Last week, between the 11th and 13th of May 2026, we once again returned to SQL Day in Wrocław. After attending and sponsoring many conferences across Europe over the past year, this event still holds a special place for us.
Out of all the conferences we sponsored last year, SQL Day remained the most warm and welcoming one. Maybe it is similar culture, maybe the openness of the community, or maybe the fact that people here genuinely enjoy meeting and talking to each other. Whatever the reason, the atmosphere once again proved perfect for networking and building new relationships.
As usual, we arrived with our now traditional orange booth, complete with our large touchscreen TV showcasing the SMT monitoring tool. With our previous conference experiences in mind, we also expanded our collection of wooden puzzles and turned the booth into a small challenge zone for attendees.
People quickly assumed that the puzzles were somehow tied to our merchandise giveaways. Since we never explicitly explained the rules, many believed they had to solve a puzzle before earning a merch. Naturally, we did nothing to correct this misunderstanding too quickly.
One moment especially stayed with us. One attendee skipped an entire session and spent nearly an hour trying to solve our toughest puzzle completely on her own without any help. At some point we almost felt guilty watching the struggle, but the joy and sense of achievement on her face once she finally solved it made it absolutely worth it.
We would also like to give a special shoutout to everyone who enthusiastically followed our advice to photograph the puzzles and ask their favorite AI assistant for help. Spoiler alert: apparently even modern AI still struggles with wooden puzzle engineering.
My personal favorite moment came when a group of three obviously good friends attempted to solve two puzzles together. In the spirit of teamwork, they evenly distributed puzzle pieces among themselves and worked independently. Unfortunately, none of them could understand why their solutions never worked. The reason was simple: every single person was missing several pieces belonging to somebody else.
Since the conference organizers already provide attendees with bags full of notebooks and pens, we focused on bringing merchandise that people would genuinely enjoy and continue using. The biggest interest this year was in our stainless-steel water bottles, t-shirts, and surprisingly, the very same wooden puzzles attendees had just spent considerable effort solving. Apparently, many visitors wanted to bring the challenge home and torment their friends and family members next.
This year we decided to experiment a little with our sponsor session format.
Instead of delivering another standard technical presentation full of live demos, we prepared a more story-driven session focused on interesting real-world cases we had solved for our clients. We discussed performance problems, troubleshooting stories, and unusual SQL Server situations that required creative thinking rather than textbook solutions.
To our surprise and delight, experienced SQL Server experts such as Uwe Ricken and Erland Sommarskog joined the session and helped turn it into a highly interactive discussion.
Personally, this ended up being one of my favorite session formats we have tried so far. The audience's engagement, questions, and shared experiences created far more value than a monologue presentation ever could. It is very likely we will continue building future sponsor sessions around this more discussion-oriented approach. We will also be publishing these real-world cases as SMT Stories so give us a follow on social networks to stay tuned!
As always, the evenings were filled with community activities. We attended conference organized events such as Community Party, while also finding time to explore local restaurants and enjoy the company of fellow attendees.
For the first time in a while, we even managed to set aside enough free time to properly explore the beauty of Wrocław itself. Between the historic architecture, lively streets, and welcoming atmosphere, the city once again reminded us why SQL Day remains one of our favorite conferences on the calendar.
SQL Day continues to prove that a great conference is not just about technical sessions. It is about people, hallway sessions, shared experiences, and occasionally watching highly skilled database professionals lose a battle against a wooden puzzle.
We are already looking forward to returning next year with new ideas, new challenges, and probably even more puzzles.
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