I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday 452 in Charlotte on Oct 17!  Last year, this event had a great turnout.  Be a part of it this year! Register Now! http://www.sqlsaturday.com/452/eventhome.aspx  My topic is ''First Look at SQL Server 2016''.  Microsoft has been busy working on the next ...

Once again, I am serving on the PASS Program Committee this year for the App Dev Track.  As we are about to start the reviewing process, I had some thoughts that I wanted to share.  Last year, we had approximately 200 abstracts to review.  It should be a similar volume this year.  For me, abstracts usually go into three piles - ...

Now that it has been a few weeks since the Summit, I wanted to look back at the location ''experiment''. Convention Center - It seemed to work well for the conference.  There were quite a few areas in the area where you could sit down and get some work down or have a discussion.  For the larger welcome reception the first night, I ...

Next week, I am tentatively planning a webcast on Oct 3, 2013 @ 12:30pm ET as I have done over the past couple of years aimed at First Time Attendees.  Once I get things confirmed, I will post a link for registration.  I updated my PPT Deck with the new information and realized that most of the message and events / timings are ...

On September 14, 2013, I will be speaking at the 2nd SQL Saturday event to be held in Pittsburgh.  I spoke at the last SQL Saturday event last year which was a blast.  This year, I will be presenting a session entitled ''Really Basic Perfmon''.  It is designed for the person who has heard about Perfmon before, but never really got ...

Last year, I had a series of blog posts that matched up with a webcast I did targeting First Timers to the PASS Summit 2011.  Here is a link to the final blog post which is a summary of those posts and links to the main points in the series. A good deal of the information in those posts are still relevant.  I am in the process of ...

I recently got my DVD set from the PASS 2011 Summit and started to look through all of the sessions that I missed.  Wow!  I can't wait to go through all of these!  It will take me a while. Since this is a new year and many people are often greeted with new challenges (like a new server to manage), I decided that this session would ...

As I alluded to in my blog series on ''What to expect at the 2001 PASS Community Summit'', the SQL Clinic will once again be in full swing.  See the following blog post on how to best be prepared to get your question answered.  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/09/19/inside-the-sql-server-clinic.aspx  

As I finish up preparing for the Sep 20 (@1pm ET) webcast, I thought a final blog post may be appropriate in order to quickly reference many of the areas that I have touched upon.  Naturally, much of this information is geared towards First Timers, but Alumni are welcome to join in the webcast as well and are encouraged to help spread even ...

I really don't think that you can get the full flavor of the Summit unless you delve into Social Networking.  There are multiple vehicles for social networking.  Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Yelp are all tools in the Social Networking Toolbox.  At the Summit, the best one of these is Twitter.  With twitter, yo ...