The PASS Business Analytics Conference (PASS BAC) is PASS' first foray into an event that is dedicated to business intelligence, big data, data visualization, and business analytics.  And it totally makes sense for PASS to move in this direction, over and above the flagship community work centered on database management and ...

Tomorrow will mark another chapter in the 24 Hours of PASS series.I am involved once again - this time in a moderator role. The event begins at 8am ET for me.  I will be introducing Alberto Ferrari who will be speaking on ''Excel 2013 Power Pivot in Action'' which is a great self-service BI story. This 24hop event will be in a different ...

Ok, I have to admit the painful truth. I'm reliably slow to the finish line. This year, I got my slides into PASS HQ by the skin of my teeth, the weekend before the event was to begin.  Although I could say with a straight face ''I uploaded my slides!''.  I have to be honest that I wasn't surprised when many of my attendees said that ...

Click this link to register: http://www.houseofbrick.com/education/sqlserverbootcamp/Registration. Presented by my buddy, David Klee at House of Brick, one of the nations top VMWare consultancies specializing in Oracle and SQL Server deployments. David has a great write-up of this boot camp ...

Last year, I had a series of blog posts that matched up with a webcast I did targeting First Timers to the PASS Summit 2011.  Here is a link to the final blog post which is a summary of those posts and links to the main points in the series. A good deal of the information in those posts are still relevant.  I am in the process of ...

PASS SQL Saturdays are free 1-day training events for IT professionals interested in Microsoft SQL Server, providing a variety of high-quality technical sessions, all happen through the efforts of local volunteers.  The leadership team of the local chapter of PASS here in Nashville (Facebook | LinkedIn) have ...

Even though I've recently changed jobs, I'll still be speaking at a lot of SQL events across the country and internationally.  There are still a few trips that I've yet to finalize, in particular with the fine folks in Houston, run by my friend Nancy Hidy (blog | twitter), and my friends in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, run by ...

I recently did a Rick Review of the Day 3 Keynote from the 2008 PASS Community Summit that featured Dr. DeWitt speaking on new technology that ended up in the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) edition of SQL Server 2008 R2.  I decided to also listen again to the Day 3 Keynote from the 2001 PASS Community Summit.  While I listened intently to ...

Am I stuck in the past?  Not really, but I like to blog about the recordings that I have recently watched.  There are a lot of recordings out there on the PASS website and other places.  Recently I have had the good fortune of exploring some of the neat technology behind the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) in SQL Server 2008 ...

I recently got my DVD set from the PASS 2011 Summit and started to look through all of the sessions that I missed.  Wow!  I can't wait to go through all of these!  It will take me a while. Since this is a new year and many people are often greeted with new challenges (like a new server to manage), I decided that this session would ...