Summit Sessions Day 1 #sqlpass

Today was our first day to attend regular sessions.  With over 189 sessions being offered over 3 days there are lots to choose from.  A common theme among the sessions are Azure, Cloud, Denali.  I personally would have liked to see more sessions on currently available products and main stream items but I understand the need to highlight emerging technology and to showcase your upcoming product release.

The first session I attended Aaron Nelson and Julie Smith doing an ETL Smackdown.  It was a great session and they had they audience fully engaged.  It is obvious that Denali has made some vast improvements in ETL.

After the first session was the chapter lunch.  I had to bail a few minutes early on the session in order to make it to lunch to get setup as a chapter leader and regional mentor.  It was humbling to see how many greater south east US chapter leaders are at the Summit.  I also met a guy from Jackson MS that is interested in starting a chapter in MS.  Today we have zero PASS Chapters in MS.  At 1:00 the book signing for MVP Deep Dives Volume 2 began so I got my copy signed by all the MVP’s that are here at the Summit.

Next I attended a session on indexes called “The Ultimate Session on Indexing”.  My impression was something quite different than what was taking place in the session room.  The room was standing room only so during the break I vacated my seat for someone else and dropped into Grant Fritchey’s session on DMO’s.  Grant was doing a great job engaging his audience and sharing how to drill down to find those poor performing queries.  It was really great stuff.

I chose to end my first day of sessions with Brent Ozar showing his Blitz script.  WOW is all I can say.  I have a lot of work to do when I get back to the office since I was placed into a new role.  Following his script will save me countless hours.

Tonight I get to bounce between the vendor expo exhibit, the SQL People party, and the P.U.S.S party.  Tonight should be a blast.  I will blog about the after events later tonight or in the morning.

Cheers!