It's almost here!! I am already in Seattle and the wonderful folks from PASS HQ are due to arrive in Seattle today to oversee the final onsite preparations. Tomorrow morning, the eco-friendly canvas bags will start getting stuffed with goodies and on Sunday the actual signs and registration booths will be put up. The various staff members will have their pep talk and briefings and will be all ready - just in time for the first attendee to arrive at 4:00pm and register.

I had already mentioned that this was going to be the greatest PASS summit yet. It will also be the largest summit in terms of attendees and registration. I have been watching the registration numbers grow rapidly in the last few weeks. You will hear all the actual numbers and statistics in Wayne's keynote, but suffice to say - we have far exceeded all previous registration numbers by a huge margin. I believe that Kevin is going to mention something about it in his blog. Keep an eye out. You can truly expect one of the best summit experiences till date. Even the level of excitement around this summit within Microsoft is tremendous. The entire SQL Server Product group is prepping to make this summit a truly memorable experience. If you are attending the summit, you can be rest assured that you will leave on Friday with a lot more knowledge, information and new friends and great memories. If you have not yet decided remember that we still have the $1595 rate through the 18th for online registrations and a couple of our summit hotels are still honoring the discounted PASS rate.

Yesterday, we had a board meeting where we voted on the election slate to fill the 3 board positions that are up for elections. We have a very strong slate of candidates this year. I am truly excited at the skills each of these candidates will bring to the PASS board and the organization. Check out the PASS site for more information. The information will get posted today and if you are an eligible voting member, you will get your ballot by email. Watch out for the ballots.

Lastly, if you are packing for the summit, remember your umbrellas and warm jackets. Late last night when I got to my car which was sitting in an open parking lot on Microsoft campus, there was frost on my car!

Preparations for the 2008 Summit are in full swing. It was amazing to also see the change in Seattle weather from being dull, rainy and cold to being sunny and absolutely delightful. It felt like a Seattle summer day! Last night for dinner, I got a chance to meet with Kate, Blythe, Nic and Craig from the PASS team that came in early to oversee on-site preparations. We went out for dinner at one of my favorite downtown Seattle joints – Wild Ginger at the corner of 3rd Ave and Union St. The food was absolutely delightful and it was great to meet some of the team members face-to-face for the first time after having communicated over email, phone and IM for the longest time. Here are some of us (minus our gracious photographer Craig) after dinner heading back to the hotel…

This morning the first day keynote for the PASS conference began at 8:30.  Before I introduced our speaker Ted Kummert, I announced some growth numbers for this year. This has been the biggest growth year in PASS history - by all measures. While there has been growth in all areas, right now I'll mention the Summit growth. The total number of delegates there is, at this moment is 2464, which is an astounding 62% growth over last year. Add to that the influence of the down economy when many conferences are seeing drastic reductions in attendance - PASS is growing by leaps and bounds. Truly amazing in this economy.

I just heard that Mike Ruthruff and Prem Mehra's first session this morning filled up 20 minutes before the session began.  That's a record also.  With 150 sessions, if you attend during each time slot, you'll only get to see about 8% of the sessions. Don't worry,  summit delegates will be able to see Prem's session, plus all of the other recorded sessions  as soon as they are posted.

Ted Kummert talked about the future of SQL, and spent time on Kilimanjaro. We saw high scalability demonstrations where a single data warehouse query was spread across 192 processors, searching through a 1 trillion row fact table, using commodity hardware.  We're going places!!!!

Earlier today I mentioned that this session was full - and it is... However Lynda Rab has spoken with Mike Ruthruff and Prem Mehra - they have graciosly agreed to do a repeat of this session. It will be on Friday, November 21, @ 2:30 - 3:45 pm in Room 6E.

Thanks so much doing the repeat...

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

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

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.

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

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.

This blog post comes from an email I sent to the Board about this.  I left in some of the thoughts around it in addition to just what we’re doing.  Plus we’re still working out some details.  But here's what we know...

This year at the Summit we want to give the community a chance to ask questions of the Board and provide feedback.  We also want to capture any suggestions people have.

First, The PASS Board of Directors will hold an open Q&A session Wednesday from 4:30PM until 6:15PM.  It will be in room 6E.  This overlaps with the last session but also runs 15 minutes past the end of the last spotlight.  This means that everyone should be able to attend for at least 15 minutes if they’d like.  There just aren’t any other scheduling options except before the keynotes.  Hopefully not too many of you will be double-booked.

We’ll try to record it.  Depends on what A/V is already in the room and what costs are.  I’m leaning toward spending the cash but we’ll see.  Cameras are welcome.  Everyone in the community is welcome to record it, stream it, whatever.  We’ll definitely take good notes.  We expect people to come and go during this.  If we get the same question three times that’s fine.

The session will probably be moderated.  All the Board members will be answering questions.  In cases where there are a variety of Board opinions on issues we’ll make sure everyone gets a chance to answer or ruminate.  I think we’ll get very few questions in areas where PASS has an official policy so it will mostly be Board member’s opinions.  We expect the community to drive the topics and we just make sure everyone gets heard.

Second, we’ve asked each Board member to spend one (or maybe even two hours) in the PASS Booth.  We’re hoping to list all the Board members and their schedule during Wayne’s keynote.  If not, they will be posted in the PASS Booth. This will give people a chance to speak with the Board in a relaxed setting and answer questions about PASS. 

Finally, we’re going to have a suggestion box at the booth.  Yes, pen and paper.  Old school I know.  We looked into an email alias.  The only downside right now is that we don’t have a good process on the other end of that to deal with the feedback we get.  HQ is completely swamped getting ready for Summit and doesn’t have any extra time at Summit.  I don’t want us in a position of accepting suggestions we can’t process or even respond to.

Whatever we have in the box by Wednesday we’ll go through at the Q&A -- time permitting.  We can probably find a volunteer to sort them for us.  Any received after Wednesday will be processed by HQ when they get back up to speed following Summit.  I expect we’ll get quite a few about Summit logistics.  We’ll just have to see if we have time to address those.  Otherwise the HQ logistics group can look through them as they have time.  This is a stop gap measure for this Summit only.  The post-Summit survey that goes out will also be a way to capture Summit specific feedback.

Going forward we’ll either setup an email alias or forums.  I’m leaning toward forums but we’ll have to see what works logistically.  Brent Ozar made some good comments about that the other day.  That gives people a way to give feedback on ideas and add more information.  And a way for the community to give feedback on the fly on various ideas.  We’ll see if we can keep up with them :)  It also gives us a way to ask them questions.  That’s an area we’ve been sorely lacking (or at least I have). 

See you all soon!

-Bill