SQL Saturday Parma, six years in a row. DevOpsHeroes, four. Parma has been a great place to reach, also for technical events. I’ve started organizing the first SQL Saturday in my birthplace in November 2014. After two years I tried to create a brand-new event, when the DevOps culture started to grow and when the agile became strong. DevOpsHeroes was born in 2016, a month before the SQL Saturday event, again, in Parma. Why change? The audience has been great (more than 200 attendees), the feedbacks, too. People who come here look comfortable with everything. Then, thanks to the University, which has been the selected location, both the events are still growing.
Let’s go in deep with the events.
SQL Saturday Parma (2014-now)
SQL Saturdays, a great format by Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS), is a well-known event all around the world. You can find hundreds of them here. In Parma, the event is completely free, with no pre-conference. It’s located on the Campus of the University of Parma, in order to make also the students as well as the school aware of this kind of events. Unfortunately, the audience doesn’t gather them as does for the professionals, so I’m working to make a better relationship with them, too. About the audience, some numbers:
| Event | Attendees | Track | Speaker | Feedback |
| SQL Sat 355 (2014) | 128 | 3 | 14 | 4.46/5 |
| SQL Sat 462 (2015) | 157 | 3 | 18 | 4.20/5 |
| SQL Sat 566 (2016) | 150 | 3 | 18 | 4.48/5 |
| SQL Sat 675 (2017) | 210 | 4 | 24 | 4.47/5 |
| SQL Sat 777 (2018) | 230 | 4 | 24 | 4.72/5 |
In 2014 the sessions were driven by, let’s say, classic topics, like DBA, Development, BI. Starting from 2016 the coverage changed a lot. More data visualizations, more automation, more BI in the cloud, more cloud itself. 2017 has been the game-changer about NoSQL sessions (on Microsoft Azure), too. The latest edition of SQL Saturday Parma introduced the AI and this year we are struggling for selecting the right sessions from a bunch of 70 proposals (all over the world). September, 30 the Call for papers (available here) will close and if you are in the area on November 23, or if you want to come in Italy for a weekend of training on Microsoft Data Platform with friends, #sqlfamily and good food you are welcome!
The event is strongly supported by the Italian #sqlfamily, especially my friends in UGISS. A big thanks go to them.
DevOpsHeroes (2016-now)
Started as a one-shot event, this is a four-year-in-a-row one. Riding the wave of enthusiasm derived from the SQL Saturdays in Parma and thanks to my work experience, who moved meanwhile from DBA skills to Data DevOps and automation, this event has been a pleasant surprise, yet it doesn’t gather as many people as SQL Saturday does (SQL Saturdays has got also its noise and the PASS support). The event was born for spreading the DevOps culture, not just the tools. Tools were described there just to pull out the advantages of the culture, which must be “soaked up” before going deeper. So, the event was born for the culture. And this has been (and it still is) one of our mission.
The event is held typically one month before SQL Saturday in the Campus of the University of Parma. It gets more than 120 attendees and this year the organization is expecting more, due to the great sponsors which help the edition.
As you can see, behind the hood there are two main “helpers”. Engage IT Services, which is the company whose I’m a co-founder, and GetLatestVersion.it, a great Italian online community for DevOps and ALM technologies. The event is totally free, and it will get 18 sessions with 3 tracks. The topics will cover Technologies, Methodologies and use cases (or Experience sessions). The call for paper is already closed and we’re finishing the program of that Saturday, October 26.
Wrapping up
SQL Saturday Parma website: https://www.sqlsaturday.com/895/EventHome.aspx
Registration: https://www.sqlsaturday.com/895/registernow.aspx
DevOpsHeroes website: http://www.devops-heroes.net/
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-devopsheroes-2019-66796826105
Alessandro Alpi's Blog 