I don’t think it is any great secret that I have had my eyes on the SharePoint Community for quite some time. With the introduction of a dedicated SharePoint track (and precon) in 2013 at SQLSaturday Cambridge (a World 1st, I believe) and most recently my attendance of the three day annual SharePoint Evolution Conference in London, it has been clear to me for years that the SQL and SharePoint Communities and technologies are more closely related and integrated than I think most professionals would realize. They are simply just different perspectives on what is essentially the end goal of presenting data to the end-user.

Ironically SharePoint is focused on the empowerment of the end-user providing them with rich document management and search capabilities (and therefore opening access to data), and SQL Server is more focused on securing, preserving and restricting access to the data; however SQL is a primary pre-requisite in order for SharePoint to perform its magic.

After recently attending many dedicated SharePoint sessions and SQL Server focused sessions for SharePoint professionals at the Evolution Conference, it was obvious that all of these Speakers were very highly skilled in their profession. There was however something that niggled me a little -they were first and foremost SharePoint professionals so discussing SQL Server to a SharePoint audience seemed like the wrong way around to me. So while every speaker was either a SharePoint MCSM/ MVP or had extensive experience working with SharePoint solutions, there was no getting away from the fact that something was missing in these SQL (or SQL HA) for SharePoint Professionals style sessions.

After a quick chat during the event with Peter Baddeley (blog|twitter) about my intentions to one day submit some sessions to a SharePoint event in the future, his encouragement was such that I decided to do this sooner rather than later and promptly submitted an abstract to SharePoint Saturday London.

The SQL Server pre-requisite is one of the biggest problems SharePoint deployments face since most SQL Server deployments come with a Database Administrator in tow. From my own personal experiences, DBAs skillsets can range anything from awful to excellent (usually favoring the former), and in any case they usually have zero understanding about SharePoint Configurations. SharePoint professionals are at the mercy of these (bad) DBAs and I want to provide them with an authoritative (of sorts) reference point from a SQL Server MCM so that they can understand how SQL Server *really* works, why it works this way, and how you should configure it with SharePoint deployments in mind. I aim to go slightly deeper than would normally be the case for this style of session because I firmly believe that having a comprehensive understanding of the core SQL subjects will arm SharePoint professionals with enough information to push through changes within their own company’s SQL Server environment.

My session SharePoint is from Mars, SQL Server is from Venus was born, and I am delighted that it has been selected. I cannot wait to be part of what I know will be a great event and look forward to seeing you there.