DataTamer: SQL Server Services

Plans for SQL Saturday Vancouver are moving forward.  Scott has taken on the speaker list and is coordinating track leads, Richard is heading up the volunteers and I've taken on the venue and sponsorship.  At the moment we are having some difficulties getting our costs down.  Hosting an event at a hotel means you are at the mercy of their registration desk.  A hotel uses the meeting rooms to fill the sleeping rooms, not the other way around.  Since our attendees will be local the hotel is going to try to make all of its profit on our catering fees.  We need to bring these costs way down in order to be successful.

This is a handy bit of code to list all columns in a given table:

SELECT * FROM sys.columns WHERE
[object_id] = object_id(N'[dbo].[ibProject]',N'U') ORDER BY [column_id]

My initial steps actually started early in the year.  I found myself with a large non-refundable deposit on a hotel conference room and no-one had brought SQL Saturday to Canada yet.  Due to some miscommunication with the hotel I had put the entire thing on hold for a while.  An unexpected email indicated that my deposit was still valid but I needed to reserve dates by the end of the year.  So that got things rolling again.

The first thing I did following this email was to contact the PASS SQL Saturday coordinators.  This initial contact put me in touch with Scott Stauffer of www.SQLServerToolbox.com. Scott was interested in bringing SQL Saturday to Canada as well (specifically Victoria and Vancouver). We discussed some initial concepts and plans.  I then filled in the official SQL Saturday request form.

A conference call was arranged between PASS and Scott and me. We needed to discuss our plans, go over a few common "gotchas", and review the process.  Nancy is our PASS contact and she has been wonderful throughout our interactions.

Next I needed to return the SQL Saturday contract.  Nancy and Sanjeet set up our SQL Saturday website and provided our official number: 65.

We have an official SQL Saturday ready for Vancouver: #65 on February 26!  I'll be blogging about the process of creating a SQL Saturday from the initial contact with PASS right through to follow up with the attendees.