Summit 2014 is upon us.  Unless you are still under a rock, you probably know that.  And if you are under that rock, I am curious how you are reading this.

While it is early on in the week for the PASS Summit, things have really been going since Sunday for many.  A lot has happened.  A lot has already been learned.  And yes, some new people have already been met.  So far so good.

Now is a good time for me to just jot down some of my early impressions from the week.

It has been nice to receive a couple of compliments this week from a few people on various things.  It is waaaaay cool to hear things such as the following from community members.  Here are some samples.

“You taught me something.” Paul Randal (blog | twitter) in reference to a recent blog post that you can read here.  It is great to hear somebody learned something.  That is a primary driver for putting up content on the web and trying to help in the community where possible.

“Your index script has saved my bacon several times!” Stuart Ainsworth (blog | twitter) talking about my missing index script here.  Again, totally cool.  I am happy to hear about successes from code that I have put out there.

Those are two big impressions that would be great takeaways for the week.

But then we have to start throwing in the learning that is part of the week is.  I have attended a couple of sessions and found myself inspired by some of the content as well as hopeful by some of the other content.

By attending a session about Extended Events, I learned about an API that can expose some XE data via powershell to extend the possibilities and uses of XE.  Since the referenced blog does not contain any of the proposed material (slides or demos) it is hard to do much more with it just yet.  I will continue to check the referenced site as well as the session information on the Summit website.

By attending another session, I learned about a new feature called the Query Store.  It is basically a “Hammer that can make a lot of things look like nails!”  That session was presented by Conor Cunningham.  And while the Query Store has some extended events that are exposed in 2014, the XEs are useless and do nothing until SQL v.Next.  It would be totally awesome to have it back ported but that has no chance of happening.

And to top all of it off, it was great to sit down and get a couple of client issues fixed during the lunch break.

This is what Summit is, a huge chance to recharge, learn and to get excited about the technology and what is coming.  Oh and every now and again, one might get the chance to teach Paul White how to use a smart phone.