Category: #SQLPass

I never attended a Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) meeting until I went to my first nation-wide summit in Denver in 2007.  I lived in an area (South Florida) that didn't have a PASS presence, and I was just going to the PASS Summit for the SQL Server training. I thought the PASS Board…

Woohoo!  I'm presenting three sessions at the PASS Summit in Seattle this year.  I'm doing one with Jason Massie (Twitter - Blog) on Social Computing for the Database Professional (I don't have the abstract handy for that one), and these two: Session: Yes, I'm Actually Using The Cloud There's a lot of hype around cloud-based…

I went to my first Professional Association for SQL Server Summit in 2007. I'd gone to a few local SQL gatherings, talked to other area DBAs, and worked on some pretty cool projects.  I really liked what I was doing, and I thought I was doing a decent job.  I knew I wasn't a rocket scientist, but I kept the trains running on time.

I got an awesome group of responses for the initial PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter.  I wish I could have taken everybody, but you know what happens when you have a committee with too many people: nothing gets done.  (Come to think of it, nothing gets done on committees period...)

Meet the Hypervisors, also known as the founding members:

The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) has several sub-groups for specialized groups of people:

Application Developers - people who code applications that store data in SQL Server.
Auditing and Compliance - people who need to secure their SQL Servers and be compliant with regulations.
Business Intelligence - people who write reports, design cubes, and mine data.
Database Administrators - people who manage production database servers.

Kendal Van Dyke is a Senior SQL Server DBA from Florida, and he's been blogging since last year.  He's syndicated at SQLServerPedia, and his recent series on RAID performance is a must-read.  I've talked back and forth with him a lot lately, and I figured I'd try something new: a virtual interview.  I emailed Kendal a list of questions, and here's how it went down:

PASS is on the ball this year!  They've got the web site and spiffy logo up and running for the 2009 Summit in Seattle.

Looking through the site, one change jumps out at me: the schedule this year will be Tuesday through Thursday, with pre-conferences running on Monday and Friday.  In the past, the summit has run Wednesday through Friday, with extra-cost, day-long pre-conference sessions on Monday and Tuesday.

The Professional Association for SQL Server Summit is being held again this November in Seattle, and the Call to Speakers is now open.  You can only submit 4 sessions, which seemed very small to me until I realized that I do entirely too many presentations. In Twitter, somebody mentioned that it'd be a good idea…

In Twitter, when you put a pound sign or hash tag in front of a phrase, that makes it easier to search for the phrase in past Tweets.

If you want to alert your fellow SQL Server peeps about what's going on at the Professional Association for SQL Server summit or at their regional events, include the phrase #SQLPass in your tweet.  Capitalization doesn't matter.

Jay Grieves (aka Big Swinging Developer) gives 3 steps to manage developers:

Find out what success means to your team.
Determine how each team member can be a valuable part in making that happen.
Monitor.

Congratulations to Tom LaRock, aka SQLBatman, and Pat Wright, aka SQLAsylum, who just got into the PASS Board of Directors!  Two board members had resigned, and Pat & Tom was appointed to one of those two positions.  I'm excited because I believe these guys will make great board members, and I'm even more excited to see that the PASS Board saw that same thing.

Microsoft's keynotes and sessions catered to the business intelligence sector of the audience.  In Tom Casey's keynote on Thursday, one slide said:

"You are on your way to becoming a BI expert."

Dear Mr. or Mrs. Manager,

Someone's sending you this because they want to go to the PASS Summit conference.

George Box said, "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."  Donald illustrated this point with a brief history lesson.  Early models of the universe said the sun revolved around the earth, and with that model, marvelous things were possible in architecture, celestial navigation and science.  Even though the model was wrong, it was still extremely useful.  Data modeling holds to that same statement: your models will never be right, but your key is to figure out which ones are useful enough.

Updates

It's Friday, it's 8:30 AM, and it's time for another keynote.

PASS Board Election Results Dribbling In Andy Warren is in!  He talks about it on his blog, and I got a huge chuckle out of this part: I didn't have any idea what my chances were, I really didn't do a lot of campaigning (hard to figure out a way to do it that didn't…

I'll be liveblogging this morning's keynotes at the PASS Summit.  Refresh this page for the latest news. 10:02 - Tom's focusing on the ROI of BI, and suddenly I get it.  The database engine works great.  Now we're bolting things on top of it to make every end user in the company see the value…

Aside from my liveblog of Ted Kummert's keynote this morning and Jimmy May's presentation on partition alignment, a few other things caught my eye today. I talked to JC Cannon about his SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide.  I've written here about it before, but it bears repeating.  If you're not here at PASS, and you…