I’m happy to say that for most of you out there, the answer to this question is “no.” That’s as it should be. I’m not anyone all that special. I present technical sessions at various events from local user group meetings to SQL Saturday’s to international events like the PASS Summit and 24 Hours of PASS. Why? Not because the attendees know my name, that’s for sure. It’s because of a combination of at least two of these three things:

1. The organizers might know my name or may know of my books or the fact that I’m working for a vendor that sponsors their event
2. I’ve submitted sessions that seem to be of interest to the people who might be attending the event being organized
3. I’ve got a track record of delivering decent, if not world-altering, presentations that people find useful.

Let’s say you’re organizing a SQL Saturday event. And, let’s say that you want to get as many attendees as you possibly can. Is your best bet to find a bunch of people with MVP or MCM after their name? Or, should you focus on getting an interesting set of content from speakers that you know can deliver?

From what I’ve seen, it’s that second option that is your best bet. I’ve stood in front of people and started talking about a topic that I have a written a book about only to find that the entire room was not aware that I had written that book. They weren’t there for me. They were there for knowledge that I might be able to communicate to them. They were there for the topic, not the speaker. I’ve seen local speakers give presentations that were simply amazing, despite the fact that they didn’t have a book or weren’t blogging constantly. It’s the content and delivery, not the person delivering it. You’re going to know your local speakers as well as, or better than, any of the MVPs. Rely on your knowledge of these people and the fact that you’ve seen them present before.

This is something that I think way too many people overlook. Especially when you’re managing a SQL Saturday event, you need to build an interesting set of topics, not lure a bunch of MVPs to your event. Guaranteed, you’ll get an MVP or three. Don’t focus on that or worry about it. Instead, focus on your agenda. Build a good set of presentations, the kind that are going to be the most useful to your audience.

Don’t believe me? Check out these links to the front page of the PASS Summit 2011, 2010, 2009. Note a couple of things. First, no headliners at all. No speakers are called out in any way except the people delivering the key notes. Second, there are Flickr & Twitter streams in which anyone can be one the front page for a time. In short, the focus is on content and attendees.

Remember this when you’re setting up your event.

Oh, and don’t bother linking to this post. Everyone has my permission to copy and paste this and claim it as their own. You just have to include this disclaimer for everyone else to copy and paste this post as well.

I say it all the time because it’s worth repeating, feedback is a gift. Good, bad or indifferent (well, not indifferent), feedback is a wonderful gift. Any time you appreciate a speaker, give them feedback. Any time you think a speaker could improve, give them feedback. Any time you hate a speaker, give them feedback. It’s really the best thing you can do.

With that in mind, I have a huge stack of gifts in front of me here, the evaluations from the PASS Summit.Thank you very much to each and every one of the 160 different evaluations I received. I presented three times at the summit, once on a pre-con with Gail Shaw called “All About Execution Plans,” one time in a spotlight session called “DMOs as a Shortcut for Performance Tuning,” and a 5 minute lightning talk called “Testing Your Backups, The Rant.”

All About Execution Plans

I worked hard prepping the pre-con. It’s my first one at the PASS Summit (and I hope not my last). Gail also worked hard. The two of us did all this work in opposite hemisphere’s on the planet. That means we didn’t really get to walk through the session until the day before. Our timing was off, and some of the advanced stuff was a little rushed late in the day. I think that might account for some of the scores. Regardless, that’s an explanation, not an excuse. Here’s how things broke down for us, 5 is good, 1 is bad:

Gail and I had a blast presenting this session. Maybe we were having too much fun. I’m very happy that our knowledge rating was good and high. Everything else, well, we missed the mark. I’m especially troubled by the low rating on the question of “Did you learn what you expected to learn?” I think that one shows that we didn’t deliver what we should have. If we were to do this again (and I think we should), I’d cut down the basics information quite a lot. We had almost 3 hours worth of introductory material. I suspect taking that down to about 90 minutes would help a lot. Then we’d have an additional 90 minutes on the other side to get into what the audience seemed to expect. Here are some of the comments (my responses are in parenthesis and typos outside of parenthesis are not mine):

• I expected more from th performance solving demoes
• Demo of what to look for in live systems with a high focus on “prevention” would have been very useful
• Would have loved a deeper dive
• Could have used little lower level but am happy anyway (there are only a few of these. Everything else was focused on the fact that the afternoon was rushed and the morning was basic)
• It might have been better to spend less time on the mornig topics and get into disection of execution plans earlier. (see)
• Explaining the properties was helpful (Yay! hit one of my keywords, everyone drink)
• I was expected more on reding exectuion plans and tuning ex. plans
• Way too academic. Don’t feel like I am translating anything back to work situations (that one hurts, seriously, it does. I thought I was bringing real world examples in, but must not have made enough of a point. Thank you)
• Would have liked access to demo material before hand. Also, real life scenarios and troubleshooting techniques would have been useful (and another. Ouch)
• Would have been nice to have screenshots of the demos (uh, no)
• The combined knowledge of these two is amazing (The plan was, I say something Gail corrects me. That part worked)
• You both have deep knowledge of the subject. You make a fantastic team. (lots like this)
• Good flow, great at repeating questions out loud. Good at zooming in.
• 1. Parse/algebraize/optimize
  2. The optimizer can lie, but usually doesn’t
  3. Look at selectt and properties in ssms, didn’t know about properties (another yay. That’s one thing I wanted to get across)
• Go to a real trainer next time (And see, that’s not feedback. That’s snark. That’s commentary. But it’s not feedback)
• Too much info so the speakers had to move swiftly and skip some basic concepts and made assumptions about the knowledge and skill levels of the students (see, hard to reconcile everything, but the consensus was, too many basics, not enough advanced stuff)

You get the idea. I think we’ve got some excellent and actionable material to build and improve this presentation. I’d present it again with Gail in a New York second.

DMOs as a Shortcut for Performance Tuning

This is the third year I gave this spotlight session. I was less than pleased with myself, the slides and the demos during the presentation (and I received some good feedback, that day, about it), but I tried hard. Evidently, trying hard paid off. I’m ranked 28th with this session in the conference over all. Yeah, hardly something to write home about unless the highest you’d ever been ranked before was 32nd. Improvement is improvement. There were 58 evals turned in out of 120 people attending.

With these levels of evals, I have nothing to complain about… I really need to get better at writing my abstracts. I’m hitting low on the actual session and expectations, so I’m clearly not communicating well. Oh yeah, I can find things to critique myself over any time I want. However, hit nice and high with the knowledge score and high enough with the presentation skills (although higher would be better). Lots of room for improvement, which is great. Here are a few of the comments:

• That I’m missing a lot of valuable information and wasting a whole lot of time hunting the whumpus when users whinge! (Win!)
• Should be serious!!! (really? I can’t. I try, but I can’t. I’m having fun with the technology and I’m going to smile and joke while I work, just because, sorry.)
• Would have rated this at a 300 level but the pre-req listing was useful. Only reason I rate this as 300 is the underlying need to understand the various terms and columns within the DMO’s. To rate at 200, perhaps a slide at the start stating the things tha (interesting. I still think it’s 200, but I hate the thought that I’m leaving someone. What do you rate it if it’s 232?)
• Big brain (that’s not all that’s big, if you know what I’m saying…What? I’m talking about my belly… what did you think? See, humor, can’t help it).
• Great presentation. Clear, very easy to understand, seeks audience input which is good as it keeps the interest levels high. (Another Win! I do go for audience input. It’s vital to me as a presenter. I’m just not a “stand in front of the hall & lecture” kind of person).
• I can use this info tomorrow.
• Apply the material immediately! Thanks!
• Dude; can’t you leave the results window up (not go back to query window) and just hit execute/F5 to re-execute? (interesting. The last several presentations, prior to this year, one of the complaints was that everything went to the bottom of the screen in the results. So now I output to the tab & more stuff is visible, but I can’t leave it on the screen… something to practice, leaving the results in place a beat or three longer… thank you, thank you. See, this is what feedback is all about)
• We pay $$$ for this!!! (very unhappy person. Same guy that didn’t like the humor. I’m sorry. I do feel back for this person. I let them down, but I’m not sure how to improve from this one. I’m not going to joke less. Maybe a warning at the beginning, “I’m going to laugh at myself, our technologies, and other things while I present”)
• The demos (script/execution capture) were boggy; this presentation was possibly an outlier.(great point. I did have some troubles with a script I’ve been running for, literally, years during this presentation. Weird. Thanks for the feedback)

You get the idea. Except for the guy upset at my attempts at humor (again, I am truly sorry), decent ratings and a few areas where I can try to improve. This is so useful. Thank you all.

Backup Testing: The Rant

Further proof of my inability to take things completely seriously, I communicated several ways to test your backups, but at a full throated roar. I hope it was useful as well as fun. A couple of comments:

• SOME PRESENTERS ARE A LITTLE CRAZY BUT AWESOME (That could be for anyone, but I’m claiming it)
• A CLOCK IN FRONT OF GRANT (the guy doing the timing was off, not me)
• next time, make sure these LTs are recorded for YouTube ! (agreed)

That’s it. To everyone who filled out a sheet, thank you. I hope I can do better by you all next year.

Here is the list of suckers, uh, I mean, candidates, that actually want to subject themselves to the board. Look these people over, weigh them, and vote well. Things are running a little different this year. The elections are being held between the 6th and the 20th of December.

The PASS Community is an amazing thing and these people are going to potentially improve it, maintain it, or degrade it. If you’ve attended any of the 24 Hours of PASS, the PASS Summit, SQL Rally, SQL Saturday, your local user group, and you’ve received something positive from any or all of them, then you’ve seen the benefits of the Professional Association for SQL Server. If you want to see PASS improved, or at least maintained, then it’s up to you to vote to make that happen.

Vote early and often.

And a very serious good luck to all the candidates.

I write quite frequently about SQL Server Execution Plans. I started in that area just because that’s how you figure out what a query is doing and sooner or later, we all have to tune a query. I found I was doing it sooner and more frequently. When the opportunity came up to write a book , I jumped on it. Now I find myself presenting, rather frequently, on execution plans.

One of the people I’ve learned from over the last several years is Gail Shaw (blog|twitter). I first saw Gail on stage at the PASS Summit, I think it was 2007. A co-worker of mine was picked, along with Gail, to go on stage for the Quiz Bowl. Gail was answering all the questions. If you go over to SQL Server Central, Gail doesn’t answer all the questions, but she’s involved most of the important discussions. If you read her blog and articles, Gail has also been deeply involved in query tuning and execution plans for a long time.

Why am I telling you all this?

In just a little over three weeks, Gail and I will be presenting an all day seminar on SQL Server Execution Plans. We’re going to cover the optimizer and the plan cache and we’re going to show you how to read a ton of execution plans. We’re going to go over how to spot problems and how to fix them. We’ll be examining plans from people in the audience (yeah, bring your problem plans) live on stage. You’ll get the chance not just to hear us talk, but to ask us questions, to get clarification on topics and meet other people who are learning the same stuff you are.

In short, we’re going to be having a really good time and talking a lot about Execution Plans. This is your chance. Register for the Summit and, please, register for our pre-conference seminar. You won’t be disappointed.

The first ever SQL Rally was held just last week. It was an excellent time. The event was organized and run by PASS. Which means, in  effect, it was a like a mini-Summit. I’m struggling a bit to come up with the words to describe what the event was like. It was so much more than a long SQL Saturday, but describing it, as I just did, as a mini-Summit mischaracterizes it as well. I guess it must be it’s own critter. Let me just tell you what went on, maybe that will help.

The event was held at a very nice hotel, the Marriott World in Orlando, Florida. The Rally proper was two days long, but there was a set of pre-conference seminars held the previous day, making the total event three days in length. All the sessions and pre-cons were selected through voting by members of the SQL Server community as organized by PASS, which means there was a real mix on speakers, some the experienced names you know and some totally new. I was lucky enough to have enjoyed the faith of the community which resulted in spending Wednesday giving an all day seminar on performance tuning to 98 attendees. I had a blast! The people there were wonderful, engaged, smart, asking challenging questions, more than a few of which I didn’t have immediate answers for. The smaller size of the event, even during the pre-con, gave it a very intimate feel. I received a lot of positive feedback from the people attending and I’ll post the evals when I get them.

The first night, Wednesday, we went out to a chicken wings restaurant which will remain nameless since the service was horrific and a couple of my co-workers got food poisoning from. You can track down the name of the place, don’t go there. Aside from that though, it was like a high school reunion, but instead of being peopled with your tormentors, it was filled with friends. We had a blast and it went long into the night and moved to another bar.

Next morning was the launch of the event. Unlike the Summit, and more like a SQL Saturday, we just started getting our learn on. Sessions kicked off and people were going. I spent most of my time, both days of the Rally, in the vendor hall, earning my paycheck at my new and glorious job. I could have attended sessions, and did go to one, but I really did want to spend more time learning how to do what I’ll be doing in the future at more SQL Rally events, SQL Cruise, SQL In The City, Connections, PASS Summit, SQLBits, SQL Excursions (should I ever get invited), SQL Saturday… you get the idea, from the excellent pros that I work with at Red Gate. But I kept asking everyone how the sessions were. The majority of the feedback I received was extremely positive, so I think the attendees had a good time.

Did I mention on Wednesday night it was discovered that one speaker wouldn’t make it on Thursday? No, well, I filled in and did a session. Maybe I was tired from the all day pre-con, but I decided to do a session with an incomplete slide deck that I had never rehearsed. It’s one I’m putting together for SQL Cruise, but hadn’t finished. Again, I haven’t seen evals yet, but the feedback I got was pretty good, and I was able to spot a few rough patches that I can fix to make this presentation better.

At the end of the day were the Lightning Talks, hosted by Jorge Segarra (blog|twitter) and SQL University. I gave one called Test Your Backups. There will be a video available. I apologize for the content in advance. I also learned at the lightning talks, well, re-learned would be a better description, that I don’t know anything. Thanks to Jen McCown (blog|twitter) for that bit of information.

Then… SQL Rally kept going. They introduced some new stuff called Overdrive. Three different sessions running simultaneously, a speed networking event, that I would have liked to have seen, a training session how to do job interviews, that I would have liked to have seen, and the Birds of a Feather discussion, that I did see because I was supposed to be running a table on perf tuning & indexing, etc. Ended up becoming a free for all conversation on indexing, vendor politics, job hunting, Naval nuclear power, and whatever else I’m forgetting.

By the end of that day, on Thursday, I was utterly exhausted. When the Red Gate team invited me to a quiet dinner, I gladly accepted and skipped the evenings festivities, which I understand were somewhat epic. I’ll leave that story to those who were there.

Friday was more learning and more time speaking with attendees about the great stuff they can do with Red Gate products (yeah, yeah, I’m trying to keep the marketing to a minimum here) and one session that I attended. It was as good a day as Thursday, but I had to cut it short to hop a plane for home.

In summary, this event was different. It was more than a SQL Saturday, which is good, because they so frequently go by in a flash. It wasn’t as much as the Summit, but that’s good too, because it really allowed you time to spend with people, which is great. I understand that more of these are planned, and I think that’s going to be a good thing. It seems like it’s a nice way to get people close together for a period of time to allow for better interaction than what’s provided through a SQL Saturday. I also liked the 90 minute format on some of the presentations. I think the idea of making these community driven events with voting is also a good idea, but that does mean that they have to be organized very far out to allow everyone presenting time to get their presentations together. In short, great event. Well done volunteers and PASS. I’ll go to another if I get the opportunity.

The very first ever SQL Rally is taking place in a little less than four weeks in Orlando Florida. It’s going to be quite the event. There will be two full days of sessions on any number of topics. But before that all starts, there’s going to be a set of full day pre-conference seminars. These too are on a number of topics, but I’m hoping to draw your attention to just one, mine.

I’ve put together a seven hour session on query performance tuning. I’ve tried to make it as complete as I possibly can. I’m going to cover the whole process from collecting data on your machines to identify where problems may be, to understanding the optimizer so you know how things work, to reading execution plans so you can identify issues, to various methods of fixing all sorts of different performance problems. In short, performance tuning, start to finish. Here are the specific things that I hope to communicate to you with this seminar:

1. The ability to collect performance metrics on their servers as part of an overall query tuning methodology

2. The ability to generate execution plans from multiple sources in support of troubleshooting poorly performing queries

3. An understanding of how the optimizer works in support of writing better TSQL code as well as troubleshooting poorly performing queries

4. A working knowledge of DMVs that will help them identify and fix performance issues on their servers

5. The ability to address common query performance problems

That’s it. If you get all or part of these five topics, it’s a win. This is probably an low to intermediate level class. It’s not high level. If you’ve been teaching performance tuning to experts for years, you’re probably not going to get much out of this class. If you do want to prep for the class, I’d recommend getting a copy of my book, “SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled.”

There’s a good chance this seminar will sell out. If you’re interested, please click here to register soon in order to ensure that you have a spot.

I hope to see you there.

Andy Warren posted a question the other day (well, issued a challenge actually), “What Should PASS Be?” I’ll let you go and read that & wait here… Done? Cool. Moving on.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my associations with PASS over the years. I’ve been a first-time attendee, a volunteer and a presenter at the PASS Summit. I’ve volunteered with the PASS organization with the Special Interest Groups, the Editorial Committee, and as Editor of the SQL Standard. I’ve taken part in 24 Hours of PASS as a presenter, host and attendee. I have helped to put on SQL Saturday events, attended them and presented at them (and we have another one coming up on April 2nd in the Boston area, please register here.). I was one of the founding officers of the PASS Chapter in Rhode Island, Southern New England SQL Server Users Group, and I’m the current president. In short, I’ve been taking part in everything PASS has to offer. What’s more, I think that by getting involved in PASS, volunteering, speaking, trying to raise my head above the crowd, it helped me make MVP and I know it helped me get my excellent new job with Red Gate Software. I know that I’ve developed friendships that I treasure because of my association with PASS. In short, this organization has been very, very good to me.

And yet…

I’ve been able to make PASS work for me, and work well. But I think I’m the exception. I recently left a team of 10 DBAs and I’m not convinced that they would say that PASS has done much for them. Yes, some of them attended the Summit and learned a lot there, but couldn’t they have attended the same lectures at Tech-Ed or Connections? Some of them have received good information from our user group, but without the PASS association, our user group could do what it’s done so far (and for what it’s worth, I don’t count my user group as being all that successful and put the fault down to its president). None of them have networked through PASS the way I have, none of them attend 24 Hours of PASS or the local SQL Saturdays. With the exception of the Summit & the User Group (and me) none of these people had any association with PASS. Talking to other people online, I don’t think this is the exception. I think it’s the rule.

So, the question is, what should PASS be? Since I’ve been involved with PASS, it has tried to compete against the magazine and publishing web sites, and failed. It has tried to compete with Linked-In and failed. It has attempted to set up vibrant discussion groups in competition with the umpteen other discussion groups out there and had a single success (Women In Technology is a model for other groups to emulate, in & out of technology) but largely failed. There have been discussions about certifications, more extended training, speakers bureau’s, and other good ideas, none of which got off the ground. At the same time there have been a couple of successes, WIT as already mentioned, 24 Hours of PASS, SQL Saturday, monthly SIG webinars, and the ongoing success of the Summit.

My last boss, who was mad as a hatter, but a great guy to work for, used to argue that you can work on your weaknesses or you can work on your strengths, but you can’t ever work on both. Further, he’d say, you’ll generally only be able to mitigate your weaknesses. Mad though he was, I found his advice extremely helpful. I think it might work well for PASS. They’ve been trying to work on their perceived or actual weak points for years. Time to switch. Start working on the strengths. Even though it’s largely volunteer run, there’s more training coming out of the PASS organization than anywhere else. Focus there. Work the strengths of the organization.

SQL Rally is coming up. It always felt a bit like a red-headed step child to the Summit. Eliminate that attitude. Pull out all the stops. Make SQL Rally a success. Start expanding the reach on the webinars. Focus on the quality and the quantity of the training opportunities already at work within the organization. Clean up the horrific SQL Saturday web site so that it gets easier to put these things on. Encourage more smaller SQL Saturday events so that the reach grows (putting on large ones requires huge commitment from the volunteers and cash from vendors, which is not going to be there forever). Build and finish the speaker bureau.  Focus on training, training and more training, even if you have to start charging for it or paying the speakers (and yeah, that might be a good idea). Advertise… everywhere. Get the word out that if you want training this is the place to be. If you want to be a trainer, this is the place to start, if you are a trainer, this is where you grow you brand. Have free sessions, but charge for access to the recordings and give a share of the proceeds to the presenters. This is where the strength of the organization lies, and we should focus on building that strength for the next few years. Then, three years in, you can start worrying about weaknesses, real or perceived, and focus on networking opportunities or certifications or something else.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents. As I said, I feel like I’ve received more from PASS than I put into it, although I have tried hard to give back to the community. I’m appreciative of what I’ve received. I know I’ve been considered one of the noisy whiners by many on the board, so I don’t mind taking this opportunity to tell them that they’ve done good work and that it’s appreciated, even by the noisy whiners. Challenge answered Andy.

I believe I’ve been far too quiet about this event.

In May, in Orlando Florida, there will be a two day SQL Server conference called SQL Rally put on by PASS. This is a somewhat unique event since the sessions have all been chosen by the community. That’s right, a series of votes was held online (and if you missed it, you weren’t paying attention) so that all of you were able to decide which sessions you’d most like to see. I’m bringing this up because, now, it’s up to you to register and go.

Did I mention the pre-con? No? Well, there will be a one-day pre-conference seminar. There are multiple sessions of excellent material at the pre-con. These were also voted on by the community. One of them just happens to be a full day session on query tuning called “Query Performance Tuning: Start to Finish” (catch that little bit of racing tie-in, yeah!) that I’ll be putting on. I’m busting my nether regions to put together a great session. I just need you guys to show up to make it perfect.

This is a short, sharp, inexpensive, easy to get to (in the old days, all roads lead to Rome, now, all airlines lead to Orlando International) event with top speakers from around the country presenting sessions that you picked. Why haven’t you registered? Get on over to the web site. Get your registration in. Plus, if you register now, you save $100, so that’s nice.

Andy Warren has posted another one of his excellent summaries of what’s going on at the PASS Board. Andy, thanks for what you do. Those of us who care about what goes on at PASS really appreciate your posts.

The discussion under consideration this time is the location of the PASS Summit. As you may be aware, it’s been held in Seattle for several years now and will be there for at least two more years going forward. It seems that the board is leaning, extremely heavily, towards making it a permanent fixture in Seattle.

I can see why they might do this. First, and biggest, it’s next door to Microsoft. That means the Summit gets tons and tons of Microsoft Employees in attendance, which is a huge draw and a very nice benefit. Second, it’s right near the management company’s headquarters, making it less expensive to get the huge staff needed to make a conference this size work. Third, the staff and volunteers are very familiar with the venue (assuming it stays the venue) so it makes planning and execution much easier. It really does make sense. The strongest of these arguments is, of course, the Microsoft presence.

But…

Yeah, there is a but.

There are a lot of people, just in the US, who live in time zones other than the Pacific. In fact, way over half the US population is located in the Central and Eastern time zones. Let’s also add in Europe for consideration. All these places require extra travel time to get over to the Pacific. That’s added expense to individuals or companies, and remember, we’re talking about more than half the population of the US and all of Europe. That’s for the attendees and the speakers (who are attendees too, make no doubt about it) as well as the vendors and their staff, an extra 3-6 hours of travel, which usually means, an entire day on either side of the summit, just spent travelling. Plus an extra day or two in the hotel. Plus extra money spent on food. Let’s also add that this is frequently non-productive or less-productive times for the companies. And don’t forget the stresses and possible costs to the families left at home when all these people are travelling. All that cost is going to add up, and a heavy percentage of 1/2 of the US and all of Europe, might just decide they don’t want to pay all those added costs. Not every year. One year, maybe two, maybe in a release year, who knows, but not every year.

I guess the question is, are more people going to not show up because of cost than the number of people who won’t show up because the SQL CAT (great people, I’ve met several, helpful, smart, useful, I really appreciate them) won’t be there? The board seems to believe that they will lose more people because of a reduced Microsoft presence than they will lose because of cost.

I’m just not so sure. Based on how the economy has been lately, cost must be a huge factor for many, most, companies deciding how many people to send out for training and networking. Is a company less likely to send their people because some developers won’t be available for questions or because they have to pay more to send people?

I’m just not with the board on this. I think the cost is going to hurt attendance more than the added MS presence will help it. Remember, more than half the presenters are not MS employees, they’re MVP’s and others. And, remember, MS will still send a pretty healthy number of employees, just fewer than they would if the event is in Seattle. After all, they want to get in front of you and encourage you to buy and use their products. That’s a big reason why they support the event at all.

I’ve found that asking questions in blog posts usually leads to few, if any, answers, but I’m still going to ask, just to try to understand how far off base my beliefs are, if they are.

Which is more important to you and your company, reduced costs, or more Microsoft people?

During the PASS Summit I have again been given the opportunity to keep my laptop plugged in… as long as I blog about the Key Notes. So, I’m going to do it, power is hard to come by in that place. Once again I can regale you, near real time, what’s occurring in the key note addresses at the PASS Summit. Once more I’ll have the opportunity to jump on to the table while wearing a kilt.

But, this year, you may not want to read me. Instead, you might want to tune into the key notes yourself. PASS is going to transmit them live. You can go to the this link to watch them. Now, I can hear you, literally, thinking to yourself, “Right, just what I need in my life, to listen to some sales hack tell me about some semi-functional bit of software.” Most of the time, you’d be right. But this is PASS. We don’t just listen to sales hacks stumbling through presentations. We’re getting to learn from Dr. DeWitt again this year. I’m jazzed and you should be too. Dr. DeWitt’s presentation last year was simply amazing. In terms of sheer geek fun, it’s hard to beat. This year should be as good, or better.

I’ll also be tweeting all week. Follow hash tag #sqlpass to find out what’s happening from me and all the other Twitterati.