Jack led the meeting tonight, spending a good amount of time on SQLSaturday, and Kendal Van Dyke did his marketing mojo about SQLRally. Good conversation about it, and a large number of the 20 or so attendees interested in SQLRally – more than were interested in going to the Summit even without regard to price.

Interesting sidebar for me was one of our regulars talking to me about how our group was different than another he had attended recently; the other group seemed to be run by a clique and didn’t try too hard to interact. It was nice to hear (the part about us that is), yet also a bit intriguing. Building culture is hard, and sometimes I wonder how much success we’ve had, but in at least once case our intent had made it through to an attendee. I think we can still do a lot more and a lot better. If you run a group, stop and think before the next meeting, are you really serving your members…and do they think you are?

Two presentations, a mini one by Orlando local Mike Antonovich on various methods of pivoting data that I thought went well, and the feature presentation by Scott Klein on SQL Azure. The Azure presentation was fun, a mix of talk through and Q&A that I think worked well as most attendees had only superficial knowledge on the topic so far, but clearly a lot of interest about restrictions and use cases. Meeting ran longer than usual, finally ending about 8:30 and then continuing as ad hoc talks and networking after.

We didn’t quite the speaker introductions right, kind of a mish mash. I think we need to formalize that and do a better job.

Overall a good meeting. We’re on break for Oct (due to SQLSaturday) and Nov (Jack, Kendal, Karla, Rodney, and I all at the Summit), and then resuming in December with probably just a social event.