Tomorrow will mark another chapter in the 24 Hours of PASS series.I am involved once again - this time in a moderator role. The event begins at 8am ET for me.  I will be introducing Alberto Ferrari who will be speaking on ''Excel 2013 Power Pivot in Action'' which is a great self-service BI story. This 24hop event will be in a different ...

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 did a Rick Review of the Day 3 Keynote from the 2008 PASS Community Summit that featured Dr. DeWitt speaking on new technology that ended up in the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) edition of SQL Server 2008 R2.  I decided to also listen again to the Day 3 Keynote from the 2001 PASS Community Summit.  While I listened intently to ...

Am I stuck in the past?  Not really, but I like to blog about the recordings that I have recently watched.  There are a lot of recordings out there on the PASS website and other places.  Recently I have had the good fortune of exploring some of the neat technology behind the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) in SQL Server 2008 ...

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 ...

In this post, Logistics centered around how to get to downtown from the airport (SEA - commonly referred to as SEA-TAC for Seattle - Tacoma). As you would expect, the Seattle airport is almost always busy.  Some airports have periods where almost no activitiy is going on.  That is rare here.  Signage is good throughout the airport ...

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 ...

Now that I have covered just about all of the ''official'' Summit activities, it is time for a blog post about ''After Hours'' activities. There is a webpage that lists some of the activities that we are currently aware of.  You can find that page here. Monday Night Networking Dinner - Last year, Andy Warren and Steve Jones started a ...