News – We’ve been a bit quiet, sadly I don’t think we’re going to be able to do in person events, the sponsorship isn’t there, and it takes quite a bit of cash to put on a free conference. But we still believe in the goal of Data Relay, to inform and connect people together. One comment an attendee said was ‘I love this, it’s geeks, listening to geeky people, talk about geeky stuff’ and that has always stuck with me, and that is our goal.

So what next? The landscape has changed since Data Relay started (As SQL Relay back in the day), there are more channels to access knowledge, youtube, books, blogs and an explosion of user groups, Data, Power BI, Fabric, Azure, Databricks, AWS, GCP, Python and so many more (Check out MeetUp). But we still think we can fit in somewhere.

The team have put our heads together and had a chat about ideas, and going to move to an Ask Me Anything (AMA) format, with a panel of experts answering your questions. This will be online using a Team Webinar session that you can join.

So we’re delighted to announce a live online webinar with the people behind dbatools—the open-source PowerShell toolkit designed to make SQL Server administration, migration, and automation easier.
The webinar will follow an Ask Me Anything format, so whether you already use dbatools or are considering getting started, this is your opportunity to ask the experts your questions.

When: Wednesday, 7 October at 12:00 p.m GMT
Speakers: Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret, Chrissy LeMaire, Andreas Jordan, and Cláudio Silva
Where: Online—https://shorturl.at/N53tz

We hope you can join us!

The Call for Speakers for Data Relay 2024 is open now, so what better time to pose the question “how do we select sessions”? I’ll try to answer that here!

We select blind — we don’t see authors — and selection is managed using Sessionize’s ranking tool. Rather than us poor humans trying to impose a total order over all your great submissions, Sessionize asks us to rank a subset of three sessions, repeating continuously until it can calculate a ranking for us. At least five selectors do this, independently, before Sessionize combines the final results.

What this means is that sessions aren’t selected directly, but that they do well when they stand out alongside other sessions (repeatedly, compared to different sessions each time).

So what makes a session stand out? Some ideas:

• A title which grabs the reader’s attention can help.
• Topics which are not already heavily covered can do well. Newer technologies are a natural choice for this, but not the only one!
• An abstract needs to be engaging, and long enough to communicate what problem you’re solving and why a listener should care. What’s the problem? Why is it a problem? Is it already the audience’s problem? You have a solution!

Data Relay has experienced speakers on the team who are happy to help, advise and mentor — so if you’re still not sure, or would like some advice, drop us a line at contact@datarelay.co.uk. We’re super-excited to see your submissions for Data Relay 2024!

 

No conference cam make it without great speaker and their sessions. Data Relay is no exception, so we’re pleased to announce that our Call for Speakers is now open for our 2022 tour. This year we are visiting the following cities/venues:

• 04/10/2022 – Leeds – Queens Hotel (new venue!)
• 05/10/2022 – Birmingham – Broadway Plaza Odeon
• 06/10/2022 – Reading – Microsoft HQ TVP
• 07/10/2022 – Bristol – The Bristol Hotel

What we’re looking for

We want top notch Data Platform related content ranging from Beginner to Expert. Sessions should be 50 minutes in length, including any time for Q&A

Past topics have included SQL Server internals, Azure Synapse, DataBricks, Intro to Python, Disaster Recovery, ChatDBOps, Azure Data Factory, Automation, JSON in SQL Server, Scala, PowerBI, SSDT, DAX, Kubernetes, IoT, Stream Analytics, DataOps, Data Security and many more.

If you’re not sure your session fits in, please get in touch or just submit it anyway!

You can submit for as many dates as you want

What we offer:

• We offer a step up from User Groups to speaking to group of 50-100 people
• If accepted for more than 1 event, you get a seat on the Data Bus that takes us around between venues
• A chance to network with other speakers and organisers
• A free lunch
• Speaker mentoring if you want it.
• A great time
• A fun event that’s different to anything else out there

Speaker Selection

To ensure a fair process, selection will be done by a blinded process where the reviewers will only see the abstract. To ensure this process is truely blinded, please do not add any personal/identifying information to your abstract.

The number of days you can attend will not be used during selection. So don’t worry if you can only make 1 date, that still works for us.

Organisers will not be submitting sessions. But will be used to fill in should we have any last minute holes in the agenda.

How to submit

We are using Sessionize again this year due to it’s simplicity. To submit your session head over to ‘Data Relay 2022 Sessions‘. If you fun into any problems please get in touch

Questions

If you have any questions please get in touch via our Contact Form, or via Sessionize. We want to help as many speakers as we can, so if you have any concerns or want advice we’re happy to help out.

Yes, we’re back and in person for 2022!

We’re running a 4 day event running North to South:

• 04/10/2022 – Leeds – Queens Hotel (new venue!)
• 05/10/2022 – Birmingham – Broadway Plaza Odeon
• 06/10/2022 – Reading – Microsoft HQ TVP
• 07/10/2022 – Bristol – The Bristol Hotel

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, but we’re looking forward to sharing as much Data Platform knowledge as we can.

To keep up to date with everything as it happens please follow us on:

• Twitter – https://twitter.com/DataRelay_uk
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-relay/
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/DataRelayuk/

Call for Speakers will be opening on 08/03/2022

Event sign up details will follow shortly afterwards

We look forward to seeing all our old friends and making some new ones on our travels. It’s going to be a lot of fun

Its been an odd 18 months and while we’ve all been staying at home the Data Relay team have been hard at work – getting ready to relaunch our unique, free to attend community conference.

With that in mind in 2021 we want and hope to deliver the following for the Microsoft Data Platform and Power Platform communities:

1. A small virtual conference broadcasting some of our best speakers from previous years events in a week long series of online webinars. Featuring 2 speakers and 2 great sessions per night, Monday to Friday.
2. Our usual format conference travelling across the country involving an in person pop up conference in 5 cities over 5 days.

Number 1 is already well under way with event details coming very soon. Stay tuned for what you can expect from our COVID safe Data Relay virtual conference!

Number 2 is of course a little more ambitious at this point (like most of you) we really don’t know what state the country will be in when our usual October slot arrives. However, we want to stay optimistic and hopeful that we’ll be able to meet up again very soon. We miss you! If restrictions remain or time scales mean this isn’t realistic, we’ll stay open minded and be looking at other virtual options.

Thank you for all your patience and loyalty. Data Relay will be back and to full strength in the near future.

Data Relay is very excited to announce it’s new leadership team.

Alex

Paul

Stuart

Long term helpers, event owners and committee members Alex Yates, Paul Andrew and Stuart Moore have now stepped up as the official directors of Data Relay.

The new blood are currently busy getting the Data Relay house in order ready to restart the UK’s favourite relaying conference in 2021. Keep an eye on our blog for details.

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to previous director Alex Whittles for his dedication to Data Relay and continued support in the wider data platform community. As soon as possible we will be hosting a leaving party for Alex, aka Big Frog, Purple Alex.

Our friends at SQLBits let us know late last week that due to the current COVID-19 outbreak they were going to have to postpone their event. The only feasible alternative date for their venue and suppliers, unfortunately, clashed with Data Relay.

We agreed that we would work together to make this happen. As Data Relay was at an earlier planning stage our sunk costs were lower and we had fewer contracts signed. So we decided that the best solution for the UK SQL Community was for us to postpone Data Relay and allow SQLBits to have our space in the calendar.

While we are saddened not to be running an event in 2020 we are glad to have helped out SQL Bits to still go ahead.

We will be returning in 2021. Dates are currently being investigated and we hope to be able to lock them down and announce them soon. We will also be keeping an eye on the Covid-19 situation.

Please bear with us as we need to liaise with venues and our sponsors, but good news will come.

We’re happy to announce the dates and venues for DataRelay for 2020. This year we’re pleased to be heading back to Microsoft HQ in Reading on the Thursday. The dates and cities for Data Relay 2020 are:

• Leeds – Monday 28th September
• Nottingham – Tuesday 29th September
• Birmingham – Wednesday 30th September
• Reading – Thursday 1st October
• Bristol – Wednesday 2nd October

We look forward to opening the Call for Speakers soon, and registrartion for attendees will open in June

The format will stay the same with 3 tracks of great Data Platfrom content from the best speakers in the industry. All events will be free to attend and we’ll be providing lunch as well.

Time to start putting them in your calendar.

There’s been lots of talk recently about the optimum length for a conference sessions. Some people have been saying the standard 50 minute session is great, other saying that a 20 minute session works better

Not being afraid of a bit of A/B testing Data Relay has decided to open up our session submissions to allow both Standard Sessions (50 minutes) and Lightning Talks (25 minutes)

You are welcome to submit as many of each as you want. So if you’ve got a great idea but don’t think it’ll fill 50 minutes, then please submit if for a 25 minutes slot.

Remember you don’t need to do more than 1 event if you don’t want to. So this could be a great way to dip your toes into conference speaking at an event local to you. So if you’re in Newcastle, Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham or Bristol then now’s your chance

As always we’re offering feedback and help to first time submitters, please get in touch with us if you’d like some and we’ll help you out.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

We’re aware that some of you may not have been aware of our rebranding last year.

For the last 10 years SQL Relay have been crossing the country bringing free quality SQL Server sessions and workshops as part of a week long tour. As I’m sure most of our attendees are aware, SQL Server is a core part of Microsoft’s Data Platform. But, it is only a part of that Data Platform.

We found that we were bring in topics such as AI, DevOps, PowerShell, Azure, Data Bricks, Python and Machine Learning that don’t alway fit under the ‘SQL Server’ banner

In recognition of this the decision was taken in 2018 to rebrand our event from SQL Relay to Data Relay to show that we’re now covering the whole of the Microsoft Data Platform

Don’t worry, everything you’ve come to expect from SQL Relay will still be preset at Data Relay. 5 days of quality free sessions and workshops at venues around the country