I flew up to Birmingham Friday for SQLSaturday #7 organized by John Baldwin from Steel City SQL and a lot of volunteers. Flight from Atlanta to Birmingham was interesting, the luggage bay door handle wouldn't stay closed flush (the external door that is) so finally the application of some aircraft grade duct tape was applied for the flight over - cool or what? Stayed a new hotel for me, the Hyatt Place, nice concept - rooms have couch, desk, fridge, 42" tv wall mounted so you can view from bedroom or couch, and it has a side panel of accessory jacks so you can easily connect to it as needed. The lobby had an integrated coffee shop/bar/check inn area, and for breakfast they provide free toast/cereal/coffee, or you can place a reasonably priced breakfast order at a touch screen monitor and swipe your room/credit card.

Anyway, headed over to Richards BBQ about 4:30 for the speaker party and due to traffic - wow - finally made it there about 5:30. Richards is a low key BBQ, we initially had a meeting room for the first hour, then moved out to the main dining area but it was never loud enough to be a distraction. Good crowd, John, Robert Cain, Stuart Ainsworth, and more, talked shop until 8 pm or so. Wasn't in the mood for ribs, and the bbq chicken was chopped (just seems wrong), so on Robert's recommendation had a burger and he was right, good stuff, and we all had banana pudding for desert, very sweet banana pudding.

Saturday morning was up early for breakfast and arrived about 7:45, nice day and beautiful location at The Shelby-Hoover Campus of Jefferson State Community College. Plenty of parking, brand new building, lots of room in the main entrance for registration and sponsors. First thing I noticed was that the signs for the turns to the event were too small, it's been a recurring problem and an area that all of our events have suffered from. For all that, the signs were there and I think the location itself was fairly accessible.

Things were calm when I arrived, they were just finishing the setup. Speakers were in blue polos, volunteers in red and John had plenty of volunteers on hand, no sense of chaos at all. Krispy Kremes for breakfast, coffee (fake creamer though!). They had a couple big signs out front which was nice, and they spent smart by omitting the "#7" from them so they can reuse them next year. Attendees got the standard bag of stuff and a pre-printed name tag, nice event guide and schedule as well.

I think there were five sponsors on site, and hats off to Confio for being solid supporters of all the recent SQLSaturday events. PASS had a table at the event, but we didn't have a table throw or prominent sign for it, so it didn't prove to be very effective. Switching hats for a minute, this is an area where PASS needs to figure out a cost effective solution for being prominent - maybe shipping a table throw, and we also need some need marketing materials. The challenge is that the person that would usually be super focused on this is the person that is tied up managing the larger event.

Back to being an attendee. Also included in the bag was a stampede card to drive traffic to the sponsors, and it also counted as a chance to win the set of PASS 2008 Conference DVD's if they had the semi-secret Steel City stamp on the back.

They elected to do a short intro talk to the attendees in the main room, one of those rooms that can be used as one big room, two medium size, or four small rooms. Configured as one large room for the intro and that was a combination of John Baldwin and Morgan Smith explaining the flow of the day, schedule updates, and how the raffles would work.

After the intro they reconfigured the room into two medium rooms (for the two DBA tracks) and a room down the hall and around the corner for the developer track. I was first up at 9 am, so I started setting up right away and ran into a minor snag - they had a volunteer in the room to introduce me. Typically I start to engage with those in the room prior to the session, but what do you do when you're waiting to be introduced? Rather than try to figure it out at 9 am on a Saturday, I grabbed a couple boxes of the Krispy Kremes and made the rounds of the room making sure everyone had another chance to indulge. Just as we started we hit another snag, the speaker in the other room was using the microphone and it was playing in both rooms - who would think to check that? Finally resolved by just not using the microphone in either room, and from there all went well. I got to meet Robert Griffin in person after the session and he was curious if I had a new laptop bag yet - nope, still looking!

After that I sat in on a session by new friend Tim Roper, and then spent some time with John Baldwin discussing how things were going. It's hard to describe the pressure that comes with these events, lots and lots of little details and decisions, and of course you want it to go perfectly. The only thing I had seen early that was missing was a trash can near the coffee for the sugar packets and stirrers, and the need for the larger signs. Then off to the speaker lounge for an early lunch, talking a little more shop and waiting for the lunch break where we were all scheduled to participate in various panel discussions.

The lunch panel was ok - five of us including Kevin Boles on mine - but we had to self moderate and we only did fair, felt like we let a few people monopolize our time a bit much, and in some cases we probably talked more about some things that needed rather than going to the next question. Hard to know, because you hate to give a 30 second answer and move on to find out no more questions! Still, I think some people found value in it and it was fun to do (if you've seen a formula for these that you really like, please drop me a note).

Lunch was boxed lunches, plenty on hand and no line at all, just grab lunch and go, and the quality was fine. Saw a couple of the between session raffles and while they aren't my favorite feature - I'd rather let them just mix as they want - they were handled nicely.

Made the rounds again after lunch and all running smoothly, still plenty of food and drink available as needed, no problems at all. Attendance was 125, a little under the projected 140 but still a great turn out. No major issues and really no minor ones, John and team did a fantastic job, and they are already thinking about what they can do better/different for one in March or April 2010. I left before 3 to head to the airport, having the choice of flying out at 5:30 pm or 6:30 am the next day, rather just get home late Saturday and try to have a day off with family on Sunday.

Long post, and I'm still leaving out a lot of good stuff!