Ok, the acronym is a little unwieldy.  The entries are still coming in for The Best Thing I Learned at PASS Summit (TBTILAPS) contest.  I know Fridays can be kind of slow so I suggest you take some time and enter our contest. It’s either that or rewrite that horrible stored procedure you’ve been meaning to get to. 

Here are some snippets from some of our recent entries:

• Grant Fritchey writes “I’ve attended technical sessions that blew my socks off and made me twitch in my seat, fighting the urge to start writing TSQL code, immediately.”  And that isn’t even the best thing he learned!  You can read the full post on his blog.
• Brian L. wrote about choosing “sessions that had ‘lessons learned’ or ‘capitalizing on’ to benefit from others’ experience in MS SQL 2008. Sometimes the lesson taught was what Microsoft had learned to improve their process. These breakout sessions helped to meet my goal of learning what is new in SQL 2008.”  He also wrote about the Summit DVDs saying “The recordings of the conference sessions which I purchased have been extremely beneficial. Not only can I 'refresh' my memory about the sessions I attended, but I can also see what I missed and hope to learn at future Summits. With PASS, it’s 'What you See is What you Get!'".  Don’t forget that when you register you can purchase a set of DVDs with the recordings of all the sessions for $95.  After the Summit the price goes up.
• Thomas L. stopped by the CSS First-Aid Station to ask about a problem he was having.  “The PASS First-Aid station had a Sr. Escalation Engineer with Cluster Environments. The gentleman had done a cluster presentation at PASS2007 I attended, so this was a good start.  He started by explaining in detail about a Cluster Environment. The tip that helped us was Possible Owners on a cluster resource.  This is where the SP & Hot Fix installation program determines what servers to update.  Again, our company sponsored trip to PASS pays off. One thing I have discovered about going to a conference is always come back with something valuable for management. Instead of attending the 'here is what’s new' sessions, I have become determined to learn 1-2 more valuable tools for what we are doing today.”  The CSS First-Aid station is staffed by Microsoft’s top support engineers.  Stop by and ask them your hardest questions!
• K. Brian Kelley writes in his blog about a session from the late Ken Henderson that helped him solve a problem a couple of years later.  The one thing that jumped out at me was in the discussion he and Steve Jones had in the comments section of this blog post.  Brian wrote “Also, it got me away for a week to really focus on SQL Server.”  I find the that’s true also.  Getting away in a place where I can think about SQL Server but not be at work makes all kinds of interesting ideas pop into my head.  I usually come back with a big list of things I want to work on.
• Simon D. writes “At the 2008 PASS conference in Seattle, I learned that a DBA’s most valuable resource is the SQL Server community. The engagement of the community at PASS transformed my problems to projects, and my tools to solutions.”  He concludes with “Impromptu sessions with peers at PASS … helped bring my project to production. My superiors at work couldn’t have been more impressed that I had accomplished so much in such a short time-frame, at such a low cost.” Simon hits on one of our key goals for this competition: helping you cost-justify the Summit.  Hopefully stories like this will convince management that PASS is an investment rather than an expense.

The contest runs through Tuesday, July 1st.  We’ve received some great responses so far.  Since we’re giving away prizes to the top ten entries you’ve got a great chance to win!

-Bill Graziano
PASS Board of Directors – VP Marketing

In many of the PASS Conferences I’ve attended I can usually point to one thing I learned that was the most valuable.  Usually this was enough to justify the cost of the entire conference.  I learned something that would save me so much time or money it would “pay” for the conference.  This made it pretty easy for me to justify to myself (or my boss) that it was money well spent.  Here's my story...

Quite a few years back I was sitting in a session on performance tuning.  The speaker demonstrated a little utility named Read80Trace that I’d never seen before.  At the time I was working to improve performance on a client’s database server.  This mostly involved hearing anecdotal stories about what was slow and running Profiler to catch queries with long durations, high reads or high CPU usage.  We were making progress but nothing dramatic.  Profiler was only catching those queries that rarely ran but where huge consumers of resources.  I could make those faster but it didn’t have that much of an impact on overall performance.

Read80Trace would capture all the activity and group identical statements together.  I could see in aggregate what was consuming the most disk and the most CPU.  We spent a week working through those queries and stored procedures.  Many weren’t very slow individually but would run 5,000 times an hour.  Even a small improvement helped.  We spent a week working on it – mostly adding indexes and occasionally rewriting queries.  After a week we’d cut our disk and CPU usage in half and eliminated the need to buy a new high-end server.  

Read80Trace completely changed my approach to performance tuning and has helped every client since then.  I liked the tool so much I wrote my own version of it when Microsoft didn’t release the 2005 version in a timely manner.  And that is the Best Thing I Learned at PASS.

PASS would like to get more stories like this.  I know they’re out there.  I’ve heard many of them in the years I’ve been attending the conference.  Tell the story of what you learned and how it helped you.  We’re running a contest through July 1st to capture these stories.  Post your entry on your blog and email us the link.  If you don’t have a blog, just email us your entry.

We’re limiting entries to 250 words or less.  Mine clocked in at a svelte 244 words.  Of course, I’m not eligible to win since I’m on the Board but our volunteers are and so is most everyone reading this.  We’re giving away a number of prizes for this including a free registration or paying your hotel costs.  And if you win one of these prizes you can give it to someone else.  (The rules as published while I’m writing this say that you can’t transfer your prize to another winner.  That’s being updated and should be corrected by the end of the day.)  

We want to take these stories and add them to our ROI page.  We think that having concrete examples of how people get value from the conference will help justify it in these tough economic times.  We’re giving away ten prizes that include the free registration/hotel, free pre-conference session and free set of our DVDs from last year.

Take a second and write something up.  Tell us the Best Thing you Learned at PASS.

Our European SQL Server Conference kicked off yesterday with pre-conference sessions by Bob Ward, Allan Mitchell and Chris Webb.  The event is in Dusseldorf, Germany again this year.  Our attendance is up 35% from last year to over 250 attendees.  Today was the first full day of sessions and the rooms were packed!  The program committee did a fantastic job choosing speakers this year.  Tonight is our social event at a local restaurant.

I'll leave you with a few pictures from the event.  You can view all of them on our Flickr stream.  I do have to say Rushabh looks great with hair doesn't he?

-Bill Graziano

PASS is deep in the planning cycle for our SQL Server Conference. One of the key decisions we have to make is how much content to allocate to business intelligence and how much to OLTP. In order to make that decision we look at a number of data points. Among these are a survey we recently completed, registration details from previous years, registration details so far this year and actual session attendance information from prior years. Adding to the challenge is Microsoft's decision not to have a business intelligence conference this year and their desire to use PASS as one of their conferences to reach business intelligence professionals.

This year we split the Business Intelligence track in two. This will in some ways mirror the split on the OLTP side between the Application Development track and the DBA track. We think it will help us better target sessions to business intelligence professionals. We also increased the total number of sessions at the conference to 168. Making the whole pie bigger is an easy way to make sure all our attendees are happy with the type of sessions we have available.

Where does that leave the DBA? What are we doing for the person that writes complex T-SQL stored procedures to process business transactions? Or spends their days managing instances? I want you to take away two key points here. First, we're going to have more OLTP sessions than we've ever had before. Second, the combination of the Application Development track and DBA track is now larger than the entire conference was in 2006. I think that's a pretty amazing accomplishment!

Even doing that for the OLTP community we aren't short changing business intelligence. We've increased the BI sessions nearly 60% over last year. If you're a business intelligence professional you'll have your choice of multiple sessions at every slot during the conference.

Allocating sessions is a difficult task. Lynda and the rest of the program committee have done a great job supporting our growing BI community and our established OLTP community. We think our overall mix of roughly two-thirds OLTP and one-third BI will meet the needs of our conference attendees.

For the last few years Microsoft has hosted a business intelligence conference in the fall. This year they decided not to have a conference. You can read the announcement on their web site.  PASS remains committed to providing a strong line up of business intelligence sessions at PASS Summit Unite 2009 in November.  PASS has taken a number of steps in response to this situation:

• We previously increased the number of sessions at the Summit. The PASS Summit will have a strong session line up for both business intelligence and OLTP.
• We split the business intelligence track into two tracks.  This will help us focus on the tasks required build and manage business intelligence solutions.
• We extended the call for speakers by two weeks.  If you planned on speaking at the MS BI Conference we want to give you plenty of time to submit an abstract to the PASS Summit.
• Our Summit is a great mix of community and Microsoft sessions.  We continue to work closely with Microsoft to make sure you get the best sessions possible.

Don't forget that April is the last month to receive the discounted rate of $1,195.  The rates go up on May 1st -- three short weeks away.

- Bill Graziano

We just launched the web site for our SQL Server conference this November.  There are some exicting changes this year:

• We've added more technical sessions bringing our total to 168.  The call for speakers is open until April 10th if you're interested in speaking.
• We're increasing our focus on business intelligence and data warehousing.  We're doing this by adding additional sessions and expanding the scope of what we're covering. 
• The conference now runs from Tuesday through Thursday with pre-conference sessions on Monday and post-conference sessions on Friday.  This should help attendees schedule travel more effeciently.
• This year we're putting a big focus on ROI.  We want to help you better utilize your database resources.   And that starts with this conference.  We're offering more sessions for less money this year.  We also have information on the site to help you get approval to attend the conference.

We'll be back with more information later.  Until then don't forget our discounted registration rates available until May 1st.  I hope to see you all at the conference.

Bill Graziano