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 ...

For the second year in a row, I was asked to deliver a 500-level ''Query Tuning Mastery'' talk in room 6E of the Washington State Convention Center, for the PASS Summit. (Here's some information about last year's talk, on workspace memory.) And for the second year in a row, I had to deliver said talk at 10:15 in the morning, in a room used as ...

SQL Sentry is very proud to sponsor the 10th annual Women in Technology Luncheon at the PASS Summit. Probably 700 people in here - pretty crowded house. This luncheon is growing year over year and is always a refreshing and interesting event to attend. Bill Graziano kicks things off and introduces our moderator, Wendy Pastrick. The panel is ...

Douglas McDowell talks about day 1, the video montage featuring folks here from all over the world, and the fiscal year. The important point I took from this is that PASS is a not-for-profit committed to investing its revenue and other resources back into the community. They are hiring another full-time community evangelist, adding IT resources ...

One of the most positive experiences I can have, as a former leader of the PASS organization, is when I see a neophyte become a passionate support and champion for the community. On my first day in Seattle, before the event had even begun, I was stopped several by people who'd attended their first PASS Summit last year. But this year, they were ...

The SQL Pass Summit 2012, the largest yet, is in full swing. Here's a summary of the sessions this week on cloud infrastructure and SQLOS topics. Some of these were today, and you can catch the recordings. One more session takes place on Friday covering SQL Server solution patterns in Windows Azure VMs... Also, catch Thursday's ...

Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP ...

Bill Graziano takes the stage at 8:15. He talks about how 3,894 attendees (and 5,611 total registrants) represent 57 countries at the 14th summit. There are over 127,000 members worldwide. Note that you can watch the keynotes and many sessions through Pass TV. PASS serves SQL Server community - expertise, support, commitment. He talks about ...

I had an incredibly interesting experience getting to Seattle this week. I flew out of Providence through Philadelphia. Apparently there was some smoke in one of the towers at PHL, so our flight was an hour delayed. I missed my connection by three minutes. I was absolutely amazed that after a one-hour, full ground stop, flights shortly afterward ...

Next week I and Alberto Ferrari will be in Seattle at PASS Summit 2012. You can meet us at our sessions, at a book signing and hopefully watching some other session during the conference. Here are our appointments: Thursday, November 08, 2012, 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM – Alberto Ferrari – Room 606-607 Querying and Optimizing DAX (BIA-321-S) ...