Last week I wrote about heading towards SQL Saturday DC. This week I figured I’d write a follow-up.

I want to start by saying thanks to everyone who organized and set things up and ran it. I’ve only been on the periphery of working the Albany SQL Saturday, but I have an inkling of what it takes to run an event like this. There’s so much work, much of it obvious, but also a myriad of small details, many that never get seen or noticed.

Since I like to talk about “thinking” in this blog I’m going to mention one such detail that I’m sure no one gave much though about, but was there. Chris Bell is one of the principal organizers of the DC event (but far from the only one who works it). I’m going to give away one of his secrets (and I hope he’s ok with that!)

So one of the decisions an event organizer has to decide is how long to make the sessions. Generally they run 60 minutes or 75 minutes. (Occasionally you might see some that run 90 minutes). 15 minutes may not seem like much, but over 4-5 sessions, it can mean the difference between adding or removing an entire session during the course of the day.

Now as a speaker, I can’t say I have a real preference. A 60 minute session often feels like I have to rush a bit, but a 75 minute session tends to mean I may have to add content, OR perhaps end a bit early, especially if there’s not a lot of questions at the end.

And that last detail is a critical detail that Chris took advantage of.

See, one of the logistical issues any major event has to worry about is feeding people. At a large event like PASS Summit, they have an entire and huge room just dedicated for lunch with rows and rows of serving tables. They can, if they had to, get everyone through the lunch line and served in a short period of time. However, at smaller events, with a smaller budget, especially 1 day events, it makes little sense to rent a space that large.

So, if you have limited space and limited time, how do you handle lunch, and especially trying to get your speakers and staff through first (so they can be prepared for their next session)?

You take advantage of the fact that every seminar before lunch isn’t necessarily going to use the full 75 minutes! You start lunch say, 15 minutes before the END of the pre-lunch sessions. Some sessions will end 15 minutes early, so those folks can get in line right away. 1-2 might end 10 minutes early and they can get in line after the previous folks are just finishing getting their lunches.  And so on.

So, you end up serving everyone in a reasonable amount of time, but you don’t have huge long lines all of a sudden. You have a much more reasonable distribution of people across your available time.

So, that’s something to think about when scheduling events. Oh by the way, if you’re doing massive maintenance or dataloads to your SQL Server database, you might want to see if you can spread out your I/O in a similar way. (Hmm, I had to get SOME SQL Server content in here, right?)

So, remember, if you think outside the box, sometimes you can get more done than otherwise!

P.S. I couldn’t finish this blog post without a huge shout-out to the @SQLSpouse and stealth Princess Gigi Bell and say thanks again for the card!