I have attended and presented at a ton of conferences over the years (see the entire list at Presentations | James Serra’s Blog). If you are looking to learn a lot about the Microsoft data platform, the two biggest conferences to attend are the PASS Data Community Summit in November and SQLBits in March. I have presented at both and will be presenting at the PASS Summit next week. My session is called “Data Lakehouse, Data Mesh, and Data Fabric (the alphabet soup of data architectures)” and will be on Friday, Nov 18th at 2:30pm PST (more info). If you are at the PASS Summit and see me, make sure to say hi!

In addition to learning about technology, attending conferences is a great way to meet people in the industry and to network for your next job. I blogged about all the people I was able to meet at a conference may years ago: PASS Business Analytics Conference: the ultimate networking. When COVID hit and everything went virtual, it made me realize how much I enjoyed meeting everyone in-person, so I’m really looking forward to getting back to that next week at the PASS Summit. I usually spend more time chatting with people than attending the sessions (which you can always watch later). This year I hope to catch Brent Ozar in the PASS Summit Community Zone where he said he will be hanging out a lot, and I will be too (starting on Thursday). Brent helped me to get started blogging almost 12 years ago (I can’t believe it has been that long and that this is my 627th blog post!). Keep in mind that many of the conferences, including the PASS Summit, have a “personal development” track so it is more than just technical stuff that you can learn.

Other big Microsoft conferences that you may want to attend are Microsoft Build in May, Microsoft Inspire in July, Microsoft Ignite in November and Azure Data Conference in December.

If you are a new presenter, a good way to start is to present at a SQL Saturday. I have done over 50 presentations at SQL Saturdays and really enjoy them. For tips on presenting, check out my presentation Learning to present and becoming good at it. I highly recommend presenting if you have not done so before – it is very rewarding and can greatly help your career. See Brent’s Become a Presenter, Change Your Life.

A great way to get notified when calls for speakers are made available for events is to sign up at callfordataspeakers.com. Check out their List of events and you will be surprised how many data-related events there actually are.

Most events now use Sessionize to submit your abstracts, so you only need to enter your session details once, as you can select previously submitted sessions, making the process so much easier.

I hope to see some of you at the PASS Summit!