A warm welcome in Zagreb

Data Saturday Croatia in Zagreb started for me with a late arrival and a small adventure.

I used Avant2Go, a very cool electric car sharing service. It worked great until I parked in an old concrete parking garage. That is where I learned that GPS tracking a vehicle through that much concrete is not really a thing. Luckily I know some locals, and the next morning Avant2Go customer service fixed it in seconds. It was a known problem, easy to solve by dialing a number. Just not the 0800 number, because that does not really work with a foreign phone.

The actual reason for the trip was Data Saturday #75 Croatia 2026 in Zagreb. It was one of those community days where you quickly remember why traveling for data events is worth it.

During the conference I even won a cool prize: a two-day ticket for Infobip Shift in Zadar. That sounded very cool, but for me it was not easy to make it work, so I passed it on to a young and promising Database DevOps hero, Christian Gregorec.

Besides the prizes there were, of course, sessions. I only joined one session myself, by Markus Ehrenmueller. I am the guy who says “I know nothing about Power BI”, so that made it an interesting one to join. ;-)

My own session was, of course, about Database DevOps:

Database DevOps: Learn How to Build Workflow-Driven Database Provisioning in Azure DevOps

It is all about breaking down the steps you normally do to deploy database changes, putting them into separate scripts in Git, and then letting Azure DevOps automatically fire the right pipeline. When you pick up a work item, or when you want to test software as part of the pull request workflow, the database work should just be part of that flow.

The day ended with a spectacular speaker dinner and warm Croatian hospitality. Good food, happy people, and exactly the kind of community energy that makes these events worth the trip.

Ola Hallengren also invited me to come along on Sunday for a tour with local Vedran Kesegic. That was amazing. We did some exercises, walked through a beautiful park, and even visited a mountain with spectacular views. Vedran then dropped me at the airport, where one hour was more than enough to catch my flight. I enjoyed the flight home with a full head and a very grateful feeling. Thank you Ola, and super thank you Vedran.

Vedran also uploaded a video that is recorded during that Sunday tour. It captures that warm Zagreb weather and the fun we had better than words in writing can.