A SQL Saturday, focused on BI, held in a town with beaches & palm trees everywhere?  Well, it doesn’t get any better than that!  (Seriously - I have massive affection for palm trees.)  SQL Saturdays are always great fun, and this one in Tampa was no exception.  Jose Chinchilla (Blog | Twitter), Sanjeev Jha (LinkedIn | Twitter) & the rest of the organizers & volunteers did a terrific job – in particular I noticed how welcoming & attentive Jose & team were to us all.

On Friday night the speaker/organizer dinner at a local brewery was really fun.  I mostly chatted the night away with John Welch (Blog | Twitter), Adam Jorgenson (Blog | Twitter), Tom Brenneman (Twitter), Sanjeev Jha (LinkedIn | Twitter) and Angel Abundez (Blog | Twitter) who came from California for this event.

My favorite session on Saturday has to be John Welch’s (Blog | Twitter) session on Tuning SSAS Performance (man, does that guy know his stuff!).  I also really enjoyed Rob Collie’s (Blog | Twitter) PowerPivot session & Dustin Ryan’s (Blog | Twitter) session on reporting from a cube.  In every time slot I had a bit of trouble choosing which I most wanted to see – quite a good problem to have!

Thanks to everyone who attended my session How to Choose Which MSBI Tool to use for developing dashboards.  Materials are posted on my Presentations page.

From what I observed, the whole day ran really smoothly.  The only thing I wondered about was that there wasn’t any time built in between sessions since each started on the hour (after seeing some sessions starting a bit late, I made sure to end mine after 50 minutes to give the next presenter time to set up & attendees a bit of a break).

Lunch was really a pleasant surprise – normally we expect something easy like a boxed lunch but Jose & team gave us Cuban fare.  The Expert Panel Q&A during the lunch break was also was entertaining & informative.  Can’t wait for the next SQL Saturday in my region.

On a personal note … my husband accompanied me on the trip to Tampa.  He & I went to Clearwater Beach late afternoon on Saturday.  The white sand beaches were just gorgeous!