SQLSaturday Edinburgh went ahead last Saturday, June 13th, and everyone had a great day. It’s clear that people in the community believe in what I am doing. They voted with their feet to attend, to speak, and to sponsor. We had high quality speakers delivering world-class content – 8 MVPs, 2 Microsoft staff, and the remainder are international speakers – and we know that Content is King.
Basically, SQLSaturday Edinburgh Business Intelligence edition was the turning point for the Business Analytics and Business Intelligence ( SQL Server based ) community in the UK.
- Our event only had five people who had spoken at SQLBits (Carmel Gunn, Bob Duffy, Gary Short, Chris Webb and Satya Jayanty).
- three of our speakers (Mark Wilcock, Chris Webb and Bob Phillips) all spoke at PASS Business Analytics Conference last April in San Jose, and they all spoke at PASS SQLSaturday London Business Analytics in November 2014.
- The other speakers have delivered sessions internationally in their field of expertise: Visio, SharePoint, CRM, and this was the first time they’d spoken at a SQL event.
We tried to be more BI and BA focused, and did it work? The feedback so far is a resounding YES. We didn’t try to squeeze the formula for other SQL events onto this one, jam some R in there, and announce it as an analytics event. The content was focused on what we do with data, why, and what the business value is.There will be more on this in future posts. In the meantime, however, I have a lot of thank yous!
I also want to say a heartfelt thank you to the volunteers, without whom, the event would not have happened.
- Malcolm Smith
- Izabela Borzecka
- Robert French
- Melissa Coates ( Twitter ) who helped by collating templates from her events to use.
- Prathy Kamasani ( Twitter ) who is just simply amazing. Her smile lifts me and she has really helped to keep me going with her sunny attitude and unfailing support.
- Rodney Kidd ( Twitter ) has been a rock and a great listener, as well as a helpful, kind gentleman.
Prathy, Rodney – I cannot thank you enough, and your friendship and support will stay with me forever. Thank you.
I want to thank the following sponsors for putting themselves forward to support me in what I’m doing for the Business Intelligence and emerging Business Analytics community in the UK. Without them, there would be no event. Fact.
I also want to thank our amazing SQLSaturday speakers. If you’d like to download their slides, you will find them on the site.
The speakers were, in order of appearance:
Jon Woodward ( Twitter / Website )
Iain Elder (Twitter)
David Parker ( Website )
Chris Webb ( Website / Twitter )
Ian MacDonald ( Website )
Adam Vero ( Website )
Bob Duffy ( Website / Twitter )
Carmel Gunn ( Website / Twitter )
Peyman Blumstengel ( Website )
Murali Nagaraj ( Website )
Peter Baddeley ( Website / Twitter )
Tom Sykes ( Twitter )
Niall MacLeod ( Website / Twitter )
Mark Wilcock ( Website / Twitter )
Bob Phillips ( Twitter )
Dave Lawrence ( Website / Twitter )
Tim Jones ( Website / Twitter )
Jean-Pierre Riehl ( Twitter / Website )
Gary Short ( Twitter / Website )
Satya Jayanty ( Twitter / Website )
Ric Howe ( Twitter / Website )
If I have missed anyone, it will be a genuine oversight due to a very tired little Jen missing things out!
I owe people emails so please forgive me until I catch my breath! Please bear with me. I’m doing my best.
Love always,
Jen Stirrup
Yes really great event – all the talks were really thought provoking and just great to hear from people who are really at the top of the game. I have already started experimenting with web scraping and python. Venue is great as well – All the rooms have excellent displays with the Pentland rooms having two parallel displays which wouldn’t look out of place in a cinema. Thanks to J for organisaing