SQLSaturday #51

Adventure 20100821

This last weekend I drove over to Nashville State Community College to attend SQLSaturday #51.  This was my first time at a SQLSaturday conference and I had a great time.  The staff was very friendly and the site was quite comfortable.  The drive from Knoxville to Nashville was pretty good, just plugged in my audiobook (The Hero of Ages: Mistborn, Book 3 by Brandon Sanderson, narrated by Michael Kramer) and drove, but I had to get up really early to make the three hour trip in time for the 8:30 AM first session.  My timing for the trip also ended up being a little closer than I would have liked as I barely had time to go through registration before the first session started.

Here are the sessions I attended:
XQuery Basics - Allen White
Design and Implement like Edison - Bill Pearson
Fundamentals of SQL Server Internals - Jeremiah Peschka
From Access to SQL Server - Jack Cannon
Fortress SQL Server - Brian Kelley
Introduction to SQL Server Statistics - Andy Warren

My pick for most informative session would have to be Allen White's XQuery Basics.  His example of extracting XML mapping data from his Garmin Forerunner was particularly awesome.

I have to say that I was most pleased with my swag from this conferance.  Beyond just the normal promotional items I also came home with copies of Being Geek by Michael Lopp and Beginning T-SQL 2008 by Kathi Kellenberger, an Apress ebook gift voucher, and I won a copy of Blueberry FlashBack Pro screen recorder in the raffle.

In contrast to the drive to the conference the trip back to Knoxville in a rainstorm was an exercise in white-knuckle terror.  It was partially my own stupid fault though.  I actually got ahead of the storm for a while just before Cookeville and made the mistake of stopping at Jack in the Box to feed my addiction to their tacos.