This past weekend (January 24th) I attended SQL Saturday #10 in Tampa, Florida. This event was organized by Pam Shaw, the leader of the Tampa SQL Server User Group. The attendance that was a healthy 175 - 200.

For those who may not be familiar with the SQL Saturday events: SQL Saturday is a full day training event that is led by a local SQL Server User Group. The first SQL Saturday was in Orlando, Florida on November 2007. Since then it has been held in various cities such as Jacksonville, Florida, Greenville, South Carolina and Olympia, Washington. Its popularity has grown over the past year and a half and now there are five additional SQL Saturdays scheduled for the first half of 2009 alone.

There were 40 sessions throughout the day at the Tampa event. The overall line-up for the day was filled with an impressive array of notable speakers such as Brian Knight, Chris Rock, Arie Jones, Tim Mitchell, Rodney Landrum, and Jessica Moss to name just a few. I was also among the list of speakers presenting on the topic of "Securing Sensitive Data".

The sum of available topics ran the whole gamut of SQL Server. With SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, ASP.NET Databinding, CLR, SQL Agent Jobs, Statistics, Wait-Time Based Performance Management, Data Mining as just a few examples the biggest challenge was to choose the one to attend. I was very pleased to see more than one security focused presentation being offered.

One of the presentations that I attended was by Andreas Etelkozi on the topic of "Data Scrambling". In this excellent presentation Andreas presented a very effective methodology that he developed and utilizes on a daily basis. His clever tag line "Got Perturbation?" was a great ice breaker. Later Andreas and I joked about printing t-shirts with that slogan and wondered about the responses of those who might not know what it meant.

Suzanne Meehle, Associate at the Orlando Law Firm of Shuffield, Lowman and Wilson, presented on the topic of "Legal Liability and Data Retention" which was an eye opener for many in attendance. Her former life as a techie provided her with the unique ability and opportunity to present this topic in a manner that was easily understood by those that are not in the legal field. I was impressed that a topic such as this made it onto the agenda.

The opportunity to expand my network of SQL pals was also an aspect not lost at this event. The trading of business cards was rampant. Chatting about mutual experiences with new friends and shopping for potential IndyTechFest speakers was on my agenda. Playing a round of "name the body part that starts with the letter..." with Rodney Landrum, Karla Kay, Chris Rock and Tim Mitchell was very entertaining. Enjoying a couple of chess games with Andy Warren outdoors in January was a very rare treat and thoroughly enjoyable.