The PASS Summit 2013 was held in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is a big change from the usual location in Seattle. This new location may have been more successful in attracting what seemed to be an unusually high number of first-time attendees, which I think is a good thing. I heard fewer complaints during the week about travel time and time away from work from people who were from the east coast and from the southeast part of the United States. On the other hand, I heard a decent number of complaints about travel time and time away from work from people from other parts of the United States. Honestly, unless the PASS Summit is held in your home town, you are going to have to travel, so there is really no way to satisfy everyone regarding a location. Personally, I like Seattle, and I know my way around the downtown Seattle area pretty well, and it is easier for me to fly to Seattle, so I am perfectly happy if the Summit is in Seattle most years. Since I live near Denver, it is not really that hard for me to travel nearly anywhere in the United States.
I had a pre-con session called Scaling SQL Server 2012 on Monday, which went quite well (even though Paul Randal fired me on Twitter). Teaching/speaking all day by yourself is a lot more tiring than you might think, especially when you have a room full of smart SQL Server people in your session.
On Wednesday, I got to present Professor DMV in one of the two large ballrooms (which was also streamed on PASStv and recorded). That was a lot of fun to present to a large session, and I got a lot of questions during and after the presentation. There was also a lot of live commentary on Twitter while I was speaking. I think that most speakers appreciate when you give live Twitter commentary and feedback while they are speaking (even if they read it later). I certainly appreciate it!
On Friday, I got to present Storage Fundamentals for the DBA in one of the smaller (300 seat) rooms. I was pretty surprised to see people lined up, waiting to get into this session. That has never happened to me at the PASS Summit. I am more used to seeing people lined up waiting to get into to see people like Paul Randal or Kimberly Tripp. Later on Friday, I watched a very good session on virtualization performance from David Klee.
I think the people behind the PASS Summit 2013 did a great job of planning, organizing and running the event. This includes the PASS board members, the PASS employees, all of the PASS volunteers, and all of the other people who worked so hard to make the event a smoothly running success. I have a lot of respect for the people that do all of the work to make the PASS Summit possible each year.
It was great to see so many people that I mostly talk to online, and to meet a lot of new people in person. I had a lot of people come up to me throughout the week and thank me for the work I do on my DMV Diagnostic Information Queries, which was very gratifying. All of the demo scripts from all of the SQLskills speakers (Paul, Kimberly, Erin, Jon, and myself) are posted here.
4 thoughts on “PASS Summit 2013 Summary”
Why don’t they try to centralize the conference in a more medium-sized venue such as – Denver! I thought Charlotte was a bit overwhelming – huge buildings, lots of traffic, rather confusing, lots of bums asking for money, etc. I would prefer something more mid-ranged like a Denver. I love it there!
They did have the PASS Summit in Denver back in 2007. I was happy about that, since I live near Denver, but I think a lot of people were not that happy for various reasons.
I haven’t been there in about seven years, but I thought the area around Coors was real nice. I also think there is a wide variety of things to do – we typically stayed in Evergreen at the Bears Inn, which is obviously not in Denver but the Red Rocks are close, rafting, Coors (brewery and field), the Broncos, etc. It’s not like there is a lot of time for that stuff anyway, but a good way to spend a couple extra days before/after.
You know, Green Bay is becoming a real popular venue for large events. Everything around Lambeau is really building up nicely. There are a lot of things to do around here too – eat cheese, drink beer… kidding.