All about PASS Summit 2019

Here are the things you must/should probably know about PASS Summit 2019, as told by me. Included:

  • Advice for first timers
  • Prioritized schedule at a glance
  • Sessions we recommend
  • A quick look at my 10 years of PASS Summits.

PASS Summit 2019

First Timers

You can also look over these old videos…I made them 8 years ago, but they still apply!

 

Schedule at a glance, prioritized

Here’s the full session schedule, and a PASS Schedule at a Glance. This schedule  is prioritized, though!

Note: I’m not seeing Speaker Idol on the boards yet, but I’ll update if/when they schedule it.

Monday:

  • Precons happen Monday and Tuesday!  You have several good options.  Itzik Ben-Gan is always an excellent choice, if you could use some T-SQL love in your life. Otherwise, you’ll just have to choose based on subject matter.
  • Donuts! If you’re in town Monday evening, hit up the MidnightDBA Donut Meetup at Top Pot on 5th Ave, 5-7pm.  Sponsored by MinionWare.

Tuesday:

  • More precons.
  • #PASSWIT happy hour, 4-6:00pm! This event is open to women & allies. Register here.
  • First-Timers’ Orientation Meeting is probably today. In 2018 it was at 4:45pm in ballroom 6E.
  • The Welcome Reception is tonight in the Microsoft Azure Keynote Room, from 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
  • SQL Karaoke happens tonight, 9:30pm-2:00am. Big fun, but get your tickets early!

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

  • Very likely #SQLRun again.
  • The Birds of a Feather lunch is apparently every day. Today it goes from noon-2pm.
  • Speaker Idol Final Round …?
  • I’m giving a lightning talk in room 618-620 during the 3:30pm time slot.

 

Sessions we recommend

I am particularly excited about a brand new feature of Summit: Learning pathways. You can choose from among 10 different pathways, and learn all about (for example) data security  over the course of several sessions. VERY cool. I imagine these will be popular, so show up early for included sessions.

Our list of recommended sessions will grow as the conference gets closer. Submit your recommendations in the comments, or ask my opinion on a session!

The most popular speakers’ sessions may fill up; I’ll mark these with an asterisk (*). Note: I won’t post days and times, as these can change. Check out the Guidebook mobile app to help keep track of schedules and changes.

General sessions:

  • TBD

Session in specific sections:

  • TBD

10 years of PASS Summits

Every year at PASS Summit has looked slightly different for me. Let’s look at the bookends, shall we?

2009

PASS Summit 2009 was my first Summit, as it turns out:

In 2009, I started blogging on MidnightDBA.com. I got my first SQL 2008 certification, the MCTS in Database Development. My goal is to get MCITP in the next couple of months, by the way.  In August I started back to work, and in October I won the SQLServerPedia contest…that got me a trip to the SQLPASS Summit in Seattle!  Just a couple of personal notes, and then back to the geeking out: Sean and I celebrated our 5th anniversary this year with a great trip to Los Angeles, and my sweet kidlets turned 10, 4, and 2.  I’m also apparently taking up the guitar (got one for xmas), which I’ve always wanted to do.

Note: I did not, in fact, pursue the guitar.

That first year I went, I already knew a ton of people from Twitter. Meeting them in person was seriously great. This is why I encourage everyone to join Twitter and follow some folks, before going to an event like this.

That yer, Sean and I had our first interview with Itzik Ben-Gan, a talk with Allen White, a big group interview with Buck Woody, Joe Celko, and half a dozen other big names, and a good many other interviews. I tried to go to all of the events and all the sessions I could, and tweeted an awful lot.

2018

Last year, I:

  • blogged a lot
  • was a mentor for some Summit first timers
  • was an exhibitor for our company MinionWare
  • hosted a MinionWare donut meetup at Top Pot on Monday night, again
  • spoke at the Seattle Freecon
  • hit the keynotes
  • walked the #SQLRun on Wednesday morning
  • worked the Birds of a Feather lunch
  • caught the end of Speaker Idol
  • attended a Women in Technology (WIT) event AND the WIT luncheon
  • published a SQL Yearbook, raising money for Doctors Without Borders
  • hit up the game night event
  • had karaoke with friends

2019 will probably look a lot like 2019, except that I am not putting together a SQL Yearbook this time around. See you there!

Trouble writing? Join the club. #JustWriteTech

I was talking with  a couple of excellent SQL people* recently, and we were bemoaning the difficulties and disciplines of blogging. This is what speakers do after a successful SQL event, by the way.

I mentioned that I’d recently joined a writing group to help with my nonprofessional writing motivation, and how great the group was. When suddenly! I put two and two together, and came up with something! An IdeaTM!!

If we all want to write more, but find it hard to make ourselves do so…how about some group support!

From local writing clubs, to National Novel Writing Month, to T-SQL Tuesday: we have all kinds of specialized incentives to write. But I want something else. Something easy-peasy, recurring, and generalized.

Introducing #JustWriteTech

Here’s the deal: we’ll have a virtual meeting each week on Thursday at 11:00am – 12:30pm Central Time, where the goal is to just write – whether you need to write a blog, code, or anything you want that’s tech related. (Emphasis on blogs, though.)

How to do it?

  1. Get on Twitter and post a “Hi there, I’m going to #JustWriteTech!“-style post.
  2. At 11:30am, start writing.
  3. Don’t talk, don’t get up, don’t check Twitter, don’t post to Twitter.
  4. At 12:30pm (or later), stop writing. Congratulate yourself on writing!
  5. Optionally, post to #JustWriteTech again to chitchat about how great we all are.

I’m going to hop on TODAY, September 19, to do just this. If you can’t make it this week, fine. If you can only make one week a month, fine. Or every other week. Whatever.

Feel free to start your own time-based #JustWriteTech – maybe #JustWriteTechEU, or #JustWriteTechAUS, for example – but be sure to link back to this post, would you? I’ll update things here with FAQ as they occur.

Let’s just write,
Jen

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the “couple of excellent SQL people”?

* Kellyn Pot-Vin (@DBAKevlar), and @TracyBoggiano, for the record.

Once a week is too often. What can I do?

Come when you can, silly.

That’s a bad time for me. Now what?

Join the party late, or early. The Twitter posts will still be there. Just be sure you set yourself an HOUR to just write tech, okay?

I have objections/thoughts/questions.

Okay, comment here.

Use T-SQL, not the GUI

I preach about writing T-SQL for admin and dev tasks, instead of using the user interface in SQL Server Management Studio. Why? Because scripts are saveable, repeatable, and excellent for CYA* events.

Case in point: I had an extensive security request from a client yesterday. I frequently use Minion. Enterprise (of course) to script out and edit/apply permissions as necessary, but this time it was a brand new security set. So, I generated the necessary scripts.This was close to what I did:

SELECT ‘USE [‘ + name + ‘]; CREATE USER [domain\user1] FROM LOGIN [domain\user1]; EXEC sp_addrolemember ”db_datareader”, ”domain\user1”;’ FROM sys.databases WHERE …

This query generated the scripts that I wanted, and I was able to copy-paste and run. Easy!

But it turns out, dear reader, I missed something. My WHERE clause wasn’t complete, and I neglected a couple of databases that the user needed to get into.

When user1 wrote to ask why they couldn’t get into database X, I was able to go back, look at the script, and see my omission.

This is a simple example, of course, but I cannot tell you how many times it’s been useful to look at scripts ran on previous dates, either to diagnose an issue, or to prove that “yes, we did perform actions A and B”.

Bonus tip: I tend to name my files by date and task. So for example, I might save the script above (and the generated script, and the name of the server I ran it on) as “20190822_Server3 user1 readonly perms.sql”. This makes files easily searchable by date, server, and task.

Cheers,

Jen

*Cover Your Butt