I made the (very) early morning drive to Columbia for the SQLSaturday there. There was a good crowd, but not overcrowded. I think I saw the total number was 200. I attended the following presentations. All of the speakers did a good job with the material.

• DW-ETL: 10 Mistakes to Avoid by Rafael Salas
• Designing an SSIS Framework by Andy Leonard
• SQL Developer’s Intro to SSAS by Nathan Mourfield
• Handling Advanced Data Warehouse Scenarios in SSIS by John Welch
• Enterprise Data Mining for SQL Server Professionals by Mark Tabladillo
• “I See a Control Flow Tab. Now What?” by Andy Leonard

A quick few notes about my experience:

• I asked 3 people about OBIEE and none had heard of it. Since this is a Microsoft centric event that makes sense.
• I’ll never get up and drive to another event that is not local. From not on I’ll drive the day before and spend the night. Lots and lots of caffeine.
• I think Business Intelligence has grown dramatically in popularity over the last 12 to 24 months. All of the sessions I was in were well attended and there were a total of 3 BI tracks out of 8.
• The event was well organized and in a nice facility. I’ll attend again next time if I can.
• I learned a lot!