SQL Saturday Blog

We received another USD$150 donation from Benevity, which is fantastic. While we do not have many expenses at SQL Saturday, we do occassionally loan money to events in anticipation of...

SQL Saturday Houston is back!

We are planning SQL Saturday Houston 2024 (#1098), with a date of December 7, 2024. We are looking for speakers, sponsors, and volunteers.

And,...

For a long time I’ve had a menu at the top of each SQL Saturday event. This has looked like this:

This has...

I started university in 1985 at Syracuse University. I’d never been there prior to that summer, but my Dad had lived near there, and they had a fantastic computer...

Most events pick a schedule from the submissions they receive from speakers. However, that is a limited set of topics, and reflects what speakers are interested in (or they think...

I am pleased to announce the VMWare/Broadcom has agreed to sponsor a number of SQL Saturdays in 2024. They have allocated funds from their marketing budget and are working with...

I filed the SQL Saturday Corporation tax return as a Form 990-N today. This is a short form filing for organizations that have less than USD$50,000 in revenue. That suits...

Some of you probably know that the SQL Saturday website and the corporate SQL Saturday website run from GitHub. We have repos for the main site and...

Welcome to the January 2024 SQL Saturday Update. This month we have a few

• Upcoming Events
• News

Happy New Year! I hope everyone is having a good start...

It’s the end of 2023, the second year of the independent, US 501.c.3 charity that runs SQL Saturday. I wanted to take a few minutes to review the year and...

Welcome to the November 2023 SQL Saturday Update. This month we have a few items in the newsletter:

• PASS Data Community Summit
• Upcoming Events
• News
• Recent Blog Posts

Part of the long term concern for maintaining the SQL Saturday charitable foundation is raising enough money to fund our efforts. We don’t have a lot of expenses, but we...

In 2023, we’ve had quite a bit of growth in South and Central America for SQL Saturday. This has been an area where a number of communities have been running...

I was lucky to attend SQL Saturday Boston 2023. At the end of the raffle, I helped run the prizes for a networking game, which I really enjoyed. They did...

Welcome to the October 2023 SQL Saturday Update. This month we have a few items in the newsletter:

• PASS Data Community Summit
• Upcoming Events
• News
• Recent Blog Posts

I was lucky to attend SQL Saturday Boston 2023. At the end of the event, the organizers wrote a donation check to SQL Saturday for USD$100.

This was a very...

A surprised awaited me in the snail mail recently: a check.

SQL Saturday is registered with Benevity as a charity since we are a 501.c.3 registered charity in the...

It’s been over a month, but I finally caught up on some blogging after a lot of travel. This post looks back at SQL Saturday South Florida 2023, which was...

It’s late May 2023, schools are letting out in many places, and many people are getting ready for the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. The South is entering winter, and...

One of the more important things for many events is marketing and promotion. It is the hardest part of growing an event. Speakers can help here by posting their sessions...

tl;dr - I have added a new menu item at SQLSaturday.com, called Site Documentation. This is intended to explain how the site runs and how to add/edit an...

There were two issues with scheduling. Size and ease of viewing this. We added two new features: an adjustable height and a print link. This post describes how this works.

Jeff Taylor has run SQL Saturday Jacksonville for many years. His 15th event is coming up next month, on May 6. Please come if you are in the area.

Tl;dr I am a mediocre developer and realized I had some strange logic in the website. I think I corrected it. This post talks about what I did poorly, and...

John Sterrit wrote a recap for SQL Saturday Austin 2023. I was thrilled that this event took place, while being sad I didn’t attend. I actually forgot to submit,...

Many of the SQL Saturday events use Sessionize for their scheduling of sessions and speakers. This has worked great, and we’d like to capture this data for historical purposes....

When I opened the mail a couple weeks ago, there was an envelope addressed to SQL Saturday. It was from an organization called Benevity, who works with corporations that...

This is a report of SQL Saturday finances for 2022.

Amended 12/30/2022

SQL Saturday is an independent, US public charity recognized under the IRS 501.c.3 code. Our board of...

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to everyone out there. I hope the festive season has been going well and you are healthy and safe.

I look forward to seeing...

I’m cancelling today’s office hours as I have a personal conflict. Plus, Summit prep has buried me.

I’ll do a broadcast in December to close out the year as well...

Welcome to the November 2022 SQL Saturday Update. This updates includes a few sections.

• Upcoming Events
...

For 2022’s SQL Saturday event, the Memphis Data Professionals (formerly known as MemPASS) decided to forgo a virtual or hybrid event and return to a fully in-person event. The...

I was working with someone earlier this year that wanted to organize an event. They were interested in an online event for their non-US community, as they thought it would...

Since I have rebooted the SQL Saturday franchise as an independent 501.c.3 corporation, I have gotten a number of data erasure requests. These seem to mainly come from Mine,...

SQL Saturday Boston 2022 took place on October 8, 2022 at the Microsoft office in Burlington, MA. This was a location that has hosted other SQL Saturday events in the...

One of the things I’ve noticed lately is that events need to send things to others for downloads. While email works well, and certainly is good for notifications, it’s nice...

I have set up Office Hours for October. My apologies for missing September.

No agenda, but happy to talk about events and any other issues.

The details are listed below:

One of the requests from users is that we include slides and code downloads for events. While we can host files on the SQL Saturday site, and we can take...

One of the things that any organizers and events are proud of is their history. We’ve had a number of commemorative events that hit their 10th event. This past year,...

When we formed the SQL Saturday corporation and had the first event in Los Angeles in 2021, the organizers requested a short code for their event. They thought these URLS...

This past weekend I was lucky enough to attend SQL Saturday Los Angeles 2022. This was the third SQL Saturday I’d been to in LA, and it was once...

The SQL Saturday site is based on work that I helped the DataSaturdays project with when the PASS organization folded. Rob Sewell did a lot of the work,...

The history of SQL Saturday events is contained on our past events page, where I’ve recovered the history as best I can. Some data was lost in an earlier...

We have few rules for SQL Saturday, but one of these is that everyone needs to agree to a Code of Conduct and the event needs to enforce it.

This...

One of the challenges I’ve seen with a few events in 2022 is finding a precon speaker for an event. All the data from PASS was lost, and many of...

I have set up Office Hours for July. My apologies for missing June.

No agenda, but happy to talk about events and any other issues.

The details are listed below:

The SQL Saturday non-profit has reached an agreement with Redgate Software to offer a free ticket to the 2022 Data Community Summit this November in Seattle. Each event...

Note: This is NOT an April Fools post.

Many events have adopted Code of Conduct policies over the last few years, which I feel is a good trend. The only...

There has been an ongoing discussion in our community about Code of Conduct and how to handle issues moving forward. I will have more to write about this in the...

We have additional trademark filings for the SQL Saturday brand. I received the Australian filing.

This means we have the US, EU, and Australia trademarks.

Unfortunately, because of Brexit...

I applied for non-profit status for the SQL Saturday corporation over the summer. I submitted an IRS Form 1023-EZ to classify our organization as a 501(c)(3) corporation. This is...

This week is the PASS Data Community Summit, and lots of us are attending in the #SQLFamily. I miss attending in person, and hopefully that will change next year.

I got back from the first 2021 in-person SQL Saturday in Orlando yesterday. It was a great event, and I’ll have some notes and thoughts coming, but I wanted to...

I have gotten a couple of data removal requests sent to the SQL Saturday webmaster, and decided to write up how I handle these. This may change in the future,...

I got a confirmation today that the EU trademark reassignment confirmation had been received by the EU IPO. This notes that the SQL Saturday corporation now owns the trademark...

I got a confirmation today that the US trademark reassignment confirmation had been received by the USPTO. This notes that the SQL Saturday corporation now owns the trademark for...

I got a confirmation today that the [US trademark reassignment confirmation(/assets/pdf/USPTONotice.pdf) had been received by the USPTO. This notes that the SQL Saturday corporation now owns the trademark for SQL...

Last month I spoke at a hybrid meeting for the Denver SQL Server User Group. This was an experiment, and I’m putting together some notes here on the event...

This past week I received the signed trademark transfer document from Redgate. I countersigned and sent them to our lawyer to file in the various jurisdictions where the SQL Saturday...

Today I held the first open town hall meetings for anyone to attend. I sent the invites out to speakers and organizers, but the meeting was public. This was at...

Note: This was sent to our mailing list and is repeated here. You can sign up for email updates.

We have a live SQL Saturday scheduled for 2021!

SQL...

The SQL Saturday corporation and franchise is back on Twitter at @sqlsatofficial.

While there are a few other unofficial “SQL Saturday accounts”, they are controlled by members of the...

One of the functions that I’ve been worried slightly about it the establishment of banking services that can be used by a virtual non profit entity. While we hope to...

tl;dr Time zones are challenging and I learned something.

The SQL Saturday website was built by me, with inspiration from Rob Sewell and his work at DataSaturday.com.

Today, after some research with a lawyer and accountant, I filed the US IRS Form 1023-EX form today with the US IRS. This was to establish this corporation as...

This past week I had conversations with a few organizers in the US that are looking to set up new events in 2021. This was a nice surprise for me,...

One of the things I am working on at this time is the raising of some capital to fund the organization for the next few years. While we want to...

I have set up a mailing list at Mailchimp for people to sign up and get information about the SQL Saturday corporation.

You can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/hwVBKn.

Feel...

The corporation was formed and filed officially in Texas today. The following officers were listed:

• Steve Jones
• Stacia Varga
• Andy Warren

We have secured an EIN and are...

Cross posted and edited from voiceofthedba.com

With SQL Saturdays being rebooted, and the SQLSaturday.com website live, it’s time for events. I am reaching out to some people that have...