Logging the history of my past SQL Saturday presentations

(2020-Dec-31) PASS (formerly known as the Professional Association for SQL Server) is the global community for data professionals who use the Microsoft data platform. On December 17, 2020 PASS announced that because of COVID-19, they were ceasing all operations effective January 15, 2021.

PASS has offered many training and networking opportunities, one of such training streams was SQL Saturday. PASS SQL Saturday was free training events were designed to expand knowledge sharing and learning experience for data professionals.

Photo by Daniil Kuželev on Unsplash

Since the content and historical records of SQL Saturday soon will become unavailable, I decided to log the history of all my past SQL Saturday presentations. To create this table I give full credit to André Kamman and Rob Sewell, that extracted and saved this information here: https://sqlsathistory.com/.

My SQL Saturday history

Date	Name	Location	Track	Title
2016/04/16	SQLSaturday #487 Ottawa 2016	Ottawa	Analytics and Visualization	Excel Power Map vs. Power BI Globe Map visualization
2017/01/03	SQLSaturday #600 Chicago 2017	Addison	BI Information Delivery	Power BI with Narrative Science: Look Who's Talking!
2017/09/30	SQLSaturday #636 Pittsburgh 2017	Oakdale	BI Information Delivery	Geo Location of Twitter messages in Power BI
2018/09/29	SQLSaturday #770 Pittsburgh 2018	Oakdale	BI Information Delivery	Power BI with Maps: Choose Your Destination
2019/02/02	SQLSaturday #821 Cleveland 2019	Cleveland	Analytics Visualization	Power BI with Maps: Choose Your Destination
2019/05/10	SQLSaturday #907 Pittsburgh 2019	Oakdale	Cloud Application Development Deployment	Using Azure Data Factory Mapping Data Flows to load Data Vault
2019/07/20	SQLSaturday #855 Albany 2019	Albany	Business Intelligence	Power BI with Maps: Choose Your Destination
2019/08/24	SQLSaturday #892 Providence 2019	East Greenwich	Cloud Application Development Deployment	Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) in Azure Data Factory
2020/01/02	SQLSaturday #930 Cleveland 2020	Cleveland	Database Architecture and Design	Loading your Data Vault with Azure Data Factory Mapping Data Flows
2020/02/29	SQLSaturday #953 Rochester 2020	Rochester	Application Database Development	Loading your Data Vault with Azure Data Factory Mapping Data Flows

Closing notes

I think I have already told this story a couple of times. Back in 2014 - 2015, I started to attend SQL Saturday training events in the US by driving from Toronto. At that time I only spoke a few times at our local user group and had never presented at SQL Saturdays. 

So while I was driving I needed to pass a custom control at the US border and a customs officer would usually ask me a set of questions about the place of my work, my citizenship, and the destination of my trip. I answered him that I was going to attend an IT conference, called SQL Saturday, a free event for data professionals. At that point, the customs officer positively challenged me and told me that I needed to start teaching others based on my long experience in IT, we laughed, and then he let me pass the border. 

I’m still very thankful to that US customs officer for this positive affirmation. SQL Saturdays have been a great journey for me!