This weekend at SQL Saturday JAX I had a great time and got to meet some great people. I had three sessions and the reviews were great. I did an MDX session in the morning. My attendees were trying to learn MDX first thing in the morning on a Saturday, that had to be rough.  But I think they all learned a lot and one of the comments was great, “I learned a lot more than expected for an intro session”.

My second session was on complex DAX expressions. I had more technical problems in this session that any other in my life. The PowerPivot add-in would not stay open in the workbooks. I ended up rebooting my machine to get things working. I felt bad for everyone having to wait for that, luckily I have an SSD and the re boot only took about a minute. Again the reviews were good despite the technical issues.

The last session of the day was Iron Chef. Where I squared off against Brian Knight to compare traditional BI to self service BI. Brian showed some of the cool new tools like Power View and Geo Flow, and I showed the traditional BI using SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS. Of course traditional BI takes a lot longer to develop so I cheated and had a lot of things pre built for the session.

The after event was at Sneakers and it was a Blast. Karaoke was on and people were playing pool and enjoying some good food.