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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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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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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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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SQL Server Standard Update

Misc, PASS
Just to keep people who might be interested up to date on what's happening with the SQL Server Standard relaunch. I've received some fantastic abstracts on a wide range of topics from a diverse group of SQL Server DBA's and Developers. From that, we've got a lot of articles in the hopper going through technical edits and second drafts. Three articles have made it all the way to copy edit. They should be done soon. I'm positive you'll see at least one of them, maybe two, before the PASS Summit. I need even more abstracts so I can publish even more articles. If you meet the qualifications to write for us, please submit an abstract to my PASS email address: grant.fritchey - at - sqlpass -dot- org (unobfuscate the obvious).…
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