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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Snags With Profiler GUI

SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools
Running the Profiler GUI against a production server is not something you should do. I've outlined my research into exactly why in the past. But I hit another little issue with the Profiler GUI as part of work I'm doing on a Microsoft PSS call (more on that in another post). We have a procedure on one of our systems that is erroring out, but only on a particular server and only when called from the application, not when it's called, on the same server, from SQL Server Management Studio. I needed to capture some trace events and do it quickly, so I decided to use the GUI, just this once. I put filters on it so that I would only collect certain data, and the database I was collecting…
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