Pass Summit 2009 – Volunteer Meetings, Welcome Reception and Quiz Bowl

I arrived at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center
around 8:45 AM this morning to register for the 2009 PASS Summit. Most of
the morning attendees were already in their pre-conference sessions that
started at 8:30 AM, but there were still a few people milling around and
stopping by the registration desk.

This year the Summit team put together seven different
pre-conference sessions. These pre-conference sessions where heavily favoring
Business Intelligent and DBA topics, but there was still an Application Developer
topic. These technical sessions offer a full day of intensive training for
attendees that paid an additional fee to attend these sessions.

The reason I arrived early to the summit was to attend a
series of PASS volunteer meetings. Today I first attended the Virtual Chapter
Leader meeting where we discussed the ins and outs of managing and growing the
virtual PASS chapters. Then I attended the PASS Chapter leader meeting.
PASS is continuing to offer support and grow their offerings to help promote
the growth of local chapters. If you have not already found a local PASS chapter
or would like to form your own chapter more information can be found on the
PASS website (http://sqlpass.org). The last
volunteer meeting I attended was a short networking workshop with Don Gabor.
Don is a networking expert, and helps the volunteers to be successful in
networking at PASS. PASS is all about networking and this session was to help
guide volunteers in helping PASS attendees to they can get the most out of
their PASS experience.

The official beginning of the three-day PASS summit is the
Welcome Reception, which started at 6:30 PM. The reception started with Wayne
Snyder, PASS President, welcoming attendees. He kicked off the reception by
talking about the Friend Referral program. This program is where attendees refer
a friend to sign up for PASS. Referring a friend entered you into a drawing
sponsored by DELL. DELL Mini computers were handed out to the lucky drawing
winners.

At the welcome reception, the different virtual chapters
were busy promoting their chapters. They were there to help attendees
understand the value of each virtual chapter, and the different services each
virtual chapter had to offer. Attendees had the opportunity to sign up to be
on the mailing list for the different virtual chapters.

The highlight of the welcome reception was the always fun
Quiz Bowl. Think Jeopardy! The Quiz Bowl takes on a Jeopardy look and feel,
but the categories and answers are PASS and SQL Server related. This year Quiz
Bowl was hosted by Tim Ford (aka sqlagentman) with his able-bodied assistant
Louis Davidson (aka drsql). This year the Quiz Bowl participants were SQL
Experts. The experts were broken up into three different teams, red, white,
and blue. The red team experts were Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randall, white
team consisted of Brent Ozar and Kevin Kline, the final blue team was made up
of Joe Webb and Grant Fritchey. The red team ended up winning the 2009 Quiz
Bowl.

There was lots of networking among the participants at the
welcome reception. I met people from all over the US and a few from Europe.
If the welcome event is any indication of things to come then this year’s PASS
event will prove to be another great SQL Server event to attend. If you are
not able to make it to this year’s PASS event don’t fret. I’ll be providing
daily updates of the happenings and announcements made at the PASS Summit 2009.

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See All Articles by Columnist Gregory A. Larsen