PASS

#sqlpass notes from the Wednesday Keynotes

At the Wednesday keynotes we started with Rushabh talking about the PASS financials.  Some numbers include:

2010 revenue projection of $3.2M which is a 15% reduction from the 2009 numbers.  But even with this reduction PASS is planning on spending 40% more on the SQL Server community.  They were able to increase the community spending, by ratically reducing the IT expenses by 67%.

Wayne then named some outstanding volunteers that work with PASS.  This includes Tim Ford for his work on 24 hours of PASS, Grant Fritschey for his work on the new SQL Server Standard, Amy Lewis who is the leader of the BI virtual chapter, Jacob Sebastian who is heading up the PASS Member Outreach program in India.

This year there are two passion awards being given out.  The first was presented to Charley Hanania for his work with the European PASS Committee, his work with the Swiss PASS Chapter.  He has be working with PASS for 4 years so far.  The second was presented to Allen Kinsel (Twitter) for his work in preparing the PASS conference.

Tom Casey (Twitter) who is a General Manager of the SQL Server Product Team at Microsoft then took the stage.  He has reminded us that only 20% of the people have the information that they need to do their job.  Specifically they need more information from there data, and how SQL Servers BI product suite can help the other 80% of the people out there get the infomation that they need.

Tom brought Ron VanZanten from First Premier Bankcard to talk about how SQL Server BI is used by them to drive their business and why they picked SQL Server over Oracle and Teradata.  First Premier Bankcard selected SQL Server because of the Office integration, as well as the pricepoint that SQL Server comes in at.  First Premier Bankcard has gone from a new customer to an early adopter running SQL Server Madison for their data warehouse which has reduced some queries run time from hours to minutes.

Tom then talked about how the new Power Pivot platform is going to make it easier to the Information Worker to get the information they need, while IT will still control the data and the application.  This is expected to make the Information Worker more efficient without having to requesting that the IT department put together the new application.

Tom brought Amir Netz (Twitter) of Microsoft to the stage to show a demostration of Power Pivot.  The demo included bringing 100 million rows into Excel from the data warehouse then filtering that data against values which were simply entered by hand into another sheet in the workbook.  As for sharing these huge documents we have Power Pivot for Sharepoint which allows you to upload the Excel workbook to the Sharepoint portal. The application can then automatically refresh the data and allow anyone who needs to view, and then slice and dice the data via the sharepoint portal without having to download the application.  The work is all done on the sharepoint server, by using your SSAS serer to do the needed processing.

When you configure Power Pivot for sharepoint you get a very interactive set of managemet screens in the sharepoint configuration.  It will show you who’s using the files, how often they are being used, and trends which show the usage of the documents over time.

The downside to putting all this new Power Pivot functionality in your org is that Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010 Enterprise Edition, and SQL Server 2008 R2 are all required to make this all work.  This ends up being a pretty pricy solution if you don’t have Sharepoint and SQL already.

Denny

First picture set from #sqlpass

I’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictues from SQL Pass to flicker.  They can be found here.

Denny

#sqlpass so far… (keynotes, parties, lunch, and more)

So far the SQL PASS 2009 summit has been a blast.  I arrived on Sunday afternoon and the fun started shortly after that.  There have been a couple of parties to go to, and we did a great photo walk Monday morning. Continued »

My #sqlpass schedule

For those lucky enough to be attending the SQL PASS summit this year in Seattle, WA I’ll be there to.  This is my third year in a row attending, and my first year speaking.  Over the course of the week I’ve got a bunch of planned things which I’ll be doing.  Hopefully you’ll look me up at one (or several) of them. Continued »

#sqlpass hair color voting ends tonight! Cast your vote before it’s too late.

That’s right, the second most important vote of this years SQL PASS Summit (with the elections being the most important); the color of my hair is closing tonight.

Currently (I’m writing this at 5:30am EST) the standings are Blue at 38%, Purple at 29%, Rainbow Fro Clown Wig at 24% and Green bringing up the rear at 9%.

Get the word out, get those votes coming in.  We’re getting close to 10% of the votes for the board elections.  I’d love to see that number get higher.  Pretend it’s Chicago; vote early and vote often (as often as you can when switching IPs each time).  As the day goes on I’ll post updates to the vote count (none of that secret stuff going on here).

Have fun, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

Denny

P.S. The reason for the quick closing so far before PASS is that if hair color needs to be ordered (I’m picky about my hair dye) we need time for it to get here.

This isn’t your grand-mothers bingo game (#sqlbingo)

This year at the PASS Summit there will be a daily bingo game.  This isn’t the standard sit in a room while someone calls out numbers.  No you have to find the people who’s names and faces (for the most part) are on the bingo cards. Continued »

What color should my hair be for #sqlpass?

I posted a survey over on Security Fight Club to get some input from the SQL community.  I need to know what color I should die my hair for SQL PASS.  The survey will be open until shortly before PASS at which point I’ll announce the winning color.

Denny

PS: I would have posted it here directly but this isn’t my site, so I can’t add plugins to handle this sort of stuff here.

Join me tomorrow as I talk about virtualization

Join me tomorrow September 30th, 2009 as I talk about virtualization with the PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter.  I’ll be presenting my presentation entitled “Diving into Server Virtualization, Deciding if Virtualization is a good choice for your SQL Server“.  The presentation starts at 9am (Pacific) / 12pm (Eastern).  (This link goes to the live meeting site.) Continued »

PASS 2009 here I come

The people at the PASS 2009 have made the ultimate mistake.  They’ve decided to allow me to come and speak at the PASS 2009 Summit this November. Continued »

What does the community want to see at PASS?

So, as you may have heard the SQL PASS 2009 Call for Speakers has gone out.  I’ve submitted a couple of sessions already, but I was hoping to get some feedback from the community at large about what you think I should submit topics on.

I’ve submitted a couple of SQL Service Broker sessions, as well as a session on Storage, and a session on planning a database migration.  I’ve got all sorts of stuff that I could submit, but if no one is interested in it, then there isn’t much point on trying to present those topics.

So I pose this question to you: If you were going to the PASS Summit this year in Seattle what would you like to see presentations on?  Should I leave these sessions up there, or replace them with others?

If you don’t have an account on this site feel free to respond to me on Twitter, my username is @mrdenny.

Denny