Today is the last official day of the PASS Summit.  The sessions will wrap up at the end of the day, and we’ll all go our separate ways and resume our semi-normal lives.  Having delivered my presentation yesterday, my official PASS duties are over, and I’m planning to spend the day taking in a few sessions and networking.

08:15am: No keynote today, so the sessions are starting first thing in the morning.  I’m sitting in on a Power BI session delivered by my friend Adam Saxton.  He’s an excellent and knowledgeable presenter, and I always enjoy attending his presentations.  For Power BI, this has been one piece of the Microsoft BI stack that I have largely ignored due to the fact that it runs exclusively in the cloud.  However, I’d like to get up to speed on the cloud BI offerings – even though the on-premises solutions will continue to represent the overwhelming majority of business intelligence initiatives (in terms of data volume as well as Microsoft revenue), I expect to be fluent in all of the Microsoft BI offerings, whether “earthed” or cloud-based.

11:00am: After stopping by the Linchpin booth again, I sit down in the PASS Community Zone.  And by sit down, I mean that I collapse, exhausted, into one of the bean bags.  I spent some time chatting with Pat Wright, Doug Purnell, and others, and met up with Julie Smith and Brian Davis to talk about a project we’re working on together (more on that later).

11:45am: Lunch.  Today is the Birds of a Feather lunch, in which each table is assigned a particular SQL Server-related topic for discussion.  I headed over with my Colorado buddies Russ Thomas and Matt Scardino to the DQS/MDS table, at which only two other folks were sitting (one of whom worked for Microsoft).  We had a nice chat about DQS and data quality in general.  I have to admit a bit of frustration with the lack of updates in DQS in the last release of SQL Server.  I still firmly believe that the core of DQS is solid and would be heavily used if only the deficiencies in the interface (or the absence of a publicly documented API) were addressed.

02:45pm: I don’t know why, but I want to take a certification exam.  The PASS Summit organizers have arranged for an onsite testing center, and they are offering half price for exams this week for attendees of the summit.  I registered for the 70-463 DW exam, and after sweating through the MDS and column store questions, I squeaked through the exam with a passing score.  I’m not a huge advocate for Microsoft certification exams – I find that many of the questions asked are not relevant in real-world scenarios, they are too easy to cheat, and I’m still very skeptical of Microsoft’s commitment to the education track as a whole after they abruptly and mercilessly killed the MCM program (via email, under cover of darkness on a holiday weekend, no less) – so I’m likely not jumping back into a full-blown pursuit of Microsoft certification any time soon.  Still, it was somewhat satisfying to take and pass the test without prep.

04:00pm: Back in the community zone.  Lots of folks saying their good-byes, others who are staying the night are making plans for later in the evening.  For me?  I’ve been craving some seafood from the Crab Pot all week, and I find 6 willing participants to join me.  I’m also planning a return trip to the Seattle Underground Tour.  For the record, I love having this community zone, and I particularly dig it right here on the walkway – it’s a visible, high-traffic location, and it’s been full of people every time I’ve come by.

06:30pm: An all-out assault on the crab population has commenced.  And by the way, our group of 6 became 12, which became 15, which became 20-something (and still growing).  Our poor waiter is frazzled.  I told him we’ll be back next October, in case he wants to take that week off.

08:00pm: Seattle Underground tour.  I did this a couple of years ago with a smaller group, and it was a lot of fun.  This year, we’ve got 15 or so PASS Summit attendees here, and we get a really good tour guide this time.

09:45pm: My friend from down under, Rob Farley, turns 40 today, and about a hundred of us stop by his birthday party.

10:30pm: This may be the earliest I have ever retired on the last night of any summit.  I’m just exhausted.  I do some minimal packing and prep for tomorrow morning and crash for the evening.

Apart from any last-minute goodbyes at the airport tomorrow, the SQL PASS 2014 Summit is over for me.  Without a doubt, this was the best, most fulfilling, most thoroughly exhausting summit experience I’ve had in my seven years of attendance.  I’m sad to be leaving, but couldn’t feel more satisfied.