24 Hours of PASS

This was a pretty cool event. The advertising leading up to it seemed to really cover the community very well. There was even a link to 24 Hours of PASS in my team’s local web site. Unfortunately, I’m not an iron man like Tom LaRock, watching all 24 hours. I only hit a few sessions.

The first session I hit was Allen White’s PowerShell for SQL Server. I have attended a couple of  his presentations at the PASS Summit. I think he’s done a great job of gleaning better and better examples out of his presentations. This one was good. I loved the way he put together the backup processes for automating backups. It looked good, took into account common issues, it just worked. I was really happy I got to see this presentation and I can strongly recommend you track down the recorded session when it becomes available.

The next session I “attended” was my own. It went over fairly well based on the response I got on Twitter. I messed up getting reports to run from the Data Collector. It wasn’t one of those normal errors that occurred, I forgot how to get it. Moving on… It was a lot of fun. I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 430 people. Everything was managed by Jeremiah Peschka and he did a great job. I’d do this again in a heart beat.

My next session was with Steve Jones on Being a Better Blogger. There was lot of excellent information. I was surprised to see my blog on the presentation for examples, twice. Quite the shock. Anyway, Steve covered a lot of the basics of blogging, but worked through good and bad examples of the kinds of things you should do to run a good blog. You could go a long ways before you got better advice. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking about reworking my blog a bit after seeing the presentation. Thanks, Steve.

I then watched 1/2 of Adam Machanic’s session on CLR and Performance. Unfortunately, just as it was getting truly meaty, I got pulled to go to a meeting. Nuts! I’ll be downloading this when it becomes available at some point in the future. The parts I saw… Adam was building a great case for when to use CLR and how much better it performed, in certain situations, than T-SQL. When I left he had 425 people.

Next up for me was Andrew Kelly presenting on File and Wait Stats. I’ve read bits and pieces of stuff he’s written or said about this in the past. I was convinced going in, but seeing how he laid out the argument for why this is one of the best performance measures was worth it. I love learning new techniques that I can put to work in my business. That’s what I got here. He did get some odd slide issues, with strange characters coming up on the screen occasionally.

That was my experience of 24 Hours of PASS. I had a great time presenting. I learned from the sessions that I saw. What more can you ask for, especially for the price? The sessions I saw all had at least 200 people in them. From what I saw on Twitter, the only real time comments I was aware of, this was a very successful event.