The 2019 event was held June 1 on the amazing UT-Dallas campus in the Naveen Jindal School of Management building, which was a nice upgrade from last years event on the same campus but in a different building.

This is not going to be an exhaustive post of all the great sessions, conversations, etc.  Mostly because I was there as a sponsor again this year so I didn’t get to any sessions.  But, I DID get to talk to a massive number of people that stopped by the table.

First off…a shout out to the North Texas SQL Server User Group board and all of the volunteers that dedicated many, many hours of time and sweat (and homes!) to make this thing happen.  The Dallas event is one of the biggest in the world.  The very unofficial count of attendees I *think* I heard was just over 700, from 1100+ registrations.

A second shout out to our sponsors that made this event possible.  Their dollars made it easy to do all we wanted to for the speakers, volunteers and attendees.  From high quality speaker gifts to cool attendee bags, to a great fajita lunch.  And cookies.  And lots of coffee all day long!

There were 4 fantastic pre-conferences to choose from.  As a full-time DBA I decided to learn something new and went to Adam Saxton‘s Power BI class.

Adam, aka ‘Guy In A Cube’

The other 3 pre-cons were from Brent Ozar (sold out twice), Andy Leonard (b|t) and Chris Hyde (t)…all fantastic teachers and overall nice humans.

After the pre-cons, NTSSUG board member Fernando hosted the traditional Speaker Dinner at his home in North Dallas.  Fernando is a brave, brave man.  The only pic I got was of the Tres Leches cake, already partly demolished:

I love the speaker dinners, as it gives me a chance to hang out with people in a low-key environment.  A stark contrast to trying to catch up at something like PASS Summit, which takes SQL geek craziness to a whole ‘nother level.

Saturday

As a Gold sponsor of this event, I got good placement of my booth, and was close enough to the NTSSUG booth to be able to help out there as well.  Brent was kind enough to come by for some pics between sessions:

Brand new DBA (Day 1 on staff) Jeff Miller (t) and Brent

Brent and the entire Dallas DBAs staff (Including Liz’s elbow)

Another benefit for Gold sponsors is the Lunch Session.  I was able to give my “Your SQL Servers are Mi$ConFiguReDed” session to 35-40 people.  I didn’t do a formal count, and this pic is not wide enough to catch those on the far left and right of this room:

This was a great session, as there was some fantastic audience participation…from multiple people!

Something that is a great way to encourage attendees to stay all day is the end of day sponsor raffle.  Sponsor agree to bring something worth $100 or more…must be present to win.  We had 13 sponsors plus PASS and Microsoft, as well as 8 signed copies of Bob Ward’s book, Pro SQL Server on Linux to give away.  There were TONS of people that stuck around for the raffle:

The Grand prize (provided by Microsoft) was a Surface Go!  All the buckets in the pic are the raffle tickets for the sponsors.  Half of them are not showing.

Once again…this was an amazing event.  Last year was great, this was better.  I can’t wait to see how we up our game for next year!

Thanks for reading!

Kevin3NF

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