BEGIN TRAN Four days, two Southwest connections each way, one community data conference, an allegedly world-record Walmart, and a 4am alarm Thursday morning. The usual. Time to SELECT * FROM adventure WHERE city = 'Albany'.
Thursday · Aug 6
Wheels Up from Indy
Travel Day
WN IND → MDW → ALB
✈Up at 4am, coffee before the car, hour drive to IND, 6:45am Southwest departure. Connect through Midway, land in Albany. No stored procedures required — just a boarding pass and questionable sleep math.
🪦Oakwood Cemetery, Troy, NY — paying respects to Uncle Sam (Samuel Wilson, 1766–1854), the Troy meatpacker whose name became the one. Worth the detour.
🍽#SQLFamily Dinner with Jason & Sheila Romans, Kristyna Ferris, Andy Yun, and Deborah Melkin — MOSU. Fair warning: index talk may occur between courses. If you don't already follow these folks, fix that: The Data Shepherd · Data on Wheels · SQLBek · Deb the DBA
Friday · Aug 7
Exploring the Capital Region
Pre-Con Day & Shenanigans
☕Coffee & Breakfast:Uncommon Grounds for coffee & bagels — been a tradition since 2024. Jason also put Bitchin' Donuts on the radar this time. That's worth investigating.
🛒World's Largest Walmart?? Apparently this is a thing in the Albany area. And… what on earth is a Cartalator? A cart elevator? A shopping cart escalator? Either way, it's a full table scan of the grocery section. Investigation required. Photographic evidence will be obtained.
🍽Lunch with the Romans' — Latham Bagel Shop. It's always somewhere good.
📊Speaker Dinner — the night before I'm on stage, so naturally I'm spending it at dinner with the speaker crew, organizers, and volunteers. Kristyna Ferris and Chris Hyde are wrapping up their full-day pre-con Modern Data Warehousing with Microsoft Fabric — expect them to arrive opinionated about whether a Lakehouse is just a data warehouse with a branding problem.
Free to attend, put on by the community, for the community. SQL Server, data engineering, analytics, AI — real sessions from practitioners who actually do the work. This is what conferences looked like before they cost $2,000 and had a keynote from a vendor you've never heard of.
📍 Massry School of Business, UAlbany🗓 August 8, 2026👥 Capacity: 300🎟 In-Person🎤 My session: Intro to PowerShell with dbatools — because your DBA toolkit deserves a throttle, not just a mouse
🍳Breakfast — Duck Donuts — made-to-order donuts before the drive to the airport. Priorities.
🍖Lunch with Jason & Sheila Romans — Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, Troy. Last meal before the flights home. If you're in the area Sunday, pull up a chair — #SQLFamily welcome.
✈The first leg out of Albany is shared with Jason & Sheila Romans. Southwest passengers on this flight: you have been warned. This crew may be loud, caffeinated, running hot from 48 hours of data conference opinions, and still debating whether NULL equals NULL.
🏠Connecting through Midway and wheels down in Indy.
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