you to the 20 speakers who contributed their time to SQLSaturday Orlando this year; Aaron Cutshall, Armando Lacerda, Eddy Djaja, Eugene Meidinger, Hiram Fleitas, James Sera, Jamey Johnston, Jean Joseph, Jeff Duncan, Jeff Taylor, Kendal Van Dyke, Kevin Feasel, Matt Gordon, Mike Antonovich, Priscilla Camp, Rob Volk, Shawn Meyers, Steve Jones, Taiob Ali, and Thomas LeBlanc.

On Sunday I emailed out the rest of the scanned data and unloaded the boxes, started writing these notes and a week later I’m finally finishing those up.

Lessons learned for Orlando:

• Should have tested the projectors more and on site in the actual room. Should also have asked for people to loan us projectors/screens. Need better projectors if we are providing our own AV.
• Lunch off site worked, but might be harder with 250 people seeking lunch. The hotel location lends itself to that approach far more than the college.
• Going minimalist worked out fine. It’s a LOT of fun to do the extras and we don’t have to stop, but they aren’t required. As always, it’s about setting expectations.

The big question is when will attendance go back to normal, or will it? Clearly we had fewer registrations, which I think is primarily due to Covid but probably also includes some that had Halloween plans and might also be related to the loss of the PASS list. Of the no-show registrations I think the higher than usual drop off rate was probably due to people thinking it was a virtual event (I had a registration come in at 5:30 am on Saturday followed by an email asking if it was virtual followed by a cancellation when they received my reply). I’d recommend putting “No Streaming” in messages rather than “in-person”, or some other phrase that is less likely to be missed or misunderstood.

If you’re thinking about a SQLSaturday in Q1/Q2 next year, based on my sample of one event, I have these thoughts:

• Do the event if it feels safe in your area to do so. Set whatever Covid policy you think is fair while respecting local policies.
• Assume attendance will be down. I think it’s wise to plan on 25-50% of normal until we see better numbers. There are worse problems than being at max capacity!
• Lowering your own expectations and goals is a tough decision. Is it worth some compromises to serve some people now vs all of them at some point in the future? You have to judge that.
• If you’re going forward I’d say reduce the work and the cost as much as you can.
• Not having the PASS tools and the PASS automatic emails makes things harder. Not undoable, but not as effortless as it used to be. You have to be willing to figure out a mashup of whatever sites and tools that will get you to the finish line.
• Be candid with the sponsors. There is a lot of uncertainty and I don’t know if the results in Orlando will encourage or discourage sponsors (or you!). I think sponsors will be slowly trying out events. I know that all the sponsors for Orlando were excited to participate and incredibly gracious about the really low attendance. They still got to see a lot of people, have some good conversations, and that was valuable to them.

We’ll have SQLSaturday in Orlando again next year and hope for much higher attendance by then. The decision about where to host will be up to whoever is leading next year (probably Kendal Van Dyke and Mike Antonovich). Both the college and the hotel locations work for us. I think we’ll probably continue to lean towards the college, but it’s nice to have options.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading it all! I hope you found some of it useful.

Why do SQLSaturday now? The short answer is perfectly bad timing. We typically open up registration on June 1 and we’re comfortable enough with the event process to know that we can push the go/no-go decision to July 1st or just a bit later and still get it all together (not the least of which is giving speakers time to see the event, decide if they want to try to go, and submit a session or two). Right about the time of the decision the COVID situation was looking better and it seemed like by fall things would be better still. The second part was that same positive outlook was causing meeting space to be snapped up for October and beyond, so we had a fairly small window to commit to a date and space. I was willing to risk (and indeed, expected) lower attendance, but I didn’t see much risk of having to cancel the event due to local COVID policies (and still don’t). Would I have made the same decision 60 days before or 60 days later? Maybe not! You do the best you can.

What about the risk? Right now the infection rate in the county is trending down, if not quite down to the low point we saw earlier in the year. That combined with the availability of vaccines, wearing masks, and the benefit of having a bit of normalcy make organizing the event an acceptable risk to me. If you disagree, if you rate the risk differently based on your analysis or personal risk factors, I get that. We all see risk differently. I’m totally ok with people deciding that now isn’t the time to go.

Is the event going to happen? Yes! I can’t promise we won’t have a hurricane, but short of that we’re counting down to Oct 30th.

Now on to some thoughts about managing the event this year.

Volunteer energy is still hard to summon, including from me, so I’ve thought to make the most of a strange year by really reducing the work we put into it. To be fair having it at a hotel takes away a lot of work – no trip to Sam’s Club, no figuring out how soda to buy, no dropping off coffee containers at Dunkin, etc. But it also seemed like a year where we should do the registration push closer to the event when potential attendees could look 30 days out and think…yeah, or nope. Every task adds up, so it’s been nice to do less, but I absolutely feel like I’m not doing enough, even though I’m on plan.

Another part of this is budget uncertainty. Most years we are pretty confident about our ability to connect with sponsors, but this year is, as expected, much different. We have enough cash to cover the basics, but we don’t want to spend beyond that unless we offset with sponsors. It’s wonderful to be able to make that minimum bet without having to cover it personally. It’s not without its downsides though, this will be the first year with no lunch available at the event. I know that’s not the biggest thing, but it’s always been such a big part of our event that it’s hard to not do it.

Related to lunch, one of the things I’ve talked to Steve Jones about is raising the maximum lunch fee that an event can charge to $30. It’s not my favorite plan by far, but if you want to use hotel meeting space you’re not going to get lunch for $10. It would still be just a lunch fee and optional, not an attendance fee. Even then it’s not the easiest thing to manage because the hotel wants commitments two weeks out and you generally need a minimum order and who knows how many will pay the money for the convenience vs going off site to save $20?

Speaking of lunch, we have always provided lunch for speakers, so what to do this year? We could pay $30 x 20 speakers for lunch at the hotel (tough on our budget), try to arrange something really close by (Plan A), or give them a gift card (Plan B). I’m hoping to have that finalized this week so we can set expectations well ahead of the event.

Shirts or speaker dinner? Right now it’s an or and I’m thinking the more important part is the dinner. I really appreciate 20 speakers committing in these times to come to Orlando and I think having that time with peers is the most important thing.

I’m excited about the simpler logistics this year. We’ll need about 3 signs to direct people, we’ll have a check in table and a few sponsors table to set up, and four projectors to set up in the rooms. No event bags, no lunch tickets, no sweating if the lunch order will show up on time and be correct! We’ll still have event badges and a small raffle at the end (I think we’ll be raffling off some projectors!). End of day clean up will be sooo easy and we’ll be at the after party 15 mins after the event ends.

Attendance is definitely below the curve so far, but I think that will improve as we move to weekly messaging starting this week. My ballpark guess is 125-150 on event day. Regardless, we’re going to do some good for those that decide to attend.

Back to volunteers, I’ve taken on most of the work with some help from Katie and Kendal and haven’t tried to engage more volunteers. Part of that is there is a lot less work and part of it that I know people are still not back to normal. I don’t know if that was the right decision, but it made committing to the event easier for me because I knew what work I would have to do.

Thinking about SQLSaturday around the world, I imagine many are debating when to have their event and/or struggling to find space. I’ll offer these thoughts:

• It’s ok to wait until next year
• It’s ok to have a smaller event. Do the doable.
• There are pluses and minuses to being freed from the PASS hosted tools, plan for some extra time when you do the next one.
• I think you can find speakers
• I think sponsors are much hard to get and will probably remain that way through Q1 of next year. Doesn’t mean you can’t go, just don’t assume standard fund raising

I hope you’re all doing well.

• Why do SQLSaturday now?
• Is the event really going to happen?