If I had to label in just one word how I feel right this second, it would be "exhausted". Luckily, this is my blog, and I can use far more than one word. So, along with exhausted, let's just add in tired, pooped, and perhaps, for y'all Southerners out there, whupped.

But seriously, PASS is over and it is time to reflect a little bit on the whole experience, as well as PASS as an organization. (On my SQLBLog blog I will post all the cool things I have learned about SQL Server 2008 that I can share) I have talked to many many people this year about PASS, some really positive, some quite negative. This is nothing new, as one of my favorite PASS memories is a few years back when two people I like and respect a great deal (Adam Machanic and Denise McInereny) were arguing the pros and cons of PASS as an organization. I was listening at times, and agreed (for the most part) with both of them.  It can be really bad at times.  Sometimes people think I argue just to argue, but the fact is that I am so wishy-washy that I make this guy seem confident:

I am generally a very positive person, so I tend to see good in everyone. I also am a technical person so I tend to see the unpositive qualities as well. PASS is the same way. I think of PASS a the people I see there each year, a well a interact with throughout the year. For that, it is one one my favorite events of the year.

On the other hand, there is PASS the organization. I know and respect all of the board members, and for the most part have for years. I also understand bureaucracy. I was a deacon for a church (which was technically the board of directors) for three years and it is so very hard to manage by committee of volunteers, particularly for parts of an organization where there is little appreciable gain to be made. Things happen slowly, and many plans are made and not followed through on.  Most of the time plans are made but never quite funded.  So feelings can get hurt and troubles occur, often because information is never really shared in a way that makes people happy.  Add into that that the kinds of people who are volunteers are also going to be people who are influential/very busy in their own careers. I am a volunteer, and I rarely get nearly what I plan to get done. I share many of the concerns that the folks who make complaints have.

But with PASS changing management companies this year, I have hopes for change for the better. More transparency of finances (good or bad) and more follow through on things promised will go a long way to make PASS a better thing.  For most people, just understanding the politics and budgeting explained will go a long way to making things more palatable.  I mean, everyone who pays dues to a non-profit organization with no "product" in exchange for those dues, should be able to get some idea of where they spend that money.  There are just too many examples in the past of organizations using people's money in less than honorable ways.  And to be clear, I have no feeling that this is the case at all.  I like and respect all of the previous board, and have high hopes for the new board.  It is just that when people question things, there ought to be answers.

To reiterate, politics aside, the conference is always my favorite, and the people who attend are a large percentage of the people in my industry that I like and respect.  This year was no different, though there are a few of the MVP's who weren't here and were really missed by me (and others too, but this is my blog :) , and I hope I get to see them again some day. 

Why do I say all of this?  I am now, and will continue to be an active volunteer for PASS, working on the blogging for the special interest groups and preparing for the Quiz Bowl again next year.  I am also highly considering running for the board at next year's summit, and I really want to be clear about my feelings, and honest about the way I think about PASS.   I welcome any questions, criticism, etc here on the blog, by email (drsql@hotmail.com), or if you want to talk on the phone, I will exchange numbers with you and we can talk. 

Today was another great day, but as with every great thing comes sadness.  I will expound a bit more sometime in the next day or so, but basically it is just hard to leave when you are having so much fun. 

We started out the day with 3 MVP sessions, which were great, but NDA...

Next up, I arrived late for Mark Scurrell and Gopal Ashok's talk on Change Data Capture and Change Tracking.  (Sorry Gopal, I missed getting your picture :)

That is going to be a really cool feature.  The days of using values that you have to manage yourself (like a datetime value) to use for ETL are soon to end.  What is really cool is that Change Tracking (which will only tell you what has changed, no matter how many times it has changed) will be in all versions of SQL Server, while Change Data Capture will be only in Enterprise Edition.  I think (for a change) that this is a good balance between the editions.  Change Tracking gives you a very solid base to build a list of rows to ETL, while Change Data Capture gives you a heck of a lot of control to see what has modified. 

A feature for auditing was also given a slide, but it it going to be interesting also.

This is definitely going to be a fairly large section in my book (4-5 pages) on security and logging changes. 

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Next was a presentation that started out kind of strange.  It was called SQL Server Q&A with Ken Henderson.  We were in a tiny tiny room (yeah, no one will attend this...)  So they expanded:

After some delay, Kevin Kline came out and interviewed Ken and it was a very interesting talk, though not at all what was probably expected (I know I was expecting something different.)

It started out with Kevin interviewing him about being an author and such.  If there was ever a presentation I understood it was this part.  I never had the energy to do the time that he said he did (work 8-12 a day, then write until 5am?  Yikes!) But I have worked until 1 or 2 for a month straight on earlier books.  I just don't have that energy.  In the future, I would like to see more interviews like this with panels of writers.  I think it would be cool to compare and contrast the kinds of pain that they all go through.  I know it would probably be good therapy for the writer in any case.  (and I know what you are thinking.  Yes, I would love to be on a panel like that.  It would be good therapy, and might place a nugget in the brain of a few attendees :)

Once people started rolling with more general questions, it really got interesting.  Nothing earth shattering, but Geoff Hiten hit him with a left hook about service packs that was entertaining at the very least.  I can't imagine just how that must feel.  I feel dumb when I make a small mistake on a piece of code I write in a single stored procedure that I can fix in 10 seconds for one client. 

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Next up was supposed to by Michael Rys and Srini Acharya giving a presentation about Managing unstructured and semi-structured data.  Apparently, they canceled a while back but it never made it to the books.  They gave the same or similar presentation earlier in the week...  So I will just have to watch it later.  Still made me sad.  I don't have any real experience with XML, sparse columns, etc yet, and I need to, for the book certainly, as well as the occasional use in real life.

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Dejected by a lost session, I walked to near the door and sat down on a small couch near the door for a while.  It was a great location because I saw a lot of people leaving from PASS including this person who was enjoying his swag yo-yo:

I also saw a person carrying my book, sadly I didn't have my camera in hand at the time.  Afterwards I went to dinner with some fellow PASS volunteers and had a spirited discussion about PASS...  Then, on the bus back to the room to write this and pack up...

Tomorrow or so I will write a follow up to the the whole PASS experience, but for now, it is time to get read to go back to the "real" world where my family lives :)

 Not a tremendous amount of news today, the highlight of my day was the 10 minutes I spent talking to Peter DeBetta and Greg Low in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza hotel.  Second in line was the room service burger I had while I worked on my game show stuff for tomorrow. 

While it might be true that meeting those guys and a great burger could be the highlight of any day, the rest of the day was more or less the average pits of traveling.  Got to the airport 3 hours early so I could spend one of those hours on a phone call, but just as I got into my taxi...canceled...  So I waited another hour. 

Arrived in Denver and (as mentioned met the aforementioned fellows) went to my room to check things out.  Room was okay, decent desk to work at, and well, this blog is getting boring.

I made some changes to the game show powerpoints we will use tomorrow to give me more time to click on the buzzer software.  Admittedly I should have tested better, but I think I have it covered now.  Tomorrow night should be a hoot... I just hope I don't screw things up too bad and end up having contestants hate me.

Everything is USB based:

In the picture there are 3 red buzzers from buzzers.com, 3 10 ft USB cables, a wireless mouse, and a 7 port hub.  It is pretty cool and a definite step up from our original set up a few years back where the buzzers failed to do even vaguely what was desired.

Anyhow, I will blog tomorrow with a lot more pictures to show you how things went (and you can leave comments on how you felt it went this year (and if we should ever do it again!))  Now I am off to a volunteer meet and greet.  Jealous?  If so, just email me at drsql@hotmail.com and I will get you in touch with the folks that can get you invited to next year's gathering (of course, there will be work to do between now and then.)

Ok, so the final day was very awesome.  I of course missed the keynote, as I was up pretty late the previous night.  I spent the morning in the hands on lab, and that was just as much fun as the previous day (hint: I liked it yesterday too :)

Then we had a long meeting discussing where our special interest groups are heading in the upcoming year.  Major restructuring, and all for the best.  We have finally got the ball rolling on our new

Next, I went to "Disk Configuration for SQL Server" by Allan Hirt.  Good overall, as it was something I really really need to learn to do. I have always focused on T-SQL, and database design as much as was feasible, but it is becoming more and more important that I learn how the hardware works, and how to spec out and maximize hardware for clients with not unlimited budgets.

Finally, I went to "Analysis Services 2005 Database Design: A New Data Model – A New Approach" by Dan Bulos.  I liked this session but it was kind of scary.  It went over my head.  The problem is that there is a big shift in paradigm in Analysis Services. Attribute based, versus hierarchy based, or so I am hearing from several people.  As long as the base dimensional model doesn't change (I just finally have that one figured out well enough to do a pretty decent design.) 

Lastly, the MVP's had a party and it was a lot of fun.  I met a lot of the people whose names I have heard over and over.  I still feel like the dumb nerdy kid when I am around these people (okay, so actually I feel a bit less nerdy around them!)

As for today, I only made one session, which was Adam Mchanic's presentation entitled: 213 - Best Practices for Structured SQL Server Development.  It was very good, and he has some good stuff going with the TSQLMacro stuff.  He was bit by the demo demon, but he handled it as well as anyone.  I certainly won't say anything, since my abilities as a speaker are why I am working in the Hands On Labs :)

My schedule tomorrow:

 9:45 AM - 11:00 AM Proctoring one of the Hands On Labs
 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM SIG Leadership Lunch Meeting
 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM  337M - SQL Server 2005: Dynamic Management Views Speakers: Tom Davidson, Microsoft 
  1:00 PM - 2:15 PM  337M - SQL Server 2005: Dynamic Management Views Speakers: Tom Davidson, Microsoft
  2:30 PM - 3:45 PM  330M - Optimization Considerations for Designing Very Large SQL Server Database 
 Systems Speakers: Ross LoForte, Microsoft Corp.
  4:00 PM - 5:15 PM  123M - SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services: Management, Deployment and Security
 Speakers: Thierry D'Hers, Microsoft 

Taking the night off, copying my Robert Plant Cds to my Tivo (remember shaken'n'stirred?) and not doing too much.  I have a lot of work to do before the PASS conference, both personal and for PASS.  One of the three (well, four) things I have going for the conference is something you ought to sign up for.  The Quiz Bowl.  Last year it was a hoot and a holler, and just imagine how much more fun it will be to have a hoot and a holler down in Texas.  You could win an iPod.  The classic moment from last year?  When the guys wearing the balloon animals who had the deal wrapped up tighter than a very tight thing wagered almost all of their points on the final question.  And missed it!  They ended up in like last place (not a bad deal mind you as they won a selection of books from Rational Press!) 

If you want to be involved, email Tim Ford at the address listed on this page.  And if you don't get selected the first time, a few people dropped out and some people just dropped by and got added.

All of the other things I am working on are top top secret :)  Seriously I will be announcing here as well as soon as I feel comfortable about the other things, and some of them are pretty doggone cool.

And if you were one of the people who have attended my sessions over the years, fear not.  I am not on the list.  There are a quite a few very common names on the list (a Kalen a Kim, and a Fernando, for starters. Plus a whole lot of other names you will recognize) and a few people that I don't remember speaking at PASS before (Kent Tegels and Adam Machanic are two guys I am looking forward to meeting!) 

But one name really pops out at me as a person I am looking forward to meeting:  Joe Celko.  Mostly because I want to see if he is as nice a guy as he seems on the newsgroups. 

Grid listing of PASS Sessions

I will however be the loud obnoxious voice at the Welcome Reception party when we have our second annual SIG Quiz Bowl.  I will post more on that over the next few months as we finalize plans.  Just be sure to go and register for the conference and you might be able to compete in our SIG bowl this year.  We gave away iPaqs to the winners last year, so who knows what is going on next year.