Do you enjoy learning about the cool things people are doing with SQL Server and database technologies? Do you want to know more about how the cool things are designed? Do you want to know more about the people who designed the cool things? If you answered “Yes!” to any of the questions above, you’re a SQLPeople Person!

Join SQLPeople just like yourself as we gather to celebrate and show-off our database technology visions. Will you learn cool new stuff? Absolutely! But educating you is not the focus of this event. Inspiring you is the focus. We’ve bribed, coerced, tricked and trapped some of the most interesting people we know into coming to Richmond to talk about their cool projects. These folks are doing amazing things with database technology and we’ve asked them to prepare short presentations describing their work. After each presentation, the speaker is interviewed and takes questions from the audience.

Our Wonderful Sponsors!

Big thanks to CozyRoc for headlining the very first SQLPeople event! Also much thanks to J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College for acting as gracious hosts!

The Talks

Redefining Vocation: Legitimacy and Innovation in Technology by Kendra Little

Our generation is changing the inherent nature of a “career” and what it means to do business with technology. Adaptability and innovation are increasingly key to success. It is no longer sufficient to perform a job well– we must recreate the job itself. As technologists, how do we attain independence? As business people, how do we continuously generate ideas? Kendra Little looks through the lens of Western History to find the source of legitimacy and a practical guide to defining the new professional life.

Rules, Rules, and Rules by Jeremiah Peschka

If you asked Jeremiah Peschka to pick three things he’s interested in about computers, he’d say “data” and then look at you funny. If you asked him again, he’d say “data design, database design, and designing around the limits of the first two.” This is a rapid tour of the building blocks of databases, how those choices affect what we do with data, and why we have to break the rules from time to time to get things done.

Renaissance Age 2.0: The Coming Golden Age of Internet Based Knowledge by Brian Moran

Free content is king. Long live the king. The ROI for most college level and career oriented technical education is fundamentally broken. We have entered a new renaissance period of hyper learning in which a vast amount of knowledge is free for the taking in a 24x7x365 manner with 5 nines. I think of it as Renaissance Age 2.0. Paying for knowledge? Really? That’s so yesterday. Alas, we’re still missing a few key pieces of technology and infrastructure that are necessary to fully unleash Renaissance Age 2.0. I’ll share 20 minutes of my thoughts on what is broken in the collegiate and career educational systems and what needs to change to more fully enable self-directed hyper learning as we consume vast quantities of free, world class, internet based knowledge. What does all of this mean for you, I, and the SQL Server ecosystem we work in? Yeah, I’ll talk about that too.

Using SSIS Custom Components to Solve Complex ETL Problems by Michael Coles

SSIS provides dozens of stock components, but every once in a while you run into a complex ETL problem that’s difficult to solve using the built-in standard components. SSIS custom components provide a powerful mechanism to perform even the most complex tasks efficiently. Michael Coles will demonstrate the flexibility and power available to SSIS developers through custom components.

SQL Server 2005 Innovations and Leveraging Features in SQL Server 2008 by Gray Proulx

Topics will include: Service Broker, Spatial Data, Dashboarding and security in Analysis Services for non Active Directory users.

Turning SQL Server into a Successful Development Platform by Scott Currie

By many measures, SQL Server is hugely successful as a platform for data development. But SQL Server, and database platforms in general, have been under consistent attack from multiple angles, often with very compelling arguments. Scott Currie will take a closer look and identify critical areas where SQL fails to offer development capabilities that are standard in most other technical platforms. Even better, he’ll show us how to fill these holes without needing to reinvent the wheel – right now – for free.