The PASS Europe event opened with a top-notch reception complete with a magnificent view overlooking beautiful downtown Munich atop the Hilton Munich Park hotel. SQL Server professionals from numerous European cities and the U.S. took the opportunity to catch up and meet new colleagues while enjoying the food and drinks and speculating on all that they would learn and discuss at the conference.

Over half of the attendees had already attended Kimberly Tripp's pre-conference seminar on what DBA’s need to learn for SQL Server 2005. Everyone I talked with said that Kimberly's seminar was outstanding and even entertaining. If SQL Server can be made entertaining, Kim can do it. It seemed most people were interested in getting a head start with SQL Server 2005 despite the schedule being pushed back to the second half of 2005.

Opening the conference the next day, Microsoft’s Gert Drapers delivered an excellent keynote to a full room. He made some interesting comments about the state of the latest SQL Server 2005 builds. While there are some changes with each CTP (Community Technical Preview) being released, there's tremendous progress being made in performance and stability. In fact, Gert has been working with companies who are deploying production projects on the CTP versions. The May CTP is scheduled to be ready by TechEd on June 5. This is internally known as IDW15 and from what I understand is feature complete. Gert did a great job of providing an overview of all of the new features for database administration, business intelligence and application development, often providing his personal insights into the product and its progress.

The rest of the conference was filled with more than 30 breakout sessions. There was a nice mix of Microsoft sessions and user sessions thanks to the tremendous efforts of the PASS conference program committee. I noticed in talking with some of the Microsoft folks that Microsoft is really putting some effort into working with clients on the “beta” (CTP builds) of SQL Server 2005 and sharing all of the knowledge learned. I attended mostly 2005 sessions, trying to learn what's new for DBA’s and also focused a lot on development. Gert had an interesting analogy in one of his sessions about not using a hammer to whack XML into the database. The same goes for coding .NET objects to run on top of the CLR (Common Language Runtime).

On behalf of the PASS board of directors, I can tell you that we're really excited about the enthusiasm at the Munich event and are already planning next year's European conference. SQL Server 2005 will be out the door and in customers' hands by then, and it should be another great event. As for me, I'm back in the swing of things after 24 hours of travel getting back to Illinois. I'm even more excited now about SQL Server 2005. As far as catching up with colleagues after session hours, I made it through an entire recap of a Germany event without mentioning the beer drinking. What happens in Germany, stays in Germany.

Kurt Windisch

PASS Vice President of Marketing