Annabel Bradford

21 December 2016

SQL in the City Streamed was a blast

Here at Redgate, there’s a strong sense of working as a team, even across functions, and that really came through during the preparations for this year’s virtual SQL in the City Streamed.

Doing a live stream isn’t something I’ve put my hand to before, but I knew a guy – two guys in fact. They previously recorded the sessions at our London SQL in the City events over the past few years, so I knew they had the right skills to do a great job to enable us to do a virtual event and stream worldwide. With the date for the new event announced, we then took to designing the agenda.

Attendee feedback from previous events had shared a desire to see more demos of Redgate tools, so to meet this need we ensured the majority of the sessions featured the tools. Creating the schedule was a collective effort between myself, Redgate Evangelists Grant Fritchey and Steve Jones, and one of our Pre-sales engineers, Tom Austin.

We thought about which themes would be important to those watching, and also which tools our customers would want to learn more about. With these objectives as our focus, the agenda was set to feature sessions showing how to provision databases faster, take that first step into the cloud, hunt down the annoying process slowing your servers down, and share SQL in a smarter way.

Take a look at some of the posts to the #sqlinthecity Twitter hashtag and you’ll see the sessions went down really well for lots of different reasons:

The 2016 objective was to take SQL in the City to the next level and reach more Redgate customers and members of the SQL Server community than we’d ever done before. I’m delighted to say we met this goal, and more of you than we ever imagined took part in the event, with over 3,000 views (and counting) of the SQL in the City Streamed YouTube videos.

Thanks to those who tuned in. I really hope you were able to take away some new tips and knowledge to put into practice. If you haven’t, and you’d like to share your thoughts on your perception of the virtual event, simply complete the feedback survey which will be open until December 21.

The videos are also now available on the SQL in the City Streamed YouTube Playlist.

Please do share the live stream or the individual session videos with any of your colleagues who might find them useful.