Follow up: SQL Saturday, Kansas City

KC IT Professionals was proud to be a silver sponsor for SQL Saturday, Kansas City on October 2nd @ the Cerner Riverport Campus! This was a FREE, all-day training event for SQL Server professionals & those wanting to learn more about this technology. SQL Saturday is a community driven event, and the response couldn’t have been better!

We had 318 people registered & 36 sessions delivered by numerous national & local SQL Server experts including: a Microsoft Certified Master & 5 SQL Server MVPs! They covered tracks in beginning/advanced DBA , Datatabase Developer, Business Intelligence, Professional Development & other specialized topics.

In addition to thanking our speakers,  event day volunteers, and sponsors we want to recognize the following people, who put in months of planning & hard work to help make this event a success:

Event Leaders: Michael Gelphman / Bill Fellows

Core planning team: Vikas Bahirwani / Andrew Cross / Bill Fellows / Brett Flippin / Michael Gelphman / Bill Graziano / Katie Lofton/ Kris Nessa / Rob Rich / Aaron Sloup

Special thanks: David Simpson / Christine Carpenter

BBQ Crawl & Speaker’s Dinner

It’s customary to have a Speaker’s dinner the Friday night prior to a SQL Saturday. This is a gesture of appreciation for the speakers as well as key event volunteers. It also serves as a great way to network prior to the event!

We took things a step further – Bill Graziano generously organized a BBQ Crawl on Friday afternoon before the Speaker’s dinner! This was great, because a lot of the out of town speakers hadn’t sampled one of the things that KC is so well known for. We stopped at Jack’s Stack, Arthur Bryant’s & Gates. We skipped Oklahoma Joe’s , since it was catered for lunch on Saturday! For our speaker’s dinner, we were fortunate enough to have a suite at Kauffman stadium for the Royals game vs Tampa Bay!

SQL Saturday Arrives

The volunteer team arrived at the Cerner Riverport campus early to prepare for the event. We opened the doors at 7:30 and sessions ran from 8:30 to 4:30 with a lunch break in between (Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ). The feedback received was overwhelmingly positive and it was really rewarding to see everyone having a good time. All of the key volunteers worked incredibly hard all day to make sure that everything ran smoothly. One of the most impressive parts about the day was the tremendous amount of help we got from some of the out of town folks – both speakers & attendees. This level of effort really underscores how SQL Saturday is truly a community driven event!

The final bonus of the day was that the remaining food was donated to City Union Mission. They informed us that it would feed over 300 people!

Here’s a photo gallery for the entire weekend (photo credits: Andrew Cross / Thomas LaRock / Michael Gelphman):

Feedback

As an event organizer, the biggest reward was seeing our attendees happy , learning and having fun! What we hadn’t imagined was the mountain of accolades from speakers & attendees that reverberated across the SQL blogosphere and other forms of social media.

Then SQL Saturday #53 (Kansas City) would be ranked quite highly. In fact, they would be number one for all the SQL Saturday’s I have attended to date. Everything about the event was done as well as anyone else and in most cases they were far ahead of others.

….In short, the event this past weekend was simply the best SQL Saturday I have ever attended, and all future SQL Saturday’s will be held to this standard.

– Thomas LaRock: “If there were SQL Saturday Rankings….”

This was probably my #1 SQL Saturday that I have been to. They are all great but this one definitely was unique and I could tell that the organizers put loads of effort into pulling it off right. So my thanks go out to them and all the people attending.

— Arie Jones: “SQL Saturday , Kansas City smothered in awesomesauce!”

End result is up to this point I can tell you that the KC area hosts one heck of a SQL Saturday. Thanks KC. If you will have me I will be back next year.

— Chris Shaw: “Speaker Day in KC”

Some of the other posts mentioning us:

Steve Jones: SQL Saturday #53 Wrap-Up

Kathi Kellenberger: SQL Saturday #53 Review

In Closing…

Did you miss SQL Saturday in KC? Don’t worry , we’ll have one again next year! In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about SQL Server & want to attend meetings, please view the website & sign up for their mailing list: http://kansascity.sqlpass.org/