2009 Pass Summit Day 1

So today was the day the conference started for real. The day started with opening remarks from PASS's President Wayne Snyder and was followed by a keynote by Bob Muglia and Ted Kummert of Microsoft. They talked about SQL Server in general and the upcoming 2008 R2 release in particylar.

The session then were hit and miss. Highlights include Grant Fritchey's     spotlight Best Practices for Working with Execution Plans. While not exactly a BI-related session it was packed of useful information that anyone working with SQL Server will find useful.

The other highlight was hearing Italians Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari of SQLBI discussing their SQLBI Methodology. In short is a mix between the Inmon and Kimball approaches to data warehousing (see here or google Kimball vs Inmon for a summary). Not only was it thought provoking to hear someone not subscribing 100 % to the Kimball approach, they also managed to combine outlining the differences between Kimbal vs Inmon and describing their methodology with being absolutely hilarious at the same time.

I might write a separate post just about that.

2009 Pass Summit Day 0 - Pre conference seminars

The pre-conference seminars were titled Delivering BI to the Masses. Maybe not too much of the material was that new to me the great speaker Peter Myers still made it worthwhile.

In the evening we were treated to a tour of the Microsoft Campus by Swedish developer Tobias Ternström and a very nice dinner at Elliot's. Courtesy of Microsoft Sweden. Thanks guys!

(BTW I just realised that you could publish blog post from Word 2007. This is really going to improve my English spelling and grammar)

2009 Pass Summit

So I and two of my esteemed colleagues are in Seattle for the PASS Summit this year. None of us had been before so we were really excited.

First I must say that Seattle is a really great city. We came here on Sunday before the conference, to attend a pre-conference session on Monday. Weather was lovely with the sun shining most of the time with hardly any rain at all. Great food too.

I will try to do a write up of each day. But there will be latency – I won't promise live blogging.