SQL Saturday Orlando 2025 Roundup

I am a tardy reporter this trip. My positive spin on this tardiness it was that I wanted to stretch the memories out for a bit longer than normal. (My truthful spin is that I was tired from vacation after the conference and then had some things I needed to do first!)

This year was a fantastic year for SQL Saturday Orlando for one very specific reason.

Was it:

Great speakers? – That was part of it with many great ones, including the last time I would see Buck Woody as a Microsoft employee.
Great food? – The barbecue was back and it was delicious as usual
Great sponsors? – Yep, Microsoft /AMD, Cozyroc, Royal Blue Analytics, SQLGrease, and O’Reily), the publisher, not the auto parts store!

All of these for sure, but let’s be completely honest: it was the weather. What a glorious day it was to be at a conference. It was a messy day/weekend outside, but no hurricane, and we weren’t outside without being covered. During lunch and the ending ceremony it was just perfect.

So big thank you to Doug Leal, Kendall Van Dyke, SQL Orlando, Andy Warren (Not sure what all he did, but he is still pretty awesome!) and all of the volunteers who showed up and made it such a great event.

My Participation

I delivered a session entitled BI versus Relational Design, which went quite well. I got one person who filled in the reviews, and gave me 4 out of 5 , with a comment of:

What can the speaker do to improve? “Make a stronger point”

I wish I knew what to do with that comment, and this is really what I hate about the comment systems that conferences have. What point were you wanting me to make stronger? I was attempting to contrast the two design patterns and show their similarities and differences. Please tell me more if you happen to read this…I will buy you a coffee at least 🙂

The Scenic Route

So the conference was in Orlando, and as such my scenic route took me just south of the conference location to celebrate early Halloween at the Magic Kingdom (and my daughter’s actual birthday. I didn’t really stop anywhere else, and to be completely fair, the pictures were pretty terrible from this year’s party, because as the Winnie the Pooh based song goes: “The rain ran rain came down down down.”

But they are never all bad, so here is a selection of pictures I took that day. They were all taken with my iPhone 16 Pro Max, because my better camera stayed in my hotel room due to gloomy forecasts (which were spot on, actually!)