Today is the first official day of the summit. After two days of preconference sessions and last night’s Welcome Reception, the time has finally arrived for the opening keynote of PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle. I’m in the rotating bloggers seating with a great view of center stage. The ballroom is filling up and lots [...]

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 [...]

An interesting confluence of events this week takes me both back to the past as I ponder the future! What gives? Well, the recent release of Tomislav Piasevoli’s (blog|twitter) new book, MDX with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services Cookbook, reminded me of my first meeting with him at a PASS Summit event a [...]

Yesterday, Denny Cherry (blog|twitter) and I co-presented a 24HOP session for the Fall 2011 lineup, “So How Does the BI Workload Impact the Database Engine?” 24HOP stands for 24 Hours of PASS and is a semiannual roundup of speakers from the SQL Server community. Initially, this event consisted of 24 consecutive sessions, each lasting an [...]

Yesterday, I delivered a presentation at SQLRally on the new data visualization features in the latest version of Reporting Services. We did some experimentation with Indicators to validate the rules for Start and End, which sacrificed the later portion of my presentation on visual design best practices. On the one hand, that meant the session [...]