It’s that time of year again when the anticipation of the upcoming PASS Summit begins to build. My first attempt at using the Summit Schedule Builder by selecting the various topics of interest to me resulted in extreme overbooking. Sigh… Now I really have to do some serious thinking about which sessions I want to see and how that fits around the various obligations that I have to participate in other events besides the sessions that I’m presenting:
Preconference: MDX, DAX, and DMX: An Introduction to the Languages of BI (Tuesday, Oct 11, 8:30 am – 4:30 pm)
Half-day session: So How Does the BI Workload Impact the Database Engine? (Thursday, Oct 13, 1:30 pm – 4:30 pm). Denny Cherry and I are co-presenting this session and provided a sneak preview for 24 Hours of Pass Fall 2011 which you can view here (see Session 9).
Panel session: Are You a Linchpin? Career management lessons to help you become indispensable (Friday, Oct 14, 2:30 pm – 3:45 pm)
Of course, I’d love for you to come to all of my sessions, but there are plenty of other speakers to see, too! If you’re a business intelligence beginner, I recommend you try to see these sessions:
- Wednesday
- Reporting Services 201: From Basic to WOW! (BID-202) Jes Schultz Borland
- Zero to Cube – Fast Track to SSAS Development (BIA-202) Adam Jorgensen
- Introduction to Data Mining in SQL Server Analysis Services (BIA-310-S) Brian Knight
- Thursday
- SSIS vs T-SQL: Loading a Data Warehouse (BIA-312) Adam Jorgensen and Mike Davis
- Creating Business Intelligence Dashboards with PerformancePoint Services 2010 (BID-303) Rod Colledge
- Friday
If you’ve already got some BI experience, the following sessions are must-see:
- Wednesday
- Thursday
- Anger Management: Overcoming SSIS Deployment and Configuration Challenges (BIA-306) Erik Veerman
- SQLCAT: Tier-1 BI in world of Big Data (BIA-408-A) Denny Lee and Thomas Kejser
- See the Future with Visual Predictive Analytics (BID-201) Carlos Bossy
- Friday
Then, of course, the big news at PASS this year is the upcoming Denali release. There are plenty of Denali-focused BI sessions to see, but I’ll leave it to you to find the sessions that are right for you!
Overlap? Unfortunately, yes – so we’re all going to have to make some hard choices. But if your budget permits, then the best way out of this conundrum is to buy the conference DVD! Then you have the benefit of reviewing presentations later and don’t have to worry about trying to remember everything that was discussed during Summit, because I guarantee it’s going to be an information overload kind of week!