I had a great time at the PASS Summit of 2009. I met too many people to keep count of and I can't list everyone here for I know I'll forget someone. Thank you if I met you and if I didn't... Darn it! We'll have to meet in 2010, I will do all that is in my power to be there.

I learned a lot and in the coming days and weeks I hope to have some blog posts inspired either by conversations or lessons that I learned in the various sessions and post con I went to with Itzik.

A thought

I was in Warren Thornwaite's session on Dimensional Modeling with the Kimball methodology. It was eye opening to this, mostly DB Engine/OLTP, Database Administrator. I have read the lifecycle book and was familiar with the Kimball approach but hearing things explained helped the understanding immensely.

One neat thing that Warren did was have an exercise involving the audience. It was a simple one to identify dimensions, grain, info, etc. for a fictitious problem. The problem was PASS Summit inspired... It was a technical conference that wanted to track speakers, sessions, performance of speakers, rooms and attendees. The stuff PASS cares about for the next session.

As we were working on the issues, I felt the light bulb burning in my head. It's a few days later and the bulb is still burning which means It's either a good idea or I have deluded myself and am about to be laughed at. Either way, here goes..

"PASS Dog Food"

This year at one of the key notes we saw a really neet series of map mashups provided courtesy of Jorge Segarra (Blog/Twitter) who, sadly, was not at the summit. Seeing that and playing Data Analyst/Architect in Warren's session got the hamsters in the head spinning:

Why not play with Microsoft technologies/betas/CTPs/TAP Tools for the benefit of the PASS Community?

What I mean is: Let's play and learn. PASS has a lot of business problems that the SQL Server tool set would help with. There are a lot of aspects of the technology we could use to help with future summits, typical day to day PASS needs and expose folks to areas and technologies they may not be in their full time roles.

For example:

• Today every room has a room monitor handing out sheets, bullying people for sheets on our way out and perhaps counting attendees at a session(?). It would be fun to get something like the RFID tags that marathon runners have into the badges handed out. Put readers into the session rooms and keynote halls. Don't track the individuals, give them blind IDs for privacy. Have a database and BI solution tied into Sharepoint with Power Pivot, 2008 R2 (or perhaps SQL 11 CTP tools, etc.). Actually track the attendance at sessions, allow people to use their ID to submit reviews and track all of that in a database. In realtime we could see graphs and charts of attendance by track, by topic, by speaker, by level, by time of day, etc. We could slice and dice, pivot and analyze the data to learn what is and isn't working. PASS could use that info for the next year.. Plus it would be fun.
• The Abstract Selection committee gets spreadsheets of speaker reviews to look through for past speakers when working on abstract selection. Spoke in a few years? Look at a few spreadsheets. It's clunky and it's a bit outdated. We could use these databases and reports to properly aggregate the data and see the trends. We could also help prefill information for the volunteers about speakers. We could even understand trends in who votes, who doesn't for BoD positions. We could understand who needs to be marketed to better, and how, for future summits.
• Chapters could use mapping/geospatial information to better understand where there people are coming from, where there are large numbers of SQL people who are known to PASS but not coming to local meetings. Perhaps there is an area for a new user group.

Really the possibilities are limitless and it's strange but I keep thinking of BI type applications. I am sure there are plenty of other uses for the technology that PASS, as a community, interacts with. It would be fun to do some proof of concepts/white papers about how we used the technology for ourselves.

Anyway I'll stop rambling. Am I way off? Do you think it would be fun to branch off into other areas with the tools you use on a daily basis and help a great organization like PASS at the same time? Add a comment and tell me you agree or tell me I'm nuts. I don't sit on any boards, volunteer for PASS when I have the time and don't have any louder voice to PASS than you do. So I don't know if anything would come of it but I wanted to share it.

Ahh.. One more ramble. All of the Virtual Chapters could be involved. The Professional Development chapter could use some of the business problems as a way to help show how to formalize business documentation, set expectations, document approaches, etc. The BI virtual chapters could work with the BI tools to help implement the requirements, etc. It almost sounds like kids playing office. Maybe it is? But I think it would highlight the fruits of the virtual chapters, the fruits of the Microsoft technologies we all love to work with and provide a learning opportunity for anyone who wanted to help. I am not a BI developer, for example, and I would enjoy helping build out a warehouse or reports or implement Power Pivot functionality.

"PASS Cares"

I was walking upstairs to go to bed (internal clock is still partially adjusted to PST from the summit) and another thought forced me to open the laptop. Not only could we sort of work together as a community on some PASS initiatives but wouldn't it be neat to help some charity organizations?

The MVPs showed great leadership and selflessness with tier Deep Dives book and all royalties going to charity. Why not build on that?

I think it would be neat to see a partnership where Microsoft would give/donate licenses for some of the tools we work with to registerred non-profit charity groups. PASS could help provide some hands. Again folks in the community can learn, step outside of a comfort area and an organization could benefit from having the help. Maybe Microsoft could even give us some "technical advisors" from the product teams/SQLCAT teams to jump in on an every other month conference call to discuss the progress and feedback? I don't know, now I am really rambling...

Alright.. I'm really done now :-) Sleep calls. I'll schedule this for Tuesday publication. Feel free to comment and tell me what I was missing. I'll be keeping the "Things I learned at PASS" tag on future posts involving glimmers of knowledge gained last week.

The PASS Community Summit is one of the highlights of my professional year. It’s a time when members of the SQL Community from around the globe can gather together at one place for learning, sharing, and networking. As I’ve often said, the best part about the PASS Community Summit is getting to catch up with friends that I only see once or twice a year. I love that.

And this year’s Summit was doubly special in that regard. This year I was able to get together with a bunch of other folks for the official release of the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book.

If you haven’t already heard, 52 really smart people and I got together to write a SQL Server book. All of the proceeds from the book are being donated to charity, WarChild.org.

It was a great pleasure and honor to work with Manning Publications and this group of renowned experts in their field to benefit a charity that crosses geographical, political, and socioeconomic boundaries to help children in war ravaged parts of the world.

And it was rewarding to see how the SQL community at PASS responded. The conference bookstore sold out of the book after the first day of the conference and sales of the book surpassed all prior title sales at the conference by a factor of five!

Those who bought a book on-site were able to get it signed by many of the authors; 35 were at the conference.

All in all, this was a special time and I hope you consider buying the book and supporting the effort and WarChild.

After the keynote I went to Michelle Ufford's (Blog | Twitter) presentation on how GoDaddy prepared for the anticipated load that Super Bowl 2009 would put on their database servers. Michelle was a first-time PASS presenter like me and I thought she did a great job speaking clearly, staying on topic, and answering questions that came up. Tony Davis (Blog), Editor of Simple-Talk, was in the audience as well and I took advantage of the opportunity to meet with him and talk DMVs while waiting for Michelle to finish answering questions afterwards.

Michelle, Tony, and I made our way to the dining hall for the Birds of a Feather lunch and ended up sitting at Kathi Kellenberger's (Blog | Twitter) table. I talked with Kathi for a while about using T-SQL to select random rows from a table and she was kind enough to give me a personalized signed copy of her book Beginning T-SQL 2008. Also at the table was Kathi's editor from Apress; I took advantage of the opportunity to talk with him about how to get into writing books, and I'll definitely follow up with him in the next week.

After lunch I went to Jimmy May's (Blog | Twitter) session on disk partition alignment. His session was very popular at last year's Summit and part of my motivation for writing my disk performance series earlier this year. I nominate Jimmy for best speaker giveaway: At the end of his session he put a few copies of Windows 7 Ultimate out and said "First come, first served". Unfortunately I sat midway back and didn't get to the front before they were gone (Lesson for next year: Sit at the front of presentations!). Anyways, what floored me the most was afterwards I think he was as excited to meet me in person as I was to meet him. Thanks Jimmy, I'm honored.

I skipped the next time slot to talk disk performance with Chuck Lathrope (Twitter), then hit the last scheduled session of the day - Kalen DeLaney (Blog)'s Index Internals. I was surprised that the room was only half full, but that was probably due to a misprint on the schedule that listed her talking about Data Warehouses. About halfway through her presentation I realized that I was sitting next to Erland Sommarskog (Blog) of "The curse and blessings of dynamic SQL" fame. Very cool.

Dell sponsored an "after hours" event in the exhibit hall from 6-8. I went but spent most of the time taking with Wesley Brown (Blog) about solid state drive performance. From there I headed to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory with my friend Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) and other folks from Florida (plus a few non-Floridians tag-alongs, more than happy to have them join!). I wrapped up the night at a fantastic party sponsored by SQL Sentry at the Tap House Grill where I had the pleasure of meeting PASS BOD VP Rick Heiges (Blog) and Andrew Kelly (Blog | Twitter), among the many that showed. Things wound down around midnight at which point I headed back to the hotel to call it a night and try to get a little sleep.

…Day 3 tomorrow!

11:49 AM PST
The room is filling up nicely! There’s a nice distribution of men and women in the room. This is great! I’m actually pleasantly surprised at the number of women at the Summit.  If it weren’t for this luncheon, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed just how many SQL ladies there actually are.

12:00 PM PST
The WIT luncheon is underway! We start off with watching an energetic video displaying various types of women and men who each state “I am a technical woman” or “I support technical women.”

Rushabh Mehta, Executive VP of Finance for PASS, opens the WIT luncheon with the statement “PASS Supports Technical Women.” He then hands the floor over to Wendy Pastrick (@wendy_dance) for moderation of today’s panel.

Today’s panel is:

• Kathi Kellenberger (@auntkathi)
• Jessica Moss (@jessicammoss)
• Cathi Rodgveller (@IgniteGirls)
• Lynn Langit (@llangit)

12:10 PM PST
Kathi starts off with a great message: “I want to encourage women to enter technology, but I want to encourage boys too.” She started off as a pharmacist because “I was probably born 5 years too early” but later switched to technology. She makes less money but enjoys it more. Her daughter had to learn HTML for school and actually helped her get her first work in IT by showing her how to program. “I want both boys and girls to have the opportunity to discover lots of different things and to find what they love. And hopefully that’ll be technology.”

12:17 PM PST
The floor is then handed over to Jessica Moss, BI guru extraordinaire. She gives a great example of how influential a father can be in a young girl’s life: her father was the one who got her interested in technology and who encouraged her career. She says she never felt like she could *not* be technical because she was raised to believe she could do anything. She ends with a challenge for everyone at the Summit: talk to just one young woman and encourage her interest in technology.

12:23 PM PST
Cathi Rodgveller shares her background in education and how she started IGNITE (Inspiring Girls Now In Technology Evolution). The goal of IGNITE is to excite young women, minority races, and low-income youth, about technology and about technical careers. Rodgveller gives us a powerful message: “You can have an impact in your community. One [positive technology] event can change a young girl’s life.”

12:28 PM PST
Last, but certainly not least, Lynn Langit takes the floor. She starts off with a challenge to all audience members: tweet or text one person to say “I’m a technical women” or “I support technical women.” The room gets active while people are busy typing or texting, and Twitter is abuzz with various tweets and retweets. Lynn then takes the floor back and talks about her background and about her charity work. She mentions that every time someone buys one of her books, a donation is made to the MONA foundation. Langit also shares some of her experiences as a technical women: “I’m a developer evangelist. I’m often the only woman in the room, and I’M the one giving the presentation.”

12:35 PM PST
It’s now time for Q&A with the audience. I’ve also invited members of the Twitter community to send in their questions or comments, and we’ll do our best to get them answered. Following is a brief summary of the questions and answers provided:

Q: First up is a father of 2 teenage girls. He wants to know why WIT programs have continued to fall since 1985.
A: WIT is a low priority for schools. Schools have so many other priorities, and not enough time or funding, to address everything they need to. We need intervention from outside sources to stimulate change and ensure it’s being addressed. Rodgveller is working with her state Senator to try to enact change on the national level.

Moss mentions that studies show the top 2 issues for WIT are recruitment and retention. She also points out that middle school years are very formative and important for young women to foster their interest in technology. Rodgveller interjects that even high school is not “too late” to inspire young women.

Q: Another father asks, how can he remove stereotypes for children?
A: Parents are the best resources, period. Parents need to support their children at home and to let them know that stereotypes are negative and not okay. This includes not just gender issues, but also issues of race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

Q: Today’s youth are concerned about the technical job market in US because of the prevalence of off-shores outsourcing. Is it still a good idea for young people to join today’s technical workforce, and how can we encourage them?
A: There are still plenty of opportunities in IT. In fact, one of the hottest trends today in technology is BI. The best way to ensure that your job is not outsourced is to stay relevant and keep up with the newest technology; those are not the jobs that are outsourced overseas.

Q: In the South, there are still lots of stereotypes. For instance, women frequently are not hired by companies for technical positions. Comments like “We can’t hire a woman for that job because it’s too valuable; what if she gets pregnant?” are still made. What can be done about this?
A: One of the executives from CA, the sponsor of the WIT luncheon, takes the stage to answer. He says in no uncertain terms that, at his company, those individuals making the disparaging remarks would be terminated. He says that the type of attitude described has to come from the top down, and the company is limiting itself by not hiring women. He ends with a message for employees to not tolerate discrimination and to go to HR whenever they see it happening.

Q: What can parents do to help WIT?
A: Parents are the greatest resource kids have. Parents set the attitude for their kids; if your attitude is positive, it will encourage your daughter to try new things and will open her up to opportunity whenever it presents itself. Also, parents need to raise the issue with schools, i.e. through PTA meetings, to make them realize that it’s important to you and it’s important for your children.

Moss: “But at the end of the day, it is the parent’s responsibility to expose your children to as much technology and as many experiences as possible.”

Kellenberger: “It is up to the parents to break stereotypes, for jobs, gender, race, etc. It’s the parent’s attitude that makes the difference.”

So that’s all I have for the Women In Technology luncheon. There was a lot of great content and some very positive messages from our panel. For more information on this topic, please check out the following resources:

• Steve Jone’s musings on the WIT luncheon
• What can men do? (to help WIT)
• IGNITE

I arrived in Seattle on Monday at 1:30 PM and, thanks to Twitter, met up with Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter) and Arlene Gray (Blog | Twitter). We shared a short ride in on the Light Link Rail for the low, low price of $2.50, which I also found out about thanks to Twitter. (Tip – when riding into town sit on the right side relative to the direction of travel – the view is much better). The walk from the rail station to the Sheraton was only a few blocks, and after checking in I met up with Aaron Bertrand (Blog | Twitter), my roommate for the week. (Side note – sharing a room is a great way to cut down on the cost of attending the summit!)

The first event on tap was Gabor's precon on Networking to Build Business Contacts. Before things began I had the chance to meet Tom LaRock (Blog | Twitter) in person for the first time, along with many other people I've met on Twitter in the last year and a few new faces. It's worth noting that about half of the people in Don's session were first timers at the Summit. I think that's a good indication that word about what PASS (and the Summit) is and does is spreading and people are getting interested in becoming part of the SQL borg community. Don gave some nice tips – some things I already knew, some new things – and shared a few secrets for remembering names before giving everybody a chance to try it out for themselves. I did OK, but clearly it takes practice to be good at it. Fortunately the week ahead presented plenty of opportunities to practice. By the way, Don's amazing at remembering names – he nailed at least 80% of people's names in the session after only a brief introduction and handshake at the door.

After Don's session I headed upstairs to the Welcome Reception where I ran into at least 20 more people I've met on Twitter recently. The food was OK (carved meats on rolls with veggies), but the real draw was the quiz bowl (Paul Randal (Blog | Twitter) and Kimberly Tripp (Blog | Twitter) smoked the competition!) and the announcement of the 1st annual PASS logreader award winners. I must have done something right because I won two categories – Best Blog Series for Disk Performance Hands On and Best Professional Development Blog Post for Off-Hours Work: A Guide For Managers.

Following the reception I headed to the SQLServerCentral party where I had the chance to meet Chris Massey (Twitter) and the folks from Red Gate. As in past years (so I hear) it was a casino style party where everybody got some chips and played different games around the room. I spent half the time socializing and the other half losing my chips. I didn't realize that at the end you could cash in whatever chips you had left and get raffle tickets for prize giveaways so I went all or nothing and lost. Oh well, next year I know better.

I caught word that a group of folks was heading to Bush Garden, a hole in the wall karaoke bar in the International District about a mile and a half from downtown. I tagged along where I met – you guessed it – even more people from Twitter for the first time (along with a few folks from Florida who I've known for a while now). I was pretty tired by that point so I just sat back and watched everyone else take turns singing. The group stayed until closing time, and for some reason we all thought it would be a great idea to walk back to the hotel at 1:30 in the morning. It was a good bonding experience for new friends, if nothing else.

I crashed once I got back to the hotel; by that point I think I had been up for close to 24 hours and the PASS euphoria only lasts so long. That and I had to be up to live blog the opening keynote that started at 7:45 AM the next morning. I'm pretty sure at that point Aaron was wondering what he got himself into by sharing a room with me.

…the adventure continues with Day 2 tomorrow!

For those not familiar with this contest you can read the official announcements of the contest here (Brent Ozar’s post), here (Andy Warren’s post), and here (Jeremiah Peschka’s post). Don’t worry, I’ll wait until you come back. You back? Cool. Alright now that you know what it’s all about let’s talk about the exciting part: the winners! Yup, last week at the beginning of the week the winners were announced. Now thanks to the magic of the interwebs and copy/paste feature here are the results (courtesy of Brent Ozar)

Best Blog Series (Multiple Posts):

• Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Disk Performance Hands-On Series (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)
• Runner-Up: Tie:
  Aaron Alton for SSMS Series (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
  Aaron Bertrand for Bad Habits to Kick Series (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)

Best Business Intelligence Blog Post:

• Winner: Chris Webb for Implementing SSRS Drilldowns (Blog – RSS)
• Runner-Up: Michelle Ufford for Using Variables in SSIS (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)

Best New Blog:

• Winner (Tie):
  Aaron Alton for The Hobt (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
  Michelle Ufford for SQLFool (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)
• Runner-Up: Jorge Segarra for SQLChicken (Blog – RSS – @SQLChicken)

Best Professional Development Blog Post:

• Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Off-Hours Work Guide for Managers (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)
• Runner-Up: Sean McCown for Landing That Job (Blog – RSS – @MidnightDBA)

Best T-SQL Blog Post:

• Winner: Aaron Bertrand for Stored Procedures Best Practices Checklist (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)
• Runner-Up: Grant Fritchey for Unpacking the View (Blog – RSS – @GFritchey)

Best Unusual Blog Post:

• Winner: Alex Kuznetsov for Reproducing Deadlocks with One Table (Blog – RSS)
• Runner-Up: John Magnabosco for Encrypting Large Values (Blog – RSS)

So first off big congratulations not only to all the winners but anyone and everyone that submitted entries! Thank you all so much for your blogging efforts, keep it up. I’m also very honored to have been named a runner up in the New Blog category. I’d like to thank all 12 of you who read this blog as well as Brent, Andy and Jeremiah for putting this together. I highly recommend you check out all of the blogs listed above as they are clearly of high quality so make sure you check them out.

In addition to this great contest you should also check out PASS board member Tom LaRock’s Blogger Rankings to keep up with the cream of the SQL crop in the blogging community.

On one final note there was an entry I personally should have won an award for most creative posting of all time (queue Kanye) and this was David Stein’s (Twitter | Blog) entry “Encylopedia Brown and the Case of Data Corruption“. If you haven’t read it go read it right now as its (as Tom LaRock/Brent Ozar would say) pure liquid awesome.

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For those not familiar with this contest you can read the official announcements of the contest here (Brent Ozar’s post), here (Andy Warren’s post), and here (Jeremiah Peschka’s post). Don’t worry, I’ll wait until you come back. You back? Cool. Alright now that you know what it’s all about let’s talk about the exciting part: the winners! Yup, last week at the beginning of the week the winners were announced. Now thanks to the magic of the interwebs and copy/paste feature here are the results (courtesy of Brent Ozar)

Best Blog Series (Multiple Posts):

• Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Disk Performance Hands-On Series (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)
• Runner-Up: Tie:
  Aaron Alton for SSMS Series (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
  Aaron Bertrand for Bad Habits to Kick Series (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)

Best Business Intelligence Blog Post:

• Winner: Chris Webb for Implementing SSRS Drilldowns (Blog – RSS)
• Runner-Up: Michelle Ufford for Using Variables in SSIS (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)

Best New Blog:

• Winner (Tie):
  Aaron Alton for The Hobt (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
  Michelle Ufford for SQLFool (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)
• Runner-Up: Jorge Segarra for SQLChicken (Blog – RSS – @SQLChicken)

Best Professional Development Blog Post:

• Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Off-Hours Work Guide for Managers (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)
• Runner-Up: Sean McCown for Landing That Job (Blog – RSS – @MidnightDBA)

Best T-SQL Blog Post:

• Winner: Aaron Bertrand for Stored Procedures Best Practices Checklist (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)
• Runner-Up: Grant Fritchey for Unpacking the View (Blog – RSS – @GFritchey)

Best Unusual Blog Post:

• Winner: Alex Kuznetsov for Reproducing Deadlocks with One Table (Blog – RSS)
• Runner-Up: John Magnabosco for Encrypting Large Values (Blog – RSS)

So first off big congratulations not only to all the winners but anyone and everyone that submitted entries! Thank you all so much for your blogging efforts, keep it up. I’m also very honored to have been named a runner up in the New Blog category. I’d like to thank all 12 of you who read this blog as well as Brent, Andy and Jeremiah for putting this together. I highly recommend you check out all of the blogs listed above as they are clearly of high quality so make sure you check them out.

In addition to this great contest you should also check out PASS board member Tom LaRock’s Blogger Rankings to keep up with the cream of the SQL crop in the blogging community.

On one final note there was an entry I personally should have won an award for most creative posting of all time (queue Kanye) and this was David Stein’s (Twitter | Blog) entry “Encylopedia Brown and the Case of Data Corruption“. If you haven’t read it go read it right now as its (as Tom LaRock/Brent Ozar would say) pure liquid awesome.

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My coworker was installing Microsoft OCS Server, and he said that he needed a SQL instance, and he told me what the instance needed to be named. Since we already had a SQL server dedicated to this project, I created a named instance on said server.

In retrospect, I should have looked a little more closely instead of just assuming I needed to create a named instance. After I looked at the screen that asked for the SQL instance, I knew that we could use the default instance and not have to go down the named instance path.

Fortunately, we’re still in the test phase with virtual servers and the servers we’re using will be replaced with physical machines. That means I’ll be able to go back and get it right the next time around.

That’s why we have test environments, right? I’d much rather make a rookie mistake in a test environment than in production.

• His maiden name 
• SQL structure 
• Complex SQL development process
• How he got into SQL, starting with his time in a beer factory
• The biggest mistakes he made in production environments
• Why "sequel" is wrong and "ess-Q-ell" is right, as far as ISO is concerned

Please go watch, and leave feedback, and let us know who else YOU would like us to interview! 

-Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

• His maiden name 
• SQL structure 
• Complex SQL development process
• How he got into SQL, starting with his time in a beer factory
• The biggest mistakes he made in production environments
• Why "sequel" is wrong and "ess-Q-ell" is right, as far as ISO is concerned

Please go watch, and leave feedback, and let us know who else YOU would like us to interview! 

-Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com