Thoughts on the 24 hours of PASS
From all indications, the first 24 hours of PASS was a resounding success. Hundreds of attendees for each session, minimal technical glitches. All in all, it went very well.
The first session I attended (well, part thereof) was Greg’s discussion on Spatial data. I would really have loved to see the entire thing, what I did see of it was exceptional, but I had to set up for my own session, and it was very difficult to listen to both Rick and Jacob going over last minute details and listen to Greg discussing geometry and geography. I’ll be sure to catch the entire thing once the sessions are available.
My session on indexes went quite well, with a good number of people attending. However it appears from some of the things I’ve read today that I totally messed up the explanation of order of columns in an index and confused the issue more than clarifying it. I think this presentation needs to go back to the drawing board. It works well enough with a small group of people in an interactive format, but not as a straight-up presentation with larger groups. Maybe some more diagrams would help, or more examples. I need to give some thought into what would work best.
Grant’s session on Performance Tuning was excellent, had me laughing at regular intervals, which was bad, I was watching it on my laptop at a local coffee shop. Other patrons must have thought I was crazy (and maybe they’re right). Grant got an infection of the demo-gremlins, but someone had to so that’s hardly a big problem.