Started the day at 6:30 at Top Pot with a meeting about SQLSaturday over coffee and it really ended up being a discussion about chapters as much as anything. Jack Corbett, Kendal Van Dyke, Rob Hatton, Pam Shaw, Patrick Leblanc, Tim Mitchell, Greg Larsen, and Stuart Ainsworth joined me. I love their passion for community! I see them as the next generation of leaders – get to know them!
8:40 am
Bill Graziano doing the keynote, started by thanking Greg Low and Pat Wright for their contributions to PASS for serving on the Board for the past two years. Then they did a great slide presentation with music showing pictures of Kevin Kline, then brought him up on stage to say thanks, brought Wayne Synder out to give him a thank you award. Very emotional Wayne starts talking about a picture of Kevin of sleeping – hard to describe, Wayne crying with emotion – kudos to Wayne for showing what he feels about how much Kevin has done over the years (Kevin served on the original board back in 1999 and continuously since then). Then reviewed existing board members and the new ones, then the new Executive Committee (Rushabh, Bill, Rick H).
European Conference April 21-23, 2020 in Neuss Germany, PASS Summit in Seattle next year, Nov 8-11, early bird rate is $995 through Dec 2009. Talked about the location of 2011 conference not set yet. Showed a picture of PASS HQ staff.
8:50 am
Patrick Ortiz from Dell. Rough start, presentation about SQL in the Enterprise, DR, etc. Honestly not very good so stopped taking notes. Sorry Dell.
9:18 am
David DeWitt, Technical Fellow, Data and Storage.32 years as Computer Sci professor, joined MS in March 2008, runs Jim Gray Systems Lab. Very engaging, joked about the server fans spinning up yesterday. Talking about growth/speed trends, seek times not getting much faster compared to other factors, need a lot more drives to keep CPU’s busy, SSD’s the big hope for changing that. This is really a presentation that’s worthy of a keynote – interesting, technical, no sales pitch, recognizes we get the base concepts already. Right now we try to avoid random IO, expensive. Memory is in Peoria, 200 cycles to access compared to 20 for L2 cache. Green stuff is bad (gotta be here, it’s the stall on the chart he is showing). Talking about column store vs row store, advantages to column store are only retrieving data needed to put into cache. Stopped writing to pay attention!
Missed a planned meeting due to bad scheduling, keynote went later than I thought it did. My fault, annoying!
Went back to the hotel to drop off my bag, back to the convention center for more networking, then off to a lunch meeting, then back for some more chat before a 2 pm meeting and another at 2:30, then spent some time wandering, looked in on Buck Woody’s session which seemed to go very well, then started working on preliminary dinner plans, meeting people at 6 pm and go from there. Finally headed back to the hotel, it’s funny that the conference just quietly ends, seems like there should be a closing ceremony!
So it’s dinner tonight, then a board meeting in the morning, one more meeting after that, then some time to relax before heading to the airport about 7p for a 10:30 flight that puts me back in Orlando at 9am Saturday – doesn’t seem like it should take long.
It’s been a good week, think I hit my goal of meeting 50 new people but it started to blur, definitely did better than in previous years. Looking forward to getting the event DVD’s so I can enjoy the technical side of the content back home. Things went very smoothly, PASS HQ did a great job this year!
