Today was the inaugural Atlanta Azure DataFest at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Stuart Ainsworth; who has organized many other events (SQLSaturday), is running it. It’s just about the right size crowd for the Microsoft office at Avalon.

A few notes…

I like the scheduling. Three one hour sessions with short breaks in between in the morning. Then in the afternoon, it broke into three separate tracks. Tomorrow’s schedule keeps the three tracks, but have three-hour deep-dive sessions in the morning and switch to one hour sessions in the afternoon.

The rooms were full, but most didn’t feel crowded. The one exception was one of the sessions I attended. I counted 23 people standing at one point – a very popular session! There weren’t a lot of extra chairs. We’ll need to be aware of that for next month’s SQLSaturday.

I was a little late this morning and didn’t have breakfast, but for lunch the food was excellent, and the line went quickly. There was plenty of time for networking and catching up with friends.

I think it was a plus that this is during the week. Events like these may attract a different crowd on weekdays than on weekends. The crowd seemed to have a diverse range of experience with Azure.

For the sessions and speakers, so far so good. All of the presentations I attended seem to have gone well. One thing I noticed is that there were many questions for the speakers. They all did a great job interacting with the audiences.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow!