Wow, what a week. Once again, PASS put on a great event that provided much in the way of events and training for the SQL Server community. If you followed my countdown you know some of what I love about PASS. Last year I blogged everyday but I did not do that this week. So, what was different for me? Well, for one I volunteered much more this year than last and I was privileged to speak twice. I spent more time meeting new people and catching up with friends and that was great as well. Enjoy my wrap up from my week.

Tuesday – Leadership Meetings, Welcome Reception, and some Karaoke

Before the event officially kicked off, I joined community leaders from around the world for a series of leadership meetings. First we had a meeting on SQL Saturdays which was an opportunity to see the immense growth of these free training events around the U.S. and throughout the world. What a great opportunity for SQL Server professionals to improve their skills and for those passionate about the community to improve their abilities by leading these events. Many ideas were shared among the team including a panel on how to effectively run a SQL Saturday on a tight budget.

Once that was completed, the Regional Mentors enjoyed a lunch together and an opportunity to share what we do to support the user groups in our regions. I particularly enjoyed the fact that I was able to spend some time with Regional Mentors from Germany, Holland, and Portugal. This highlighted further the international scope and reach of PASS. This was followed by the Chapter Leaders meeting. That meeting was held as a series of round tables that the chapter leaders could move through. I was working at the table focused on leadership with Ryan Adams ( B | T ) from the North Texas SQL Server User Group – NTSSUG. We had a number of good conversations around building leadership teams for user groups and what is needed to have an effectively led user group. Check out the NTSSUG site for the by-laws sample we discussed multiple times.

All of these meetings were followed up with the Welcome Reception, which I made a small portion of as I was trying to drop my backpack at my hotel and work my way back there. After the reception, I headed out to Bush Gardens with a number of others. During that time, Jes Borland ( T ) managed to get a microphone in my hand and I had my first round of karaoke. Yes, I actually did sing and had fun doing it. All-in-all, it was a good time had by all.

Wednesday – SQL Around the World, Microsoft Announcements, Tabular Models, and Magenic Team Dinner

This was the true kick off to the event. For many, they looked at the key note as the kick off. Before that even began, I was working in the Community Zone encouraging people to participate in the SQL Around the World community activity. It was a great game. You needed to find 10 people from 10 different countries and find out something interesting about them or their country. I found a dancer and someone who had ridden a cheetah as a kid. I also surprised someone from the Czech Republic when she mentioned her home town only to have me let her know I had been to her home town many years ago. It was a fun conversation. If you did this and have other cool stories let me know. It was amazing as well over 50 different countries were represented at PASS.

Next, Ted Kummert had the first keynote session of the day. His keynote was filled with announcements concerning SQL Server including the following:

• Hekaton: the project code name for a new in-memory OLTP engine
• The Columnstore Index will be updateable
• Next version of PDW will be out in H1 2013
• Polybase: allows you to query across multiple types of data sources such as SQL Server and Hadoop with T-SQL
• DAX Queries will be able to query SSAS Cubes

He also highlighted some recent announcements related to the SQL Server stack:

• Microsoft HDInsight Server CTP: Hadoop for Windows Server
• Windows Azure HDInsight Service Preview: Hadoop for Azure
• Power View and PowerPivot fully implemented in Excel 2013

After the keynote, I hit a session on BigData and Hive which was put on by SQL CAT and very informative. My big takeaway was to use EXTERNAL tables not INTERNAL tables when working with Hive. I then went to do final prep for my Tabular Model session. In this session, “Building a Tabular Model Database”, I present on what tabular and in-memory is, and then proceed to open up a Visual Studio project and create a database. I think it went well and the attendees seemed to enjoy the upbeat nature for an end of day session. The night wrapped up with dinner with the Magenic team (7 of us). Good chance to grow relationships across offices from around the country.

Thursday – Community Zone and DAX as a Query Language

Thursday was a fairly low key day for me. Once again I spent time in the Community Zone. I had the opportunity to talk with a few people on creating a user group in their area. As always, I like to see people interested in growing their local community.

I also attended Alberto Ferrari’s session on DAX. I think the biggest surprise to me was that you can now query DAX directly from SSMS. I am not sure that I am convinced that it is a full query language yet, but it is definitely closer. The key to it all is the EVALUATE expression which allows you to create the DAX query ironically in the MDX window. Here is just a taste of DAX as a query:

EVALUATE
    ‘DimCurrency’
ORDER BY

    ‘DimCurrency’[CurrencyAlternateKey]

What I found interesting is that you can create columns, build measures, and perform many other operations against the tabular model using DAX. In the end, it will not increase the memory used as storage as it is all calculated. Look for some more on this in later blog posts as I delve more into the in-memory storage and usage when working with DAX.

Friday – More Community Zone, HDInsight, Paul White, and Window Functions

Last day. I spent more time in the Zone. I really did enjoy my time there as I continued to meet more people. I was even present when a contract was completed for the Shanghai user group. Very cool indeed. I then attended a session on HDInsight by Mike Flasco from Microsoft. This is very cool stuff as you can create simple Hadoop cluster on your desktop to test the technology. Microsoft and Hortonworks have done a great job of bringing Hadoop data into the Microsoft stack.

On my way to present my final session of the day and the conference, I stopped in for the second half of Allen White’s ( B ) optimization presentation. In a word (or two), mind-blowing! Wow, who knew that the optimizer did all those things? I was highly impressed and think he should look at a precon on the subject next year. Unlike some three hour presentations, he could have went longer as he was not stretching his content out. Nice work Paul. So, I got to follow that with a presentation on Window Functions in T-SQL. For the second time, I had the last slot of the last day. I think this presentation went well even though we were all worn out from a content-filled week. It was fun to try some ideas from the audience in the demos. That always makes for a more interesting demo. I will be doing a follow up post on what I learned from some of the attendees on the subject as well, proving once again this is a user community event. We all have something to contribute! (If you attended this session, you will find links to the blogs on the subject here.)

What’s Next?

Coming in April is the new Business Analytics conference in Chicago followed by the PASS Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. Of course, your local user groups will continue to meet with regional SQL Saturdays sprinkled throughout the year as well. How will you participate and contribute in 2013? We look forward to seeing you all again, soon.