Speaking at SQL Saturday Prague 2019

Last weekend I had the great opportunity of speaking at my first SQL Saturday, in the beautiful city of Prague in the Czech Republic. Together with my colleague Jeroen Schalken (B | @JeroenSchalken), we travelled to Prague to deliver our session on implementing Power BI (Premium) at Van Lanschot Kempen.

I also was very active on twitter during the weekend on the hashtag #sqlsatprague, I embedded every first tweet of my daily threads in the blog.

Friday

All settled and ready to go to #sqlsatprague with Jeroen Schalken! We are going to present the Tips & Tricks from our #PowerBI Implementation at Van Lanschot Kempen tomorrow at 17.15! #pbifamily https://t.co/6g7aGMQbDg

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 20, 2019

We started Friday morning with our travel to Eindhoven Airport. After a little delay in Eindhoven, we were just in time to drop our bags at the hotel and get ready to be picked up for the speaker's dinner. It was in restaurant Kuchyň, with a beautiful view over the city next to Prague Castle.

Having a great speaker's dinner at #sqlsatprague! With @JeroenSchalken @JiriNeoral @pinaldave @christinaleo @Neil_Hambly @SQLSwimmer @tomaz_tsql @MatijaLah @sqlpass_cz @jardaminha @SQL_Alex @DejanSarka @DamianWidera @TomasTucek @jaroreken @malekpav pic.twitter.com/7gLfFy8Rkr

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 20, 2019

We shared some starters on the table and then could pick our own food right from the kitchen, which was very nice. We were very well taken care of by the SQL Saturday Prague team!

Saturday

I started the SQL Saturday with a short run around the convention center and through the park and after having breakfast in the hotel we headed to the conference.

Rise and shine! It's #sqlsatprague time! pic.twitter.com/TLqGgG4apQ

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 21, 2019

During the day I attended these sessions:

• Profiling Your Data by Angela Henry (B | @SQLSwimmer)
  Angela showed how you can use Power BI or the SSIS Data Profiling task (also available in Biml) to profile your data. Oh, and you should do that before the start of your project btw.
• Power BI Row Level Security Deep Dive by Jiří Neoral (B | @JiriNeoral)
  Jiri showed RLS in Desktop, from defining your security in a (hidden) table to dynamic RLS.
• Power BI as a universal analytic tool by Michal Chmelár (B)
  Michal showed several Cognitive Services for analyzing and translating text to sentiment analysis and also how to integrate the PowerApps visual into a Power BI report.
• Designing your tabular/PowerBI model for performance and scalability by Ivan Donev (B | @ikdonev)
  Ivan showed us several best practices of creating an SSAS model after breaking down Hash, Dictionary and Run Length Encoding.

There was also time for relaxing in the speaker room and taking some fresh air outside. And then finally of course our own session at the end of the day:

Tips and Tricks of a Power BI (Premium) Implementation at a Financial Institute by Jeroen Schalken and me. Because we were the latest slot of the day quite a few people already left, but our audience was very interactive and had lots of questions, so thank you!

We also went to restaurant Na Pekařce for the SQL Saturday after party, where we were joined by the speakers, organisers and also around 40 attendees.

Sunday

We had this day to enjoy the beautiful city of Prague, together with a few other speakers and Jarda, who was our awesome guide for the day!

Sightseeing after #sqlsatprague with @pinaldave @jardaminha @christinaleo @SQLSwimmer @JeroenSchalken pic.twitter.com/6Le9LbgYJo

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 22, 2019

Monday

Because our flight was at 9.30 AM we started this day very early with a quick breakfast and on to the metro and bus to the check-in and security at the airport. It all went very smoothly so I even had some time to work on this post. At 11 o'clock we were back again on Dutch soil. As a surprise my wife and 2 youngest kids were there to pick me up.

Dobrý den: Final preparations before going back home from #sqlsatprague. Massive thanks to all the organisers @sqlpass_cz , sponsors, attendees and other speakers! A special thanks to @jardaminha for taking such good care of us and taking us on the sightseeing tour yesterday! pic.twitter.com/cXI4awH0Ah

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 23, 2019

Closing words

All-in all it was a wonderfull weekend and I met many new great friends from the SQL Community. I hope I can some day go back to (SQL Saturday) Prague!

I also made a short video of my adventures during the weekend, so enjoy!