Up at 5am today, worked for a while, then down to breakfast at 6am with Brent, Colin, Denny (and wife!), Tom, and Tim. Good conversation, good food, expensive breakfast (at the Sheraton). Then over to the convention center to see what was going on, had coffee with Kendal, Patrick Leblanc, Greg Larsen, and then up for an informal meeting with the sql bloggers we could gather, just trying to start a dialog about how we can communicate better with them. Very early on that, but interesting. Then wandering around the main room chatting with a few people, enjoying the time

8:40 am

Rushabh Mehta, VP of PASS, started off talking about finances. Financials are available on the site, login, go to governance page. Mentioned again that attendance this year was only down 9%, pretty good given the economy. Encouraged participation in PASS at chapters, volunteering, speaking. Talked about how many volunteers make PASS happen, had all the volunteers present stand – guessing it was 75-100 people.

8:50 am

Wayne Snyder, President. Started by saying the board serves the members. Recognized outstanding volunteers:

• Tim Ford – volunteer since 2002, Program Committee, Virtual Chapters, Quiz Bowl, more.
• Grant Fritchey – editorial committee, SQL Server Standard editor, chapter leader, won the best thing I learned at PASS contest
• Amy Lewis – Volunteer Coordinator for BI Virtual Chapter
• Jacob Sebastian – Chapter regional mentor, PASS Member outreach in India (by himself…with others)
• Passion Award:
  • Giving two awards this year
  • Charley Hanania, PASS Europe, Swiss Chapter, four years volunteers
  • Allen Kinsel,served on Program Committee (PASS Summit speaker schedule), has been on volunteer and nomination committee, fives years as a volunteer

I love Wayne keynotes, Wayne does Wayne very well!

9:00 am

Back to Rushabh, 7th year we have the Women in Technology luncheon (how to get more women engaged in tech). MVP’s wrote SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, royalties to charity. Q&A today with the PASS Board today at 4:30 pm. Party tonight at Gameworks tonight, sponsored by Microsoft. Tom Casey will answer questions on Twitter, @ms_sql_server.

9:06 am

Tom Casey, GM, Business Intelligence. Comments on PASS; 2 dedicated BI tracks, 41 sessions on BI last year, 50 this year, 20% selected BI as focus last year, more than 30% this year. Long intro.

• Ron Van Zanten, Directing Officer, Premier Bankcard, 9th largest issuer of mastercard in US, process 600k credit apps this month. Doing this interview fashion must like with Priti yesterday, not my favorite format, Ron doing pretty well. Said Madison reduced query time greatly. Said the ability to visualize the data was pretty important.

Talked about empowering users, the spread of info throughout the business. Powerpivot for Excel and Sharepoint (used to be Gemini) (2010).

Amir Netz – Demo of Powerpivot, 100 million rows in Excel on a laptop.Seems fast. Has Analysis Services running in process, compresses data. 20g of data, compressed to 133 mb. Underlying data in reports can be exposed as data feed, consumed by PPivot (not screen scrape). Has RelatedTable function to do lookup, returns table, SUMX aggregates table. Automatically finds some relationships. Showing new feature called Slicers in Excel, click fields and chart object shows up, but they seem to align and size well. Data can be uploaded to Sharepoint, live preview of Excel view of that data in Sharepoint. Now going to 2nd machine, Win7 touch screen. Accessed doc via Sharepoint, then running server side. Can use gestures to navigate (assuming you have the touch screen!). Harder to read demo, just a camera on it instead of direct from PC. Another demo, mildly confusing, reports in Sharepoint. Nice visual way to go back/scroll through report for various time periods (good demo there).

10:00 am

Back to some report demos. November CTP coming soon and Office 2010 beta as well. New resource center, www.microsoft.com/technet/bicenter. End of keynote.

From there I met Brent Ozar for coffee and a long chat, great fun, the first time we’ve had a chance to talk at length. Worth the time if you can corner him!

Had lunch in the main hall, wasn’t as much fun today with no birds of a feather, but did get a chance to get some feedback on business cards. In general people like the half size moo cards initially, but then worry that they’ll lose them. What can you do?!

I had another meeting scheduled for after lunch that was rescheduled, so went back to the hotel for a break and to work a little, back over to the convention center about 3 pm to network, then head to the Q&A session at 4 pm. It was the first time that I know of that the Board took open questions and I think it went well, Joe Webb moderating. Attendance lower than I hoped, but lots of good discussion. As you might imagine we were a little nervous going in – imagine an open forum where anything can be asked in any way and knowing that if you goof on the response, there’s the twitter sound bite of the day! In general you win at these type of forums by being direct, honest, thoughtful, and non-defensive. Can’t answer all the questions, or please everyone, but you can engage them to understand their concern. I thought the attendees treated us very fairly and tried just as hard to engage us. I’m really hoping this will become a yearly tradition.

After that, around 6:30, we left to get ready for the MS sponsored party at Gameworks. First class, tons of food, three hour pass to the games, free drinks too. Eventually we headed out for a sit down dinner and wound up at Changs, too tired to go further. So far not doing well on my quest for ‘Seattle’ food, but having fun anyway.

Called it a day about 10 pm as I write these closing notes, have a meeting early tomorrow!