So, some excellent and surprising news, I’ve just been chosen to speak at SQL Saturday 730 in Manchester this July. Now, it wasn’t entirely a surprise as I designed and submitted three presentations (very deliberately) to their website before the deadline. I suppose you could say that it’s at least partially my own fault.

It was an interesting thing to find out about as a relatively new speaker in the community. First of all, there were 164 sessions submitted for a total of 30 available slots which doesn’t put the odds in the favour of an unknown name in the community. This does say a lot for the selection process for SQL Saturdays that they take the merits of the presentation rather than the reputation of the speaker. Great news for people who are considering embarking on a speaking career in the SQL Server community.

This presentation is one I’ve given before so I’m pretty comfortable with it, I’ve tweaked it since I gave it last but there’s a good foundation there. I’ve moved it over to the SQL Saturday powerpoint template and made sure that my demos are up to date. That’s pretty much the hard work done.

I’ll post updates before the day if I have any, otherwise I’ll make sure to give an update after it’s done and my heart rate has returned to normal.

Now to do the usual things, check floor plans for the venue and try to work out which room you’re going to be presenting in, how many people it seats and how empty it’ll be on the day…