Scenic City Summit Roundup

Continuing my new tradition of recapping conferences I have attended or worked on, I just got back from Scenic City Summit 2025 (https://sceniccitysummit.com/) and this was a doozy of a conference for me.

It was the last conference I organized sponsorship for as the editor of Simple Talk, one I spoke at, and it was one that I had a small hand in organizing, so there were feelings all around. The organizers did a great job (the ones we were far more involved than I was this year of course!)

The Main Event

This year’s main event was a lot different than previous years, in that it was back in the Chattanooga Conference Center. This is a really nice space for a moderately sized city like Chattanooga, and it felt good to have more space than last year. (It was also pretty interesting because there was a body building conference taking place at the same time and it made for some interesting people walking by until we all realized what was going on. I mean it isn’t that all IT types look like me or anything, but these folks were getting prepped to pose with muscles popping everywhere.

The highlights of the day (for me) were:

A session on LIKE and RegEx in SQL Server (Azure and the forthcoming on-prem SQL Server 2025) by Jeff Foushee (https://linkedin.com/in/jeff-foushee)
Giving my full, old school, relational database design session again. Walking though how to design a database felt good again.
Spending time with Ben Miller and Jason Romans at the after party, and the after after party.
Plus: Seeing this conference grow with more types of content,

Next year I hope we can get even more data oriented content here in Chattanooga (and we don’t come on the same weekend as conferences like SQL Bits and DataCon in Seattle. Of course it isn’t the same audience, but the pool of speakers is a different story.

And audience is, generally speaking, determined by speakers.

Happy Hours

One thing interesting about this year’s event was instead of a speaker event, they had Happy Hour events. I missed the Thursday night event, but I did get a chance to hang out a the Friday night one. A couple of drink tickets, some light snacks, and a lot of great conversations. It was awesome hanging out with a couple of old friends. Jason Romans and I then headed off to dinner and met Ben Miller along the way.

Stayed out too late that night, but well worth it to hang out with old friends!

The Hackathon

On Saturday, they hosted a hackathon, so I attended. This was my first hackathon, and I had the exact experience I expected. Like a gill breathing creature on the shore:

My data skills probably would be useful eventually in these projects, but I really haven’t done a lot of scraping of data from the web to start with. Currently, I only have a Surface Go 2 Laptop to use portably, so none of the tools I would need to load any relatively interesting set of data since this laptop only has SQL Server 2022 Express edition server on it.

So I basically watched and tried to get an idea of what people were doing. I will say the ideas people had for using online data were really awesome (if they seemed really unlikely to be done in 5 or 6 hours!). The highlight idea was a multi modal transportation tool that would show you where to park a bike, car, get the bus. Basically map navigation that isn’t just car, walk, bus, etc. in Chattanooga.

Next year I am going to try to have a data challenge along with the hackathon by setting up a data set to have people analyze and display their findings from the mystery dataset. (And that data set should be a bit of public data like found here, showing all the car crashes in Chattanooga. Tell when to avoid certain places, kinds of cars most likely to be an issue, put them on a map, etc).

The Scenic Route

It is a recent tradition of mine to always do something interesting on my way home from an event and share it along with a conference report.

This is an “interesting” time for me, so I decided to do something pretty cheap (aka free). Since we didn’t do a lot of exercise at the hackathon (unlike say a regular conference in a conference center), I decided to stop at..a mall. A really nice mall in Chattanooga called Warehouse Row, but a mall nonetheless. In my defense, I didn’t know it was a mall, and had only seen it from the signs in the past.

Either way, got a bit of exercise, a bit of dining FOMO after seeing Tupelo Honey and Two Ten Jack (). I had never heard of Two Ten Jack, but who doesn’t like Ramen!