05Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit 2009 – Day 2

PASS
Day 2 of the Summit was extremely busy. I missed a breakfast on DMV's that evidently was one of the hits of the show. Day 2 was kilt day. I wore mine and there were two others, Steve Jones and Bill Fellows. They were a hit. Next year I'd like to see more. There are pictures all over the place. Track one down on your own. I set up at the bloggers table and blogged & tweeted my way through the key note. Except for the hyper-sexy Windows 7 touch screen computer, it wasn't the most exciting key note I've ever seen. The new technologies coming out for data manipulation on the client machines in Office 2010 are impressive, no doubt, but something seemed lacking and I'm not sure what it…
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04Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Wednesday Key Note 3

PASS
More demos using Analysis Services from R2. They're showing how you can refresh data & reports without having to write a bunch of SSIS packages. That's pretty cool too. You can actually connect to Excel now and pull data into SSAS to manage the data like it was a database. You're going to have to spend time managing these files like they were servers. Analysis services is starting to manage itself? I hate to say this, but I've heard that kind of statement before from MS. It wasn't true then. Is it true now? No idea yet, but the small part of me that doubts these things just fired up. The reports can be animated. Data in motion is pretty darn slick to watch. Powerpivot is a freebie that runs…
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04Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Wednesday Key Note 2

PASS
Tom Casey of Microsoft on BI. 20% of people that are decision makers within organizations have the tools and information they need. That means that 80% don't have it. I believe those numbers. Microsoft is very focused on getting BI built into the information platform. You can tell from the stuff released in SQL Server 2008. Part of the proof he's putting out is the PASS Summit itself. There's 2 dedicated BI trackes, 50+ sessions, and 30% of attendees said they were interested in that track. For some information Ron Vanzanten. He's sporting identical clothing to Tom Casey. 4 million card holders and 3200 employees. They'll be working through 600,000 credit card applications in a month. Woof. 24tb of customer data in a SQL Server BI environment. Woof X2. Unfortunately,…
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04Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Wednesday Key Note 1

PASS
Nice phot montage, included so many friends. I love PASS. Rushab Mehta launching the Wednesday key note. Unfortunately, this is the DULL, but important, stuff about finances. PASS is a non-profit, volunteer run organization. I'm not going to track this stuff. You can find the full financials on the PASS web site. Celebrating volunteers. You do need to thank the people that make this thing run. I'm especially amazed by the work done by the Program Committee. The outstanding volunteers for the year are: Tim Ford - Program Committe, Quizbowl Me - SQL Server Standard, Editorial Committee Amy Lewis - Co-leader & Volunteer Coordinator for BI Virtual Jacob Sebastian - Chapter Regional Mentor The PASSion Award is going to two people this year: Charley Hanania - International Recipient Allen Kinsel…
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04Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

PASS Summit 2009 – Day 1

PASS
YAAAAAH! The PASS Summit is pretty amazing. Yesterday I sat through the key notes from Microsoft. I was at the bloggers table where I could hear the speaker and lots of typing. I used to consider myself a blogger, but then I watched Brent Ozar doing and learned that I was doing it all wrong. Anyway, the key note was pretty interesting. They talked about future plans and directions of the information platform (note, not data). Right after I presented my first session, Execution Plan Best Practices.  The room was darned full and I only had one, very minor, glitch. After that I RAN to the Birds of a Feather lunch to host a table discussing developing databases on a team. It went all right. I don't think my table…
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03Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Tuesday Key Note – Part 3

PASS
Now up is Ted Kummert of Microsoft. He's giving us a good overview of some of the technology coming up. He's showing us his Top 5 reasons to be at PASS You are part of the world's largest gathering of SQL Server Professionals - way too true. why aren't you here? You can take your questions directly to the "Source" - Yes, this is very useful We've got Wayne & Rushabh - Instead of Arnold Schwarzenneger at the Oracle conference. Eh You can work hard & play hard at Gameworks - Oh lord, we're in a DOT COM. Please no. You will build skills & knowledge on the #1 Database in the world - Yes. Most of these are pretty good reasons to be here. #1 and #5 especially. The Information…
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03Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Tuesday Key Note – Part 2

PASS
Bob Muglia opened with January 13, 1988, when the Microsoft Sybase Ashton-Tate SQL Server program was launched. Apparently Bill Gates was very nervous about the speech at the time, but Steve Ballmer jumped up and down like a chear-leader. WOW. He's holding a box with 51/4 and 31/2 inch floppy disks (yeah, I'm old enough to know what he's talking about, kids, ask your grand-dad). Mr. Muglia just said that there were limitations to the product. That's an odd thing to hear from a software company. Nice to hear it though. He's showing how 128 differnt machines can be added to the system. They've got some kind of load generator that is maxing out 128 processors. Then they jumped it up to 192 processors. You'd be surprised how little space…
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03Nov 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Tuesday Keynote – Part 1

PASS
Set up and and ready to go. Wayne Snyder is going to open the ceremonies and the key note will be from Bob Muglia and Ted Kummert of Microsoft. There are almost 3000 registrants here this year. They're in from 46 different countries. It's really an amazing collection of people. Between twitter, the blogs, the people, the show... it's not good for anyone's ADD. Cool intro with the quick history of the previous locations of the PASS Summit. Wayne's talking about newsgroups as the source of information "back in the day" of 1999 and SQL Server 7.o. Wayne's showing the growth over the last three years. 1528 in 2007, 2445 in 2008 and 2200 this year. That's pretty amazing since most conferences are running 50% down this year, PASS is…
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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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