PASS Summit Evaluations

PASS
The big day has arrived and all the speakers are poring over their PASS Summit 2009 evaluations, me included. These things are always a mixed bag. On the one hand you get nice positive reinforcement. On the other, you wonder how you may have fallen short to not get even higher marks. I'd say I take them as guides and move on, but I don't. I really sweat them and worry about lower marks and ways I could improve... makes me a bit crazy. Be that as it may, here are the evals from my two sessions. Best Practices for Working With Execution Plans (AD-419-S), 59 evaluations Usefulness of Session Poor:0 Average:2 Good:19 Excellent:38 Speaker's Presentation Skills Poor:0 Average:2 Good:18 Excellent:39 Speakers's Knowledge Poor:0 Average:1 Good:12 Excellent:45 Accuracy of Session…
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Dr. DeWitt’s Key Note at the PASS Summit

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If you missed this, here's your chance to make it up. If you were there, and like me, you need to rewatch it about six to eight times to try to understand everything that was presented, here's your chance. Dr. DeWitt's key note was probably the high point of the Summit or at least in the top 5. It's not to be missed.
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PASS Summit 2009 Day 3

PASS
The day started off with a mixed bag. First we had an honestly tearful farewell with Wayne Snyder saying goodbye to Kevin Kline, leaving the board for the first time since PASS was founded. This was followed by a painfully dull session with Dell all about their commitment to bread & butter DBA concerns. That was followed by Dr. DeWitt doing a deep dive into the history and the future of computing, showing and teaching in ways that only the very best can achieve. It was a fantastic performance, entertaining, enlightening, amazing... Just flat out incredible. It's the kind of understanding that you wish you could get about most things, most of the time. Unfortunately, it came to an end. Today I finally got to hit a lot of sessions. First…
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PASS Summit 2009 Key Note 3

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Dr. David DeWitt "I'm not a doctor." This is going to be good. "From 1 to 1000 MIPS" He's doing great. He was a fantastic last year and I knew this was going to be good. 32 years in academia and only in MS for 1.5 years. He's the blue sky guy, and beleive me when I tell you, you get smarter from being in the room with him. And a huge ovation because he told us that he's going technical and not covering a marketing pitch. Right. This one is going to be hard to blog. He's going through information quick. It's all good. He's giving an academic talk about the 30 years of technology trends in databases. He's going over how the trends have affected OLTP and why…
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PASS Summit 2009 Key Note 1

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Wow, the bloggers table is empty today! Nice intro! Good photo's. I love the Summit! Bill Graziano is introducing Day 3. He acknowledged Twitter and the bloggers. We rock! Outgoing board members are Greg Low and Pat Wright. These are great guys who've busted their butts for the community. Kevin Kline is completely off the board now, finishing his time as the immediate past-president. I'm pretty sure that's the first time he won't be on the board. Yep, I'm right, he's never been off the board since PASS was a organization. He really has done a lot for the organization. Thanks for your time Kevin. A review of all the other board members including the new president Rushabh Mehta and Wayne Snyder as the immediate past president. April 21-23,2010 the…
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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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PASS Summit Wednesday Key Note 3

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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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PASS Summit Wednesday Key Note 2

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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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PASS Summit Wednesday Key Note 1

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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

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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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