PASS Community Summit Recap
This year was my last year as a member of the leadership of the Professional Association for SQL Server. I will still be involved with the organization, but will be rolling off of the Board of Directors at the end of my 2 year term in December.
That made this event a little different for me. I've been at 9 of the 10 US PASS conferences - the only one that I missed was the first one. I've attended them in a variety of capacities - speaker, board member and even general attendee.
This year was the largest PASS conference ever. It included three amazing keynotes. My favorite was given by Dr. David DeWitt. Dr. DeWitt is a Technical Fellow with the Gray Systems Lab in Madison, WI (which is located just an hour down the road from me). The keynote contained no marketing - the entire presentation was about the theory and research that goes into building high performance scalable database systems. It was one of the best technical lectures that I have ever attended.
There were over 120 technical sessions at this conference - and I did manage to make it to a few of them. One of my goals for the conference was to meet as many Microsoft employees as I could, and I think I did quite well for myself. I also served as the moderator for a panel debate on the pros and cons of NULL. The panel consisted of 5 SQL Server MVPs, and one guy who should be one. The session was well attended and the debate got quite heated at times. Who would have thought that a debate about nothing would be so well received?
Next year's PASS conference is again going to be held in Seattle. The dates are November 3 - 6, 2009. I encourage anyone who is interested in the best SQL Server education for the money to attend.
That's it for now...got to get back to installing MOSS and PerformancePoint - but that's another blog post entirely.
Chuck