What an amazing weekend.

Sometimes you can go to a free training event and take a few notes of things to go look up and that’s a win. And some days the stars align, you pick the right sessions and you walk away with solutions to problems you are working on right now.

I was lucky enough to attend Craig Ryans session on reducing your SQL spend. This is something I focus on in most of my client engagements so generally I think we have the bases covered. Not even close! Craig had a handful of different considerations that I need to work into our own offerings including comparing pricing in different regions and dusting off the cobwebs from the Web Edition of SQL Server – which to be quite honest I haven’t considered in my calculations for years. Then add in changing operating system and we saw an example of how to actieve the same levels of performance on the same hardware(or often better hardware) for half the price. Great session well worth the price of admission(which was free, but to be honest I would have paid twice that.)

My own session went okay. We went through the 5 types of Encryption that are available within SQL Server and demo’d each, making it clear that technical know-how is not a reason to not start the process of implementing Encryption in your environments. And a great thing happened after that session. I had fumbled a couple of times with the technical setup and switching between slide decks and Management Studio and one of the audience came up to me afterwards with a recommendation on using colour coding for session connections. This is something I often do when I am connecting to prod or non-prod client environments, but I think it would be a great addition to a session where I’m demo’ing in multiple different environments – both for me and the audience. So thank you anonymous random guy.

The next session I started going to was Warwick Rudds session on Azure Data Studio, but Warwick hit a technical snag when the presentation room monitor decided it had had enough and went to sleep. Warwick always presents great content, but I also know he distrubtes it really well so I promised to catch it on online and took the opportunity to grab a Lime scooter back to the hotel and drop off my laptop so I was set for a big night after the event without having to lug it around.

I got back in time for Heidi Hasting to talk about some of the processes she has automated and the tools she uses. I picked a couple of key words out of her presentation abstract and thought it may just help with an issue that a colleague is currently working on. Heidi had flown in late and had the last session of the day and presented on 2 hours sleep. But man did she deliver just what I was after with some pieces being perfect to solve a Powershell\PowerBI analytics\MS Licensing issues that have been on my periphery over the last week or two.

And as always the real value in these sessions is that if you don’t get the exact piece of information you are after in a session, you can go out afterwards, buy someone a drink and chat about the technologies we are working with and chew over the problems we are faced with in our day jobs. I literally got thousands of dollars of value out of the event and had an amazing time doing it. Thanks to Hamish and the team for another successful and enjoyable event.