Time is a weird commodity. From one point of view, the supply is inexhaustible. No matter how many minutes I spend here at my iPad writing, there are more minutes in supply. I keep writing and time doesn’t stop at some certain time. But at the same time, I never have enough time despite this inexhaustible supply.

This explains completely why I still haven’t finished my presentation for Richmond (a new one, what was I thinking?), and I also haven’t written my roundup post from the previous conference. Hopefully that changes once this presentation is ready, but like everyone else, I have said that before. The topic is one I know really well, I just have to finish the examples! And then finish finishing them!

Either way, Day of Data Richmond has always been a great event, in a pretty nice city and I am looking forward to getting there and seeing old friends.

Last year was different

So this year is going to be an interesting year, as last year was the final year that Wayne Sheffield was going to be one of the conference organizers and I have known Wayne for 30 years or so at this point. Not that he didn’t leave the reins to another great organizer, Jamie Wick whom I have also known for quite a few years from this conference.

I love going up to Richmond and the scenery between Cleveland, TN and Richmond VA is world class. Last year I spent some of my trip back on the Blue Ridge Parkway in NC for my scenic route home. Not sure what I will do this year (but if that is all I can muster, there are worse places to check out for a day.)

The presentation

Here is the abstract, which is a double session (it knew that, sure I did!) that will close out the day (along with others of course :))

SQL Techniques You Should Know
Your boss calls you at the end of the day and says, “I need you to create a new TPS report. I will email you the details.” The email arrives seconds later, and as you read the requirements over, you are mildly terrified. Sales figures need to be grouped, aggregated, formatted, and compared to another set of data that had been created previously.

Iin this session, I will cover the techniques you need to do to write the T-SQL for this and any other queries you need. We will cover various techniques to filter, transform, aggregate, and generally manipulate data quickly and correctly. By the end of the session, you will leave with techniques to apply immediately so all your reports will be correct and fast and the TPS report users will speak your name using superlatives and not expletives.

Hope to see you there!

I can’t wait to be back in Virginia. Last year the ride up was weird because it was the first time I had been back there since I had left my company based in Virginia. And now I am back at that company and going there again. I won’t be heading into Virginia Beach to the office because only a few people I work with are in that area anymore! So I expect a new, yet similar range of emotions to be in play this weekend too.