Click the image to find an event near you!
SQL Saturdays are a neat idea – they’re a day-long event of free training, encompassing several one-hour sessions. These events will normally have 5 or 6 time slots during the entire day. Therefore, if the event has 6 concurrent sessions, that is 36 hours of training material. There is usually more than one event going on most weekends. If we assume 100 events at 36 sessions each, then there are 3600 sessions in a year. Since the speakers normally post their presentation materials and demo scripts on the site, the site itself has become a resource for additional training material. While the program is fantastic, the problem is that there isn’t a way to search the site for sessions.
Search the SQL Saturday sessions
Therefore, I’ve developed a PowerShell script that will search the SQL Saturday site. It searches for sessions where the search phrase is in either the session title or abstract. Without further ado, I introduce Get-SQLSaturdaySessionTopicSearch (which is available in my Code Library).
Input:
| Name | Required? | What it does |
| SearchTopic | Required | The phrase that you are searching for. |
| StartDate | Optional | The first event date that you want to search. This defaults to 30 days before the current date. |
| EndDate | Optional | The last event date that you want to search. This defaults to 30 days after the current date. |
| EventNumber | Optional | The first event number where you want to start searching. Defaults to 500. |
| ExportFile | Optional | The path and filename of the file to export the results to. |
| DebugLevel | Optional | Controls the display of debugging and progress messages. Defaults to 1. |
DebugLevel values:
1. Displays the SQL Saturday URL as it is being processed.
2. Displays the event name and date if the feed for that SQL Saturday could be opened.
3. Displays session title for matched sessions.
4. Displays all session titles.
Examples:
.\Get-SQLSaturdaySessionTopicSearch.ps1 -SearchTopic ‘Query Store’
.\Get-SQLSaturdaySessionTopicSearch.ps1 -SearchTopic ‘Query Store’ -ExportFile ‘C:\Temp\SQLSatSearchResults.csv’
Output:
The output to the screen is the Event #, Speaker, Session Title, and URL for the presentation.
The generated export file will also include the event name and session abstract. Additionally, the URL will be encased with the Excel HYPERLINK() function. When the export file is opened up with Excel, clicking the URL will open your browser to the session information, where the presentation material can be downloaded.
I hope that you get a lot of use out of this script.
