TO THE ORGANIZERS OF SQL RALLY THANK YOU!

SQL Rally is over, and before we get too far away from it, I just wanted to say a quick Thank You.  

There was a lot of work done to pull off the SQL Rally.  It was over 1 year in the planning, and it showed.  I’m still relatively new to Florida, I moved here not even a year ago.  And when I did, I had no idea what a rich SQL Community it had as a state.  There are over 12 PASS Chapters in the state of Florida, an average of at 5 SQL Saturday’s a year, and this year the Inaugural SQL Rally.

Going to these events you see a lot of the same people time and time again.  Kendal Van Dyke (@SQLDBA|blog), Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan|blog), Pam Shaw (@PamShaw), Jack Corbett (@UncleBigUns|blog), Karla Landrum (@KarlaKay22|blog), Rodney Landrum (@SQLBeat|blog), Jorge Segarra (@SQLChicken|Blog), Adam Jorgensen (@adam_jorgensen|blog), Andy Warren (@SQLAndy|blog), and this is the second time in less than a year I’ve seen Louis Davidson (@DrSQL|Blog) down in Florida volunteering his time, VA Beach or Tennessee, either way that’s a long way to travel!

If we could group all of these folks in a room, and I’m sure there are even more that I’ve left out, and give them a standing ovation it wouldn’t be enough.  When you take the time to speak, it takes a lot of preparation, planning Demo’s, Slide Decks, and learning, time that it takes outside of work and from your family. 

When you are planning an event like this, coordinating the speakers, finding the venue, getting sponsors, working on Logo’s, Websites, brochures, marketing, meetings, planning nightly activities, pre-con’s, the list goes on and on, you do a lot more.  It takes a lot more, and that is a lot less time you have with your family.

When you see the pictures that Kendal Van Dyke posted on his flickr account, the first couple pictures you see show the work being done while you are on the verge of the event.  Jack, Andy, and Kendal all had really great blogs leading up to the Rally, but nobody is there taking pictures when you have a planning meeting, nobody is handing out swag for time spent weeding out the venues, when you negotiate a deal for rooms, or get funding there is no crowd to break out in applause.

We attend these events because we are passionate about SQL, we are all striving to share with one another to better ourselves and each other.  The people that put on these events, they love this at a whole different level.  I don’t think they get to hear “Thank You”, nearly enough.  Maybe I'm wrong, I hope they do.

So this is the only way I can think to do it.  If you had a hand in Volunteering Thank You, If you had a hand in putting together a Session or a Pre-Con Thank You, and for all the people that put in their time, were away from their families, and made the big picture come together Thank You.

Send them a message on Twitter, go to their blog, or shoot them an email and just say Thank You. I had a blast, I can’t wait to do it again, and I really appreciate all the hard work.  So one more time, because I could never say it enough, Thank You for all you do so that we can learn.

Thanks Again,

Brad