03Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

PASS Summit 2009 Day – 0

PASS
Monday at the PASS Summit. It's always a big day. This year it's the eve of the Summit and the launch party is held. I started out the day with an impromptu breakfast with a bunch of great guys, bloggers I was interested in meeting or guys I'd known previously. Then it was off to the conference. I attended a series of Microsoft Insiders sessions. It's one of those things you're not supposed to talk about. I'll say this though, MVP's speak their mind, or at least SQL Server MVP's do. In the afternoon I went to two sessions with small talk expert Don Gabor. The first session was for the PASS Volunteers. It was a lot of fun and I really learned a lot. The second session was for…
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02Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

PASS Summit 2009 – Day -1

PASS
The official start date for the summit is Tuesday, but trust me, everything kicked off on Sunday when registration opened. 4:00PM the doors opened and I was second through the door (had to be polite, there was a lady in front of me). Registration went smooth as silk. And then the fun started. The PASS Community Summit has a key word in the middle there, Community. Well it was on display. All these people that I know in person, like the people I work with at PASS, online, all the SQL Server Central Posters and the Twitter crowd, and by reputation, MVP's and others that I've heard of, read or seen present, are all milling around, introducing themselves, hugging old friends, making new ones. The fellowship in  a group like…
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30Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

More PASS Activities

PASS
As if I needed more. I'll be sitting at the blogger table and blogging live (as live as I get) during the keynotes. It should be fun. As I said on Twitter, this means I get to pick on the cool kids. Life is good. Thursday I'll be doing a book signing with Apress between 12:30PM-1:00PM across from the Summit bookstore. I don't have a clue which book we're talking about since they'll be supplying it. I hope it's the Performance Tuning one, but it might be the Introduction one. Either way, that's another place to track me down & say hello. In addition to my keynote blogging, I'll put up a summary for each day of the summit just like last year. It's looking to be a great summit.
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27Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

SQL Server Standard, Volume 6, Issue #1

Misc, PASS
It's alive! It's alive! That's enough from Colin Clive. It'll be out for the Summit. SQL Server Standard lives again! Although, not quite in the same shape as it used to be. But hey, stitching stuff together out of dead tissue is messy work. I want to thank our first author who had to suffer through quite a few growing pains and help us blaze a trail through the woods, Thomas LaRock. I want to thank my boss at PASS for all the support especially the time I started whining, Andy Warren. And there's this other guy, who has helped just a ton in this effort in every way, and lead the technical edit team, Brad McGehee. We have a photo credit to Pat Write for the front. Craig Ellis has done…
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23Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit One Week Away

PASS
It's just a week and a couple of days before I'll be hopping a plane for Seattle and the 2009 PASS Summit. I'm as excited about this one as I was my first summit, maybe more so. I'm going to get to see a bunch of friends that I only see once a year and hopefully meet in person people I've only interacted with online. A very large part of the PASS Summit is networking. I'd like to meet people who actually read my fumbling attempts at understanding how SQL Server works and how to best work with it. If you'd like to have a chat, there are a lot places to track me down: Monday, most of the day I'll be going to various PASS meetings, so if you're…
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21Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Birds Of a Feather Lunch

PASS
The PASS Summit agenda is shaping up and it's already looking to be much busier than last year. The latest is the Birds of a Feather lunch. It's lunch with an MVP. At least 50 different MVP's will be hosting a table each. At each table a topic of discussion will be hosted by the MVP present. It should be a lot fun. It'll be a great way to meet people and share war stories, tips, approaches, what ever. The list of topics and the MVP's leading are available here at Mike Walsh's blog. I'll be hosting a table on Team Development. I crack jokes about beating up developers, but really I see them as partners and teammates. We're all working towards a common goal, delivering the product, whatever it…
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14Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SNESSUG October Meeting

PASS
The Southern New England SQL Server Users Group's October meeting was a bit sparsely attended with 7 attendees. The sponsor for the night was ApexSQL. The presenation was by AJ Dharmapuri who spoke on using DMV's. Barbara Sampson, SNESSUG Treasurer, did a demo of ApexSQL's SQLEdit. It's a pretty powerful TSQL coding and scripting tool. There's a lot of functionality that worked in a very snappy way during the demo and looked great. I may need to spend some time with their products to see if we can put them to work. As part of the sponsorship, we gave away a license for the Apex SQL Univeral Studio. Quite a prize. I was very excited to see AJ's presentation for a few reasons. First, because he presented on DMV's, based…
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10Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

3 Weeks to the PASS Summit

PASS
The PASS Summit is only three weeks away and I'm getting awfully excited. It's not too late to register. Heck, you can register at the door, but you'll pay full price. If you want to save a little, use this registration code, FRP3D, and tell them you know me. They'll hook you up & you'll save $200.  If you're involved with designing, building, developing, developing against, supporting or maintaining SQL Server databases or manage any of those who do any of the above, this is where you should be for the first week of November. You're going to get great information from presentations by top experts within the SQL Server community. Speaking of community, this is one to take part in. You're going to be able to network, talk to, confer, converse…
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08Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Log Reader Awards

PASS
Brent Ozar, Andy Warren and Jeremiah Peschka have put together a blogger award called the PASS Log Reader Award. I took a couple of posts that I did in the last year and entered. No, I'm not going to say which ones and I don't expect to win because I just picked 'em up, as is, no edits and submitted. I didn't browse all my posts, I didn't rank them, rate them, or do anything else. I just picked two that seemed to describe something and describe it reasonably well. The way I look at it, win or lose, this is supporting PASS, so it's worth taking part. Plus, I like a little competition. The award will be presented at the Summit (which is only three weeks away!).
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06Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Hey, ho, where’d you go…

PASS
Ohio? I'm presenting on Thursday to the Columbus SQL Server Users Group, home of the newly minted MVP, Jeremiah Peschka (congrats again). It's to be a virtual presentation through live meeting. The topic is a Understanding Execution Plans. This time I hope that one of us remembers to hit the record button unlike last time when I did this presentation for the PASS AppDev Virtual Chapter. If you're in the area, come on down and meet me, virtually. Show runs from 6:30-8:30, although all that time is not my presentation, so I suspect Jeremiah has some more fun planned.
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