Here goes with what I hope to achieve the following week in Seattle, WA Oct 9-15 for my 4th summit.
I have spent about 1 hour a day reviewing what I have selected for the week with the really cool Build Your Schedule for Summit 2011.
Sunday Oct 9th is travel day, which starts about 1PM central in Baton Rouge and end at 9pm Pacific in Seattle. I will use this time to review my presentation and read parts of Louis Davidson’s book about relational databases.
Monday morning I hope to have breakfast will some SQL friends (Rob) and head to Rob Farley’s Pre-con on Fixing Queries with Advanced T-SQL constructs. I saw a session on 24 Hours of Pass by Rob, and realized I need to learn from this guy. He seems to have some real good customer/employer experience with queries, plus a dynamic personality. I like the fact his abstract says there will be not much PowerPoint 
Monday night Andy Warren and Steve Jones have a meet and greet social that I hope to attend with a new Summit person I encouraged to attend. Hopefully, I get to see John from West Virginia that night. Cool dude!!!
Tuesday is full of social activities with SQL people that volunteer on different levels. First, 8am meeting with Virtual Chapter leaders. I am the Co-Chair with Lorra Newton on the PASS Data Architecture VC. After that, there is a meeting of SQLSaturday people up until lunch. The chair of local PASS chapters meet in the afternoon, and I am going to try and represent the Baton Rouge chapter for William Assaf and Patrick Leblanc. I really hope to meet some new faces in the SQL Server world during this day. There is always someone new that is so fired up about helping the community. I love being around these people of just listen and encourage.
Tuesday night is the Quiz bowl and Welcome reception which is always entertaining.
In addition to Quiz Bowl, Tuesday night is the best evening at Pass with SQLServerCentral.com and RedGate Casino Night. Steve Jones is a great guy to be around and SQL Server Central is where I got my first look at how giving the SQL Server community is with information. Thanks Steve, Andy and Brian!!!
If I do not get to blog the summit keynotes, I will skip the first keynote and go to the Lab and play around with Denali. These hands on labs are a great way to introduce new stuff. I will go to the Keynote on Friday with David DeWitt - http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2011/SummitContent/Keynotes.aspx. Maybe Thursday morning I will go chat with the SQL First Aid station and just listen in on some debugging. If you have a problem, this is the place to be to get Microsoft Support to assist. I have used these people with replication problems in the past.
Wednesday starts the 3-day summit with 75, 90 and 1/2 day sessions. It is really hard to pick, but here goes.
I have multiple options for Wednesday thru Friday, the only sure thing is my 3rd Normal Form: That’s Crazy Talk!!! on Friday at 2:30pm.
Wednesday Oct 12th
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM -
[BIA-404] Add It Up: Analysis Services Aggregations
[RM:4C3]
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
[BIA-305] Common Analysis Services Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
[RM:602-604]
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
[DBA-304] SQL2008 Query Statistics
[RM:2AB]
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
[DBA-500-HD] Inside Tempdb
[RM:6E]
3:00 PM - 4:15 PM
[BID-306] Intelligent Laziness with the Management Data Warehouse – why work harder, when you can work smarter?
[RM:608]
4:45 PM - 6:00 PM
[AD-318] Characteristics of a Great Relational Database
[RM:602-604]
4:45 PM - 6:00 PM
[DBA-320] Why are we Waiting..
[RM:606-607]
Wednesday is the Exhibitor Reception and I need to get with Quest people because my new employer uses SpotLight. Still need to say hi to Confio who have Ignite, the best Wait State performance monitor around.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
[DBA-403] Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting
[RM:6E]
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
[BID-301] Reporting Services Techniques and Tricks
[RM:613-614]
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
[AD-400] Physical join operators
[RM:615-617]
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
[BIA-303-HD] So How Does the BI Workload Impact the Database Engine?
[RM:606-607]
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
[DBA-314-S] What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache
[RM:6E]
5:00 PM - 6:15 PM
[BID-303] Creating Business Intelligence Dashboards with PerformancePoint Services 2010
[RM:4C3]
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM – I have to see at least one presentation by Peter Myer
[BID-305-S] End-to-End SQL Server PowerPivot
[RM:2AB]
Thursday night I am taking the night off, have some dinner and rest for my presentation on Friday afternoon. I might go by the Community Appreciation Party sponsored by Microsoft for a quick bite.
Friday, October 14, 2011
10:15 AM - 11:45 AM
[AD-500-S] Query Tuning Mastery: Zen and the Art of Workspace Memory
[RM:6E]
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
[DBA-402] Windows Operating System Internals for Database Pros
[RM:4C1-2]
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
[BIA-307] Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach
[RM:608]
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
[BIA-308] Delivering KPIs with Analysis Services
[RM:602-604]
2:30 PM - 3:45 PM
[AD-206] 3rd Normal Form: That's crazy talk!!!
[RM:609-610]
4:15 PM - 5:30 PM
[AD-303] Parameter Sniffing: the Query Optimizer vs. the Plan Cache
[RM:608]
4:15 PM - 5:30 PM
[BID-302] Multidimensional Reporting: MDX Essentials for Report Design
[RM:602-604]
Friday night find some people to have dinner and wind down, maybe blog some about the Summit. This is definitely the best week of training and networking I have ever experienced. Please go if you ever get a chance.
Saturday I travel home and hopefully I get some sleep on the plane and get some idea how LSU is doing against Tennessee. GEAUX TIGERS!!!
