Thoughts on PASS’s Bankruptcy, Redgate’s Acquisition, and Private Equity
A private equity (PE) company recently acquired the majority of Redgate Software, the current owners of the PASS Data Community Summit and SQLServerCentral.
Everybody in tech has private equity stories, some good, some terribad. Private equity hands money to companies not out of generosity, but because they believe they can turn it into even more money over time. The new PE owners want to pump up the company’s revenues, cut expenses, and raise profits as quickly as possible. That way, better numbers help them turn around and offer the company’s stock to the public, getting their money back out plus a nice profit.
Redgate’s new owners (and they are owners, as noted by the “majority shareholders” wording in Redgate’s announcement) don’t have emotional ties to past baggage, so sometimes this means cutting things that the community loves, but that aren’t meaningfully profitable.
Like, uh… Summit and SQLServerCentral.
I don’t necessarily think these cool communities are on the chopping block, but that is the kind of thing that PE companies do when they’re under pressure to make money quickly. Even if it does happen, it’s probably unlikely to happen in the first year at least. I hope it never does – I hope these community resources stick around forever – but now is a good time to talk about how PASS came under Redgate’s ownership to begin with.
Rewind the clock to 2020.
PASS, the organization formerly known as the Professional Association for SQL Server, had been hosting an annual PASS Summit in November every year. The Summit was PASS’s only meaningful source of revenue, and they were living Summit paycheck to paycheck. I’d been very vocal about the problems with PASS, but I think it’s safe to say that nobody, including the Board of Directors members, were really happy about PASS’s finances.
Like Maximus said in Fallout, “Everyone wants to save the world. They just disagree on how.”
In 2020, the pandemic struck, and they had to cancel the November 2020 event. It was the straw that broke the camel’s wallet. Shortly thereafter, PASS announced they were bankrupt. After decades of serving the community, all that was left was millions of dollars in debt and a few assets, none of which were worth anywhere near enough to pay off the debt:
- An email list with community members, speakers, volunteers, and in-person event attendees
- Videos from many prior in-person and online events
- The brands of PASS and SQLSaturday, and their respective domains & web sites
I was worried about who would get those assets.
When the bankruptcy was announced, I immediately contacted my attorney and explained the situation. I told him I wanted to make an opening offer for PASS’s assets, but only if the deal included all 3 of the above asset groups. COVID had actually been really beneficial to my business’s war chest because I’d been well-positioned to teach online classes, so I could afford to pay cash for the assets and still have a war chest to start hiring staff to plan for more events. My attorney contacted PASS to get the ball rolling.
I wanted to move quickly because I was worried that a bad actor would get those assets. I could imagine a slimy vendor buying them, sticking their ads all over them, trying to sell the recordings as current knowledge, spamming the email list with junk, putting on a “conference” that was really just vendor spam, etc.
A couple of weeks later, PASS replied with a one-slide PowerPoint deck:
Note that the slide only mentions SQLSaturday – not PASS, not the email lists, not the session recordings, etc. Those “assets” were practically worthless. I told my attorney no, I wasn’t interested, but to keep me posted if anything about PASS itself came back. It never did.
PASS had already secretly been acquired by Redgate.
A couple weeks later, we found out Redgate had already bought PASS’s best assets behind the scenes.
My first reaction: I was really, really pissed off. Clearly, the PASS Board of Directors (who had a relationship with Redgate) had done fast, secret backroom deals with Redgate to sell/give those assets to Redgate, without telling the public, without giving the public a chance to bid. Depending on how it went down, that may have been illegal.
However, my first reaction only lasted a couple of minutes.
What was I gonna do, sue? Who would I even sue? PASS was defunct, and the assets had already changed hands. Any lawsuit would just slow down the process of keeping the community alive. Besides, I liked and trusted Redgate, and I thought they’d do their damnedest to keep the community up and running, without turning it into a spam-fest.
In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t get PASS.
Had I won the bidding (that never happened), my plan had been to hire a few core people to manage the brand, and farm the rest of the event planning work out to a professional event management company. (No, not the prior management company because they only ran PASS and nothing else – I’m talking about a large event management company that manages tons of events, not just IT related.)
The years 2021 and forward would have been really hard, ugly work for me. I’ve already tried to build a company with employees before, and failed miserably, because I suck at management. Nothing in my personal skills library has changed to make me better at that task.
It would have been really hard because the (crappy) existing site was DotNetNuke, and I would have wanted that modernized into something like WordPress. That’s a monstrous amount of work.
I would have had to devote a ton of my time and resources to marketing the event. What online platform would we have picked? When would have been the right time to start the in-person event back up? What would the right prices be? How would we select sessions? All of that is a ton of work.
And finally, my name had a polarizing reaction amongst some community members. Some folks would have abandoned the conference just because they didn’t like my blogging or presenting style, and I’m sure there would have been folks at Microsoft who would have refused to participate. The community needs to bring people together rather than split them up.
So in hindsight, I’m really glad I didn’t succeed at my attempt to get PASS and keep it going, and I’m glad Redgate got it. Redgate has invested a lot of time and money, way more than I’d have been able to dedicate without abandoning other work & personal stuff in my life. (I’d already written this post when Louis Davidson announced that the topic for today’s T-SQL Tuesday #194 would be admitting past mistakes, and I thought about submitting this post to that event, but I don’t know that there’s a lot y’all can learn from that particular mistake of mine, ha ha ho ho.)
But… the Summit is already getting cut back.
Before the private equity acquisition, Redgate had already announced that the 2026 Summit had already been cut down to just 3 days: Monday pre-cons, and then Tuesday/Wednesday regular sessions. This is the first time that I can remember where the Summit wasn’t a full week long.
At the time of the announcement, Redgate wrote:
We’ve heard your feedback: many data professionals are facing increasing challenges in securing time and budget for week-long events. By offering a broader range of events in more locations, we remain committed to supporting and empowering the data community.
The first sentence was probably true.
The first part of the second sentence was definitely not true. In 2025, Redgate offered the 5-day summit plus 3 2-day events in New York, Dallas, and Utrecht. The 2026 lineup represents a cutback in every way: less events, less cities, and the Summit is shorter.
But the last part of the second sentence was true: “we remain committed to supporting and empowering the data community.”
And that’s awesome.
Redgate was still putting on 2 2-day events, plus a 3-day Summit. In 2026, that’s hard as hell to do, and I respect them for it. AI is wreaking havoc on all kinds of business models, and the world is a chaotic, unpredictable place right now. Travel is hell for a lot of people – me and Yves included, having just gotten back from Asia and having gone through some nerve-wracking moments at border passings.
Redgate was taking a real financial risk by continuing to run these events. There are real risks that attendance goes down, which means revenue goes down, which also means sponsorship from other vendors goes down. Redgate (and their new owners) have real financial risks at stake to try to keep this community going.
But you’ll notice that I used past tense a lot here, as in “Redgate was” – because Redgate has new owners. I hope Bregal Sagemount continues to maintain the PASS Summit and SQLServerCentral into 2027, but we won’t really know until the 2026 Summit, when the event has always announced the next year’s location and dates. Fingers crossed, because I’d really like to keep seeing y’all there.
36 Comments. Leave new
>And finally, my name had a polarizing reaction amongst some community members. Some folks would have abandoned the conference just because they didn’t like my blogging or presenting style, and I’m sure there would have been folks at Microsoft who would have refused to participate. The community needs to bring people together rather than split them up.
I didn’t know that and it’s shameful. But not surprising. People don’t like to be “challenged”. Jonathan Swift said it best: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
> I didn’t know that and it’s shameful.
I’m totally okay with it, and I mean that in a peaceful, Zen way, not a “screw those people” way. The community is a really big tent, and there’s room for people with all kinds of preferences and opinions. Not everybody likes banana peppers on their subs, and that’s okay.
> When a true genius appears
Hahaha, whoa now, I’m a lot of things, but true genius is not one of them. I just work hard – uh, when I work. (I’m packing for a cruise as we speak, hahaha.)
“I didn’t know that and it’s shameful”
Why? Is there One True Sentiment™ on this topic that, if not held, makes one inherently wrong?
Ben – I’ll take Dave’s side on this to play devil’s advocate.
In a perfect world, you could say everyone should be tolerant of other peoples’ presentation styles, viewpoints, communication methods, behaviors, personalities, etc. Everyone should be able to get along, and attend a 3,000-person conference together.
In that perfect world, you would never hear someone say, “I refuse to attend Event X if Person Y is there, because even if I don’t have to see their sessions, I don’t want to be seen as the kind of person who would hang out at the same events as Person Y.” Because in that perfect world, everyone would understand that *attending* Event X is not the same as *endorsing* every other human being that also attends Event X.
If you haven’t been involved in event controversies – and God bless everyone who has not had to deal with that kind of hassle – then you would be forgiven for thinking we’re living in that perfect world.
🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obFlSwpIihc
I wanted to sleep on my reply to that, hahaha.
I remember when the Redgate announcement came out, and I felt genuinely bad for everybody (you included!) at Microsoft who had to deal with all this.
Microsoft buying PASS wouldn’t have been the right answer. Microsoft wasn’t in the product events business. (They had Ignite/Build/etc, but those are platform events, not single-product events.)
Microsoft handing a pile of money to PASS wouldn’t have been the right answer. When a failing business finally hits rock bottom, it isn’t Microsoft’s job to continue to enable the financial mismanagement by handing over more moolah.
Microsoft explaining their situation in frank terms wouldn’t have been the right answer. There were a lot of feelings going around, and if Microsoft said, “Y’all flew this plane into the ground, and we’re not rewarding you for that,” that would have alienated the pilots.
I thought Microsoft’s actions (publishing a web page of the remaining community resources) was fair, and I didn’t have any other idea to improve the situation. I was just happy Microsoft didn’t do the bad solutions.
Yes, that was the conundrum. So I went after helping the User Groups, because (at the time, anyway) my team and I convinced leadership that in-person groups were the real community.
Community is often expressed in different ways – from Events to meetups – but now it seems Community may mean something else – just forums and large T1 events. All things change, I suppose. I truly hope the community we supported continues. I have friends around the world because of it.
I wondered why ads suddenly showed up in SQLSearch several weeks ago. I didn’t mind, it’s an extremely useful tool offered for free, but it was new after several years.
Hopefully redgate makes it – PE investments generally come for businesses with elevated chances of non-success. SolarWinds seems to have been strengthened by their PE bailout, hopefully redgate will come through it as well. Some people may be upset they will lose their legacy licensing pricing from 15+ years ago but I would rather have functioning software available over the labor it takes to modify something else less complete or roll my own.
Well, to be fair, ads suddenly showed up in SSMS recently too. 😉
Brent – you are one of a kind, and I mean that in a good way. Virtually no one else gives as much for free to the SQL community as you do, and I respect you for that. And you generally make good points in your opinion articles like this one. Thank you. Excellent perspective.
Aww, thanks!
If the worst happens, and Redgate doesn’t continue PASS Summit or SQL Saturday into 2027, would you reconsider trying to buy either or both? If so, why, if not, why not for SQL Saturday? (You’ve already gone into why not for PASS Summit….thank you for the insight).
I wouldn’t for PASS Summit for the reasons I explained in the post, plus right now I’m not really optimistic about the prospects for in-person global events for the next 2-3 years.
SQL Saturday is already a non-profit, separate organization, spun out of Redgate already.
I was unaware of that fact about SQL Saturday. Thank you very much for telling me. I knew they were trying to rebrand as Data Saturday, but that’s all I knew.
Heh, no, that’s a separate group. SQL Saturday is here: https://blog.sqlsaturday.com/2025-11-26-evolvingsqlsat/
That displayed both brutal self-awareness as well as an optimism of the bigger ‘us’ encompassing the data world.
Well said – it is up to all of us to make it happen.
Thanks!
Brent… We had a SQL Saturday last year in the Salt Lake City area but nothing is scheduled for this year. The SQL Server group had a few meetings last year but it quickly died another death and that group has been basically dead for years. The .Net User Group is trying to come back but has poor leadership and has now cancelled another meeting but the group has been trying to die for the past 20 years.
You and a few other people know I lost the ability to speak. Larynx issues. Prior to that I offered to present but the boards of these groups are kind of elitist. PASS has had the same problem as I know damn fine presenters that get turned down speaking at PASS. Many topics I see being presented are pretty bad and many aren’t of interest to people more senior in the industry. Many of the presentations I have watched where they are recordings from various conferences, I end up thinking to myself, “THAT SUCKED.” You don’t know how stressful it is to have to know I could do a better presentation if I could speak and if the people running those conferences would give me the opportunity to present.
If PASS, SQL Saturday and the various user groups are to succeed again in the future, those organizations need not only new leadership but people that can lead rather than just project manager types that outside of given assigned responsibility couldn’t get anybody to follow them to the nearest exit in case of an emergency. Many are the type if there was an active shooter half the people that would for them would risk their lives to drag that person out so they could be shot. People running these groups maybe great in their fields of expertise and may be great managers but ARE NOT LEADERS.
Brent… I hate to be this negative but I know several groups where people have wanted to present and because some big name wasn’t available to present they cancelled rather than give others the chance to present. I know I wanted to present and this has happened to me. You also don’t see leadership who know talented people that aren’t trying to actively groom people to present. The current leadership is just plain lazy or inept. 40 years ago when I first became a senior developer my job was to teach and it wasn’t a paygrade like it is today. I got there because I mentored other developers. I took ownership but the current group of leadership I doubt know what ownership is. SORRY FOR BEING NEGATIVE!
I’m really sorry you’ve had to go through all of that. Losing your voice and then watching doors close has to be incredibly frustrating, especially when you care deeply about teaching and mentoring.
You’re not wrong that leadership and community stewardship matter, and it hurts to see talented people sidelined. I don’t have any answers there.
I WILL LEARN TO SPEAK AGAIN! It’s a painful process and I can barely make a sound when I try and even then I only can make a sound about 10% of the time. This is something I am going to continue to fight to overcome and it’s just an inconvenience not a disability.
The one thing all these groups never do is ask what the people attending want to learn. I don’t think any of the people running these groups are interested in what the attendees want to hear. The last large conference last November in Utah I didn’t attend because there wasn’t a presentation that interested me. That has been true the last few years as well. We had a SQL Saturday last year but there wasn’t much there of interest either and the one on Query Store was done by one university professor that most people have forgotten more than that guy ever knew on the subject. Last query tuning presentation I watched was terrible and that was done by a senior DBA who used to be head of the SQL Server User Group.
Last year we had half the presenters not show up and the excuse was because of safety concerns traveling to the US but the organizers were too lazy to contact people to see if they were available to do a presentation. I understand that people will always cancel and that’s a huge terrifying fear but I would tell some of people that bring a presentation and if somebody cancels we will fill those slots with people with prepared presentations. Have a backup plan. There are always a few people that have presentations ready that don’t make the cut but those individuals do show up to the event. If you have cancelations rather than just a “No Show” then the organizers should be reaching out to those people. We had 1/3 of the presentations not show up and nothing to fill those gaps? That’s just sad.
You’re absolutely right—there must be a backup plan when speakers cancel. Leaving one-third of the sessions empty is unfair to those who showed up. Too many organizers are good at logistics but lack true leadership that inspires people and discovers talent. Speaker selection that relies only on “big names” often overlooks experts with real-world experience.
Wayne, as a veteran, your experience and insights are invaluable to the community. Your determination to “learn to speak again” is truly moving. Sharing this McGill University hydrogel injection research for your reference—perhaps worth discussing with your doctor: https://www.archyde.com/mcgill-researchers-unveil-long-lasting-hydrogel-to-repair-damaged-vocal-cords
My issue is a torn larynx and a growth that has formed. Extreme coughing from COVID caused the damage. Medical science hasn’t progressed far enough yet to help with my condition.
The problem in the various communities is they never plan for those situations where people don’t show up when they are scheduled to speak; when last minute issues prevent the speaker from attendance (ie. death in the family or birth of a child for example) or if a flight simply gets cancelled. Organizers should always have a backup plan including speakers that may want their first change to present.
I love all these inclusionary BS rules these groups have created because let see one of these group find me somebody that can do ASL so I can present.
Quick note: I’m not a medical professional – I shared that McGill hydrogel research just for your reference. It might be worth asking your doctor whether it’s relevant in your case.
Wayne, your determination to relearn to speak is inspiring. The SQL Server community needs people with decades of practical experience – your resilience demonstrates exactly why you’ve been such a respected mentor.
Here are some resource suggestions with verified information:
1. Voice Rehabilitation Resources
Since I cannot verify specific voice therapy center information, the most reliable approaches are:
Consult your current ENT specialist and ask for referrals to specialists in vocal cord trauma and rehabilitation
The American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery website has a patient resources section: https://www.enthealth.org/
2. ASL Interpreter Resources
Professional Services (Paid):
Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) — rid.org (search by state/specialty for certified interpreters, link verified accessible)
Inclusive Communication Services — inclusiveasl.com (tech conference specialists, link verified accessible)
Volunteer Options:
Search for “[your city] deaf community center” to find local deaf community centers
Contact universities with ASL interpreter training programs for student interpreters
Tip: Provide interpreters with your presentation slides and SQL terminology glossary 48-72 hours in advance.
3. Presenting with Zoom
Zoom has built-in accessibility features that let you “speak” by typing:
Quick Setup:
Go to Zoom web portal or desktop client ? Settings
Find “In Meeting” or “Accessibility”
Enable “Live Captions”
Select “I will type my own captions”
Newer Zoom versions also offer Text-to-Speech functionality, which reads your typed words aloud
Testing: Open zoom.us/test to test your meeting and features (link verified accessible).
4. New Treatment Options
I’ve seen research reports on emerging voice treatment technologies (such as hydrogel injections and stem cell therapy), but these are still in experimental or early clinical stages. I cannot confirm their availability or suitability for your situation. I recommend consulting your doctor about appropriate treatment options.
Whether you recover your voice, use ASL, leverage Zoom’s features, or a combination of these approaches — I hope you find a way to continue sharing your expertise.
Now that Microsoft is running a data summit (and advertising it in our tool of choice) and the main pass event is geolocally challenged I don’t have high hopes. I had already decided not to go to any stateside events (or the US in general) and making the event shorter will just make certain that I and others coming from abroad will probably not be showing up anyways. It was good while it lasted
It’s a little tricky: they’re technically not running a data summit. They’re just endorsing, sponsoring, and giving speakers to another event. They used to do this same thing with Connections and Intersections.
It’s beneficial to Microsoft to have a US database event where they can control what’s coming from the podium and the marketing sessions.
I hadn’t thought about the *duration* of the event affecting international attendees’ interest until I got a similar reply on LinkedIn, and I agreed immediately. It’s really hard for me to justify flying over to Bits every year too for similar reasons.
Give me a ring sometime, Brent, and I will spill so much tea we could drowned in it. NDA required. 😉
We gotta do that non-technical event at some point, gathering a bunch of people together to just chat for a few days! I would love to do that. It would be really cathartic after the last several years.
Amen to that! I was thinking about organizing a bourbon / whiskey distillery tour out of Nashville or Louisville. It’d be like a land-based SQL Cruise. =^D
Once the weather improves! You have snow in Nashville!
WOW. PASS Summit was my goto conference for about 20 years. It helped me retain my job as I knew who to ask questions of, including you Brent. I got to know people on the board and got me to go on SQL Cruise a few times. I got to meet many people over the years before I retired in 2022. I also helped run 4 SQLSaturdays in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada leaning on contacts I made at Summits.
I had read about the takeover but didn’t really know who was taking over RedGate.
Chris
I think it’s still fantastically valuable. I love Summit, and it’s like a family reunion. I’m still looking forward to attending it this fall – and seeing my doppelgänger again, heh!
[…] Thoughts on PASS’s Bankruptcy, Redgate’s Acquisition, and Private Equity (Brent Ozar) […]
Thanks for your thoughts on this post. As you know I’m the Global events manager at Redgate and have been on the team running PASS for the last 5 years.
I want to say straight up that Redgate will continue to support the SQL Server and the wider database community through our events and our resources, including SQL Server Central. We will be running PASS Summit in 2026, exactly as you say above, in three locations worldwide. We’re working on the registration and CFS launch at the moment, but the details about the event locations and dates are on the website: https://passdatacommunitysummit.com/
Redgate places huge importance on, and dedication to helping the community to connect, share and learn. We’ll keep doing this with our in-person events, the online resources associated with PASS, the wider Redgate family of community resources such as SQL Server Central, Simple Talk and DB Engines, and a range of other community support activities.
Our new investment partner will of course bring some change for Redgate, but having met them yesterday at our company kick-off, I honestly believe they are joining us as a partner for the long-term. What attracted them to Redgate in the first place (and they’ve been following us for seven years) was in part our connection with and commitment to the database community, and so I’m very confident that’ll continue.
I look forward to seeing you and the data community at a PASS Summit event soon.
As a DBA working in China, I read this post and all the comments with both gratitude and concern.
From a DBA’s perspective, our daily work is about balancing risk and sustainability. Risk comes from upgrades, architecture changes, performance issues. Sustainability comes from long-term stability in teams, processes, and the ecosystem.
PASS, Summit, and SQLServerCentral are like a “high-availability solution” for DBAs worldwide. When we hit tough problems, need structured learning, or have to convince management to invest, these community resources give us crucial support.
That’s why seeing Redgate move under PE ownership and Summit being shortened worries me. My biggest concern isn’t “will there still be a conference?” but rather: Will deep technical content slowly get replaced by “marketing-friendly” material? Will hard-won real-world DBA lessons get cut because they don’t show short-term ROI? Will free or low-barrier learning channels get pushed behind paywalls?
As Chinese DBA, there’s another layer: in recent years, China’s own database communities have grown quickly (like DTCC, the China PostgreSQL conference, and many city-level meetups). Local vendors—Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei, OceanBase are investing heavily in database tech, while openGauss, the open-source database born from PostgreSQL, has built a growing community that resonates with enterprise DBAs.
What we really hope to see is a healthier global collaboration model, not everyone operating in silos. On one hand, platforms like PASS Summit and SQLServerCentral are still our important source for global perspective and authoritative SQL Server knowledge. On the other hand, local Chinese conferences and communities help overcome time zone, language, and travel-budget barriers, and capture practices specific to our environment and scale.
Since you visit China regularly and clearly feel the future-focused energy here, I genuinely hope Redgate and its new investors can treat China and the broader Asia data community as partners, not just a distant market.
For example: bring more China/APAC DBA voices into the program, proactively invite more speakers and case studies from China and Asia-Pacific into Summit and SQLServerCentral. Work with local events and communities on shared content, co-hosted sessions, or joint workshops—not just one-off sponsorships. Offer more generous terms for universities, open-source communities, and non-profit user groups, so people doing deep technical work can actually use the tools and contribute back.
For us DBAs, our core needs are simple and practical: as long as there’s content that addresses real-world practice, honest cross-company, cross-stack conversation, and commercial decisions don’t gradually squeeze these things out—then no matter whether the owner is PASS, Redgate, or a PE fund, I think we’ll keep showing up, speaking, and sharing. And we’ll keep trying to build bridges between our local communities and the global one.
I sincerely hope that after 2026, we’ll still see you at Summit, and that we’ll also continue to see you—and maybe Redgate as well—at in-person events in China. That would be a strong signal that the global DBA community is still healthy and moving forward.
I really appreciated the background here Brent, especially the bit about the possibility of you purchasing the assets. I also appreciate the generally positive attitude with all the comments. It’s not easy being a group leader, nor making the decisions for running an in-person event. Every year I learn new lessons and try to reinforce the usable older lessons.
As a note – sqlsaturday.com is now owned by Steve Jones, and he has recently changed it to Day of Data, a more data inclusive name for the event. Data Saturday is a different track, but I can safely say that the events are still following the original goals of offering free top quality presentations to the attendees.
But….I look forward to Summit and surely had a blast in 2025!
Thank you Redgate for keeping the dream alive and I wish you luck!