PASS, then and now

Earlier this week, I told you about the early days of the Professional Association for SQL Server (www.sqlpass.org) and how I came to be involved.  (Of course, I’m not an actual historian of the events.  So I’m sure I left out important information.) 

This topic came to mind because I was sitting in a PASS board of directors meeting that very day.  Things have changed a lot between the early days of PASS and now.  From the outside, there are some changes in the organization that are very easy to spot.  For example, the conferences have gotten much bigger, both in terms of the number of attendees at the event and the amount of educational content that PASS is able to provide. 

PASS has also grown in terms of the total content provided by Microsoft and the attention that the conference receives from members of the Microsoft SQL Server development team. This is a wonderful fringe benefit to the PASS event since an attendee can meet a very large number of the developers, development leads, and program managers for the develop of the SQL Server RDBMS at a single event.  In fact, it’s the best place short of Redmond to meet members of the SQL Server team.  You’ll be able to meet experts from almost every component area of the SQL Server team, even the obscure areas.  For example, Notification Services is well represented at PASS, in the same way as you would expect from one of the major components like the query optimizer.

Another example of the way in which the event has grown is the overall community involvement in the event.  PASS has participation and support from almost all of the major independent SQL Server web sites, such as SQLServerCentral.com, SQL-Server-Performance.com, SQLTeam.com, and SQL Server Magazine.  This year we’re looking forward to an even larger community engagement as the community looks forward to embracing Yukon.

Next week, I’ll tell you some more about PASS with regards to the internal operations of the organizations.  In the meanwhile, I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts about this year’s conferences (Munich in May and Grapevine, TX in September) or the organization as a whole.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,

-Kevin