I’ve been at SQL Pass and it has been a really great conference. I will write soon more technical content, there are a few notes about the good and the bad of the overall experience that I’d like to share.

  • The keynote of David J. Dewitt has been great. If you want to understand the *right* positioning of NoSQL movement and Hadoop technology, this is what you need to learn. And yes, you can watch it here, for free!
  • The Expert Pods between session rooms have been a great idea. Something I’d like to see in any conference. It was an easy meeting point for people with the same interests and there were always interesting discussions around. Kudos to PASS Summit for that!
  • The rooms for BI Sessions were smaller than required. Too many times I’ve seen people that weren’t able to enter the room, whereas other (larger) rooms where half-empty. Moreover, there were conflicting sessions in the same timeslots and no sessions for a topic in the other timeslots. PowerPivot/BISM have been particularly affected by both issues. Something didn’t worked well in planning, I think.

Thus, a good training week for anyone involved in SQL Server products family. Now, if you’re in Europe and you want to get some training in London, we will have some news for the BI audience in the next few months; in the meantime, Chris Webb is managing to run these courses with trainers from COEO:

  • SQL Server Developer Workshop with Gavin Payne
    1st – 2nd November 2011
    A 2-day interactive workshop that drills down into new features, tools and best practices for developers working with SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2. More details and registration here.
  • SQL Server Internals and Troubleshooting Workshop with Christian Bolton
    6th – 7th December 2011
    The Advanced Troubleshooting Workshop for SQL Server 2005, 2008 and R2 provides attendees with SQL Server internals knowledge, practical troubleshooting skills and a proven methodical approach to problem solving. The workshop will enable attendees to tackle complex SQL Server problems with confidence.
    More details and registration here.

Now back to writing, a book about BISM Tabular is in the workings, stay tuned!