I love reading the many blogs posts that pour in following a PASS Summit.  I think it is fun to read everyone’s experience.  There’s not really a wrong way to attend the conference unless you just hide our in your hotel the whole week.  Here’s how my week went.

Sunday

This was a travel day for me.  I drove with Brad Schacht and Gareth Swanepoel up to Charlotte from Jacksonville.  This was a fun 5.5 hour drive as Gareth live tweeted our trip with the hashtag #sqlwolfpack.  We arrived Sunday night with just enough time to go register for the conference before registration closed for the night.

Monday

Monday Brian Knight and I delivered a full day precon on Growing up with Analysis Service: Power Pivot to MOLAP.  We had about 100 in the audience for an exciting day of learning.  We took the approach of telling a story of an Analyst that created a Power Pivot model but as requirements changed there was a need to find a more scalable solution through the other forms of Analysis Services.

Tuesday

This was a lighter day for me but I did stop by and visit the networking party hosted by Andy at Buffalo Wild Wings. I also spent much of this day setting up the Pragmatic Works’ booth prior to the opening of the event on Wednesday.

Wednesday

The opening of summit started with the keynote describing a hybrid approach to SQL Server (On Premise and Cloud).  I’m seeing more and more momentum Microsoft cloud.  A lot of the crowd that wasn’t buying into is years ago are now starting to see the benefits clearly now too so that’s helping. 

After lunch I delivered a presentation on Creating an End to End Power View Reporting Solution.  In this session I show what is needed to go from basic data source to full reporting solution using Power View.

After all the sessions were complete the Exhibiter receptions started and the Pragmatic Works’ booth hosted a book signing.

I also attended a Karaoke party hosted by Pragmatic Works that night with a live band.  You can check out about 200 pictures from that event here.

Thursday

On Thursday I presented a session with Dustin Ryan on Choosing the Right Analysis Services: Tabular vs MOLAP.  This was the first time I had ever presented with Dustin and I think it went really well.  I especially enjoyed how we worked off each other to make our points together.  Demos were of course planned but the banter was all thought of on the spot.

I also attended a couple sessions on Thursday.  One on Real Time Data Warehousing on PDW and then also the BI Power Hour.

Friday

I worked the Pragmatic Works booth much of this day and then went to the SQL Saturday Charlotte Speaker dinner at night. 

Saturday

I presented a session at SQL Saturday Charlotte on Power Query.  I had a lot of great questions in this session, which happens to be one of my favorite topics right now.  The event was incredibly organized.  I tip my hat to the organizers who obviously put a lot of work into getting the event together.