What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location. 

I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you.

So lets talk about the event

Overall

We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later).

Location- Golden West College

We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC!

Some lessons learned

Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors.

I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community.

Sponsors

We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love.

• Platinum Sponsors
• Quest Software http://www.quest.com
• My Space http://www.myspace.com/
• Gold
• Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com
• Silver
• Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com
• Bronze
• WestClinTech http://westclintech.com
• Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org
• Attunity http://www.attunity.com
• Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com

Some additional Thanks

• Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter)
• Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community!
• Einstein Bros. Bagels
• They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee.
• Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com)
• Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch.

Moving Forward

Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events.

In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS.

San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm )
Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ )
L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ )
SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ )

So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!

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