I’m lucky enough to take part in the largest SQL Server conference in the world, the PASS Summit 2014 held in Seattle. This will be my second Summit, first one being the 2013 one held in Charlotte. While I’ve had the privilege of attending quite a few training sessions during my career, none have been even close to the level of learning offered in PASS Summit. The knowledge of the speakers, many of who are renown experts in their own fields, and the quality of the sessions is nothing short of awe inspiring. In 2013 Summit I remember being quite impressed how well things were organized. I was even more impressed when I learned that the amount of volunteer work hours for it was over 500,000.
That is a lot of hours and I believe it tells about the kind of commitment the SQL Server community has for making this event a reality.
So while there is the 9 hour time difference and the trouble of travelling little over 5000 miles, I’m quite sure It’ll still be worth it. I’m also glad that our company has recognized the value of these conferences and they have to offer. In fact there’s a whole group of us, from different teams and with different areas of expertise, going.
The summit is a huge event with over 200 tracks running over 3 days and there’s also the opportunity to enjoy 2 days of day long pre-conference sessions before the main event. Fortunately the PASS organization provides an online scheduling tool and a mobile app to keep track of these sessions. Unfortunately you can still only attend one at the time, which means that some difficult decisions need to be made. My schedule had more than one time slot filled with two interesting looking sessions, but I suppose it’ll never hurt to have some options.
I’ll probably be writing short daily summaries about the event and the trip in general, similar to what I did for last years PASS Summit.
Leave a Reply