The official start date for the summit is Tuesday, but trust me, everything kicked off on Sunday when registration opened. 4:00PM the doors opened and I was second through the door (had to be polite, there was a lady in front of me). Registration went smooth as silk. And then the fun started. The PASS Community Summit has a key word in the middle there, Community. Well it was on display. All these people that I know in person, like the people I work with at PASS, online, all the SQL Server Central Posters and the Twitter crowd, and by reputation, MVP’s and others that I’ve heard of, read or seen present, are all milling around, introducing themselves, hugging old friends, making new ones. The fellowship in  a group like that is amazing. It really makes the trip worth it. Sometimes working as a DBA can be a quite lonely job, but not here.

That was the only official function on Sunday. I met one of my favorite people from SSC, Gail Shaw, and went to dinner. Great time. I was walking back to hotel, and I had not been keeping up with things on Twitter, when I hit the wall. A whole collection of people, largely from Twitter, but also just old friends from previous PASS events, were in the hotel lounge. The Sheraton lounge is not the place to hang out, but it is the place to meet and find out what’s happening. We ended up walking down to a bar called the ZigZag. There were over 40 people from the Summit jammed into the space and it read like a who’s-who of the SQL Server and PASS community. I know at least two board members were there. I finally got to meet Phil Factor. Good times.

If you are in Seattle for the summit and you want to find a crowd of people (and you should), get on Twitter and track down #sqlpass. You’ll get useful, mundane, and bizarre information from it, but it will enable you to find out what people are up to and where they’re going.

More to come, including live blogging from the key notes all week.