About a year ago, I had this crazy idea. I wanted to organize a SQL Saturday for Boston. That’s when I went to Adam Machanic and asked if he minded. Adam is the backbone of Boston’s SQL Server user community and had played a key role in the event two years before. Our local BI user group organized last year’s event, but I had my sights on something a little bigger.

That’s when I started working with a few folks from our user community as well as Karla Landrum from PASS. My goal was to do a quality event without a massive budget. Adam told me that he’d give all the moral support he could, but that he didn’t want to organize the event.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that organizing an event like this would be so much work. That was pure arrogance on my part. It was a ton of work. It became a major time suck in my life, and stuff for the event completely took over the small guest room in my condo.

When we started this process, I have to admit I had no idea what I was doing. True to his word, Adam gave a ton of moral support, kicking my ass when I needed it. He put me in touch with the right people, including Andy Roberts and Jim O’Neil at Microsoft as well as a guy from our user group named Robert Padilla. Between Robert and I, we did most of the work.

Over the next few days, I will post what we learned and what we did. But history will tell that we put together a good event and that our user community had a great day.