Thursday
After the Thursday’s keynote, I spent some time talking with Brent and meeting various vendors and conference attendees. It’s been good to have a little bit of time to relax, I’ve found.
After lunch, I attended Paul Nielsen’s and Louis Davidson’s presentation on smart database design. If they present on this topic, I definitely suggest that you attend it. In addition to being a hilarious presentation given by two exceptionally smart men, I took a lot away from it. One of the biggest things is the universal answer to almost any question: ‘It depends.’ There isn’t a magic solution. Throughout the presentation, Louis and Paul provided a lot of tools and rationale to use to make the decisions when a hard and fast answer isn’t immediately available. This was the best luck I had with sessions all day.
In the afternoon, I attended a SQLCAT session on Large Scale Relational Data Warehouse Learnings. There was some great material presented. Unfortunately, the bulk of it went over my head and I left the session about halfway through it.
In the day’s final session, I attended a Session on Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions. I learned a bit about building cubes with BIDS, but for the most part this was an introduction to report builder. I left early and was greeted by a book from Louis Davidson. I went to the SQL Server Heroes Unite event, but I left early because, frankly, I was exhausted from all of the learning, networking, and socializing.
Friday
Friday morning’s keynote by David Dewitt was amazing. He clearly explained the technology behind Gemini will work on a more technical level. Normally this would be a difficult subject to comprehend, but David made great use of his slides to clearly explain the core concepts in a clear manner.
I, once again, missed the morning session while I spent time socializing and getting to know my friends.
When the conference started, I had originally planned to spend my time on the Application Development track. However, after the first day I realized that the most important thing that I would get out of the summit was to expand my knowledge and get out of my comfort area and learn more about different aspects of SQL Server. With this in mind, I attended Donald Farmer’s session on Integrating Predictive Analysis Throughout the Data Lifecycle. Brent Ozar did a great job of summarizing Donald’s presentation. One of the most interesting things that Donald showed was how to use an existing corpus of data to perform form validation based on trends in the existing data to determine if data is valid within statistical norms.
Later in the afternoon, while loitering around in the hallway with a few others, Donald Farmer came along and said hello to us. Within a few minutes we were interactively mining his sample data on Titanic survivors. This emphasizes how easy it is to use these new tools to mine and analyze the data on the fly to produce a better, or different, understanding of the body of data.
The final session of the data was Louis Davidson’s talk on Why Normalization Matters. Louis is just as engaging of a presenter on his own as he was with Paul Nielsen. While there was some review here, the important thing wasn’t the material in the presentation. The important thing was the understanding and the explanation that Louis brought to the material. Ultimately, the main point that Louis made was that if you think about table design carefully and intelligently, it’s very easy to design tables and the relationships between them. The main reason that many databases are not in third or fourth normal form isn’t that it’s difficult it’s that people try to take shortcuts designing or extending a database. Of course, the only way to do things right is to practice.
Everything else
The 2008 PASS Summit was my first conference and was a great experience for me. I got to meet a lot of great people, volunteer and provide help for an organization that I enjoy being a part of, and learn more than I ever thought I would learn in a week about parts of SQL Server that I never thought I would have a chance to look into.
Social networking made this all easier. By using twitter, I was able to keep in touch with all of my friends, get tips on sessions to attend, and coordinate attending sessions together. TJay Belt posted a great blog summarizing how we were able to use twitter during the conference to keep in touch, network, coordinate, help each other out, and socialize.
PASS was a great experience, it gave me an additional dimension to my understanding of my own skills and of SQL Server as an entire family of products and something more than just a relational database engine.
