Another year, another awesome conference put on by Kevin Feasel here on Memorial Day weekend. Kevin joked about not realizing it was Memorial Day when he set the date, and to be honest, I didn’t realize it either. I had asked off for Monday with a pretty detailed plan of why and what my plans were, including being out our planning meeting in the morning.

But other than a bit of traffic coming through the TN/NC mountains where Helene tore up the roads a few years ago and a lot of cloudy weather, it was a perfect weekend. (And to be honest, the weather wasn’t all that bad for someone running a conference because it was cloudy all day and didn’t actually rain much. If you had signed up, no reason to skip and go to the beach, mountains, or even do chores. This was the place to be.

Oh yeah, and the donuts were quite good too!

Inputs

I attended a few sessions, the first being from Peter Shore on Data Hoarding. Sadly it wasn’t on how and why TO hoard data, but rather why not to. His arguments were compelling and I have regularly thought you probably shouldn’t keep PII (personally identifiable information) around, but I never want to lose history of what happened in the past because I want to look at what worked (and didn’t). Of course, data does get less and less relevant over time, so there is that.

The other session was from Kayla Boor, who works with Anders Pedersen at SoftPro, and it was a professional development session about how a Site Reliability Engineer (Kayla) became friends with the DBAs. Not that we are actually sworn enemies, but I will agree that it is not a “normal” thing. (She also brought homemade cinnamon rolls as you can see in the previous picture. They were quite good, even after the donut I had earlier.)

Outputs

When I was eating dinner on Friday night at a pretty quiet Moe’s near my hotel (I missed the Speaker dinner unfortunately), I saw that Kevin had DM’d me to see if I could do an additional session to fill in. It was actually kind of perfect because I was able to do my Relational and Dimensional Design Differences session before I give it in two weeks at Scenic City Summit. The best part was that I finished in 45 minutes (which is the length of a SCS session), and we had 15 minutes of great discussion.

For my session session on SQL techniques, I was honored that Peter Shore was in there, and gave me some advice about that session (which has been awkward each time I have done it.) People definitely learned things (a few people told me!), but it needs to be a tighter session with a clearer abstract.

I am not quite sure if I will make a few versions that target kinds of SQL techniques (admin, DDL, formatting data, data manipulation, grouping data, etc), or just only try to do it as a pre-con. With a full day, I think I could do some fun stuff.

The Hallway, Lunch, and After Party Tracks

I spent some great time hanging out with people during the day. Great food, great ice cream, and great company.

Scenic Route

Sunday I started my way home to visit my family and have some adventures. It was a terrible weather day, but after the family visit I took some time between rain showers to visit Dollywood. I have wanted to feature this park for a long time, and even if I didn’t get to spend a long time there that day, it wasn’t fun to get back and snap a few pictures!

The weather even make me leave too early to ride my favorite roller coaster (the Tennessee Tornado) but I did get to enjoy the scenery and a train ride around the park to see the progress on Nightflight Expedition.

A great time

Like last year, (and hopefully next), Raleigh Day of Data was a fantastic time with friends new and old and I look forward to going back again next year!