Tag: conferences

SQL Bits 2025 was amazing, as always. It’s been my favorite conference to attend, with lots of friends, a family atmosphere, and some amazing speakers from whom I learn many things.

This year I wasn’t picked as a speaker, which is fine. Their committee didn’t like my submissions for some reason, which happens. I’m disappointed, but that’s it. I am fine with any event who chooses me or choose not to have me. However, since Grant and Kellyn were accepted, I planned a trip to Cambridge for the following week. A month or so ago, Redgate asked me to just attend and be a part of the booth. I agreed, and extended my trip lightly to arrive Friday.

My hotel was just past the Excel center, so as I walked from the train, I stopped by Friday afternoon. Things were relatively quiet, and the neon sign wasn’t lit, but I went in and saw a number of friends.

I saw a few Redgaters as well, and loved the branding (though not the colors) on the bean bags this year.

Friday was a bit of a hangout for a few hours, but I had to get to the hotel to get some work done, including a few late night customer calls from the US.

Saturday was more fun. I spent most of the day at the Redgate booth, which had a great whack-a-mole game where two people could compete.

I didn’t attempt it, but I saw quite a few people giving it their all. There was a magnetic leaderboard to the side, with the counts climbing and climbing throughout the day. Event the Redgaters had fun.

Lots of selfies with friends, including quite a few North Americans that I relish the time to catch up with as I don’t often see them in the States.

I got recruited (again) by Daniel, who keeps trying to get me to Stockholm for his Data Saturday event. He spent some time showing me pictures of his amazing speaker dinner on an island in the area, so I might have to try and make time in my schedule for 2026 to get over there.

The event was plenty busy, with lots of time between sessions to wander the expo hall, meet friends, chat with vendors, and just relax.

I’m sure you’ll see lots more pictures, as Mikey was busy taking lots of pictures. I’m sure he got more than his 10,000 steps each day, trying to take as many shots as possible. I managed to grab one of him during a session.

I made a few new friends, getting the chance to chat with people that knew me from SQL Server Central or just had a question. A few selfies, one of which was with this cool hat in keeping with the neon theme.

Redgate had a great neon sign, which was more red in person, and I’m looking forward to seeing this in the office at some point.

Events always end too soon, though I’m usually worn out and ready to move on from early mornings and late nights. I am glad I got to hit the Pelaton each day, though my body was tired and I struggled a bit with late night conversations both days.

I was honored after a quiet dinner Saturday to sit with the organizers for a drink after they had their post-event dinner. They are great friends I’ve known for many years and I’m proud of what they’ve built. Reminiscing about different highs and lows across the various events in different cities was a memory I’ll cherish.

It was especially memorable as Alex Whittles is stepping away to focus on Purple Frog Systems after ten years. It’s bittersweet, but I certainly understand volunteer efforts are a time and place thing, and people come and go as their lives change. I wish him well and I’m sure we’ll continue to see him as a speaker, likely with a little more energy as he won’t need to be dealing with the logistics of running the event at the same time.

An amazing few days, and I hope I have the chance to come back next year.

I can’t remember how I heard about Small Data SF 2024, but it caught my eye. The mix of sessions had me interested in going, especially with Mother Duck and Duckdb being the main sponsors. I’ve run into DuckDb a few times in the last couple of months, so I was interested in what I could learn about small data and a different group of people than I normally see at events.

When a customer visit cancelled, I requested the learning and development (L&D) time and budget and got it approved. I booked flights and a hotel and headed to San Francisco.

The structure of the conference was interesting to me. I’ve been lucky to get to a few smaller conferences in the past (100-200ppl) and I like them. SQL Bits, PASS Data Community Summit, and other events are nice, but I tend to like small events.

This conference had the tag line of Think small, develop locally, ship joyfully. There were other tags, and you can read their manifesto, but essentially this conference looked at the idea that lots of work with data (OLTP or analytics) can be done on small sets, with local databases or local data.

Day 1

Day 1 started late, at 12p with lunch. I liked that, though I took advantage of the late start to sleep in and get a late breakfast, so I really wandered around and chatted with people with a coffee. Food was nice, as it always is in San Fran. Lots of dietary choices, and mixes of stuff. The event was in a co-working facility, so there were always snacks around (chips, nuts, fruit, etc.).

Day 1 was two workshops. Each was 3 hours with a break between them. Essentially these were vendor sessions for hands on work with a product. There was a happy hour after, but I skipped it.

My first workshop was from Mother Duck, a vendor building on DuckDB. The workshop was based on this github repo, and showed how to use dbt to move some data around. It was hands-on, and things worked well for me, but this was a mix of CLI work, python, database work, and more. Some people definitely struggled with the workshop. I found this interesting, and I learned a few things. I’m definitely interested in doing some DuckDB work to analyze data in a way that is different (and simpler) than Snowflake or Fabric. I could see people doing this.

The second workshop was from Outerbase, which essentially is a way to work with multiple databases on the web. It’s a light Object-Explorer/Query tool in some ways, but they’re also trying to do some AI work to help stub out a web interface for your database. They had us try to build some methods and web code that we could paste into a React or Angular (or others) framework. This one was OK, but I am not sure this is a great use of AI. I was hoping for a bit more.

Day 2

Day 2 was all day, from 830-530. I arrived to find a lot of people getting breakfast. Again, hot food, cold food, GF, etc. Lots of choices. One cool thing was a coffee bar where you could get baristas to make a nice drink, but you could also get a Mother Duck mug for your drink. I have too many mugs, but I liked this one, so I got one.

This was a one track conference, which I also like. Everyone gets a shared experience, we have common things to talk about, and things change often. I also don’t have to go find rooms. In this case, one large rooms with a low stage.

New talks every 20 minutes, on a variety of topics. The agenda was wide and varied. I think a few talks were meh, but most were interesting. I’ve got some editorials coming, but the first talk on Big Data was great, as was the second one on different tooling we might use for both development and analysis of smaller sets of data.

Note, small data doesn’t mean kb or less. It notes that many queries can be run on GB of data on a laptop, and with today’s network and laptop capabilities, this can make sense. There was also some limited domain views of the ways you might shard your data to lots of databases, and you might do more local work, not central db connections. That makes sense in some cases, but not all.

I also think some of the speakers (quite a few startup people) minimize or don’t think about the true scale problems when workloads grow, nor about the hassles of pulling all this data together and synching it. In any case, I think their ideas work for some problem domains.

There were a few panels, as well as a presentation of a paper from Amazon. One super interesting thing was Redshift shows like a 60:40 split of reads to writes. That seems crazy. However, an exec from FiveTran talked about that matching their experience where many data warehouses are running constant updates from OLTP systems, something that their customers sometimes don’t realize. He wasn’t sure if this was a good idea as well, but it’s been good for their business.

As seems to be the case, there was a satirical talk on BI tools and how they don’t always help. An analyst for one of the political campaigns gave a funny humorous look at the world of vendors and customers.

After the last talk, there was a short happy hour, where I had the chance to chat with a few people. Silicon Valley is a strange place, full of people working in startups, formerly from startups, or wanting to start one. Everyone has a good idea, which I think is true, and so many of them want to chat about their thing or your thing.

As you might expect, a lot of people at AI-focused or thinking AI. It’s neat to hear their experiences and what they think. Certainly I saw some neat demos or using small models (again small data) and feeding a user query into the model along with some data from a database or a flat file. That was interesting and something I think could be useful in different ways that are focused. I expect more and more people to get comfortable with AI based work.

Ultimately, I had a nice, refreshing two days that got me thinking about data differently and how there are different ways to approach problems and solutions. Perhaps one of the neater things I saw was PySheets, Python in spreadsheets. Just don’t try it in Chrome, and make sure to use the little A* button to test the AI.