Feasel’s Grand Analysis of the PASS 600 mile radius rule

UPDATE: Last week, PASS announced an update to the 600 mile radius announcement: “…we will be piloting the 600-mile driving radius distance for events in North America beginning January 1, 2017. We will not include the back-to-back weekend restriction during this pilot…”

Last month, PASS – the professional SQL organization that many of us are a member of – announced a new rule: that the free one-day “SQL Saturday” conferences cannot run on concurrent or adjacent weekends. There was a good deal of talk on Twitter, some response blogs, and comments on the announcement itself.

For the record: I think this rule is meant to benefit sponsors and PASS itself, not the local event organizers and attendees. More: I think it may be a benefit to sponsors, and will be a detriment to organizers and attendees. So I’m not a fan.

Kevin Feasel has written a written an extensive blog post detailing the problem, data, analysis, and conclusions about the new rule. You see, PASS made a big set of related data available, and Kevin happens to have done some work in the data analysis sphere. (What a wild coincidence!) So he cleaned up the data, loaded it in, and did some fairly extensive analysis.

It is a long post, so feel free to read the intro and then jump to “Conclusions”* if you’re short on time. But I do encourage you to read “Airing of Grievances” and “Limitations of Analysis”, too. It’s good stuff.

Not-really-a-spoiler: his conclusions support a couple of the unproven theories of mine, specifically about attendee travel distances.

Happy days,
Jen
www.MidnightDBA.com/Jen

*Hardy har-har…get it? Get it? Jump…to Conclusions?