Last Saturday we were proud sponsors of this year's SQL Saturday Manchester.
SQL Saturday is a training event for SQL Server and Azure professionals. As a free-to-enter event which members of our internal IT Team attend every year, we are always happy to sponsor and support this event.
A day of high-level educational talks and demonstrations was incredibly well attended (especially on one of Manchester's rare sunny Saturdays!).
Evolution's IT Director Pete Moore on this year's SQL Saturday:
"What was interesting about this year’s SQL Saturday was the variety.
You could spend a day on a PowerShell if you wanted to (emphasis on the you here!) alternatively you could spend a day learning about Azure or PowerBI.
More importantly I got to meet loads of people in the SQL Community; it is almost therapeutic to know that we all share the same challenges in data."
Alex Dean, Data Manager at Evolution, was also in attendance and adds:
"I found the event particularly useful as it offered a great insight into some of the new functionalities that are available in the 2016 SQL Server Management Studio; examples being the interaction with SQL and R, and the rise of U-SQL which is a hybrid of SQL and C#.
In addition to this, I found a particular talk done by Hugo Kornelis in regards to simplifying complex queries very informative.
This will be of use to me in my first Microsoft SQL server exam, and the reporting we do here at Evolution."
To add some light relief between the educational sessions, Evolution set up the 'SQL Star in a Car' competition, with the fastest lap of the day winning a set of Sony Bluetooth headphones.
Congratulations to this year's winner Glenn Sharrock with a lap time of 1.28.1.
Thanks to the organisers and attendess for making it another fantastic opportunity for the SQL community to get together.
