My First Microsoft Pass Summit Conference

It’s Friday and the last day of my first Summit conference.  I’ve wanted to attend this conference for quite a few years, but with my focus on the Oracle side and scheduling date so close to Oracle Open World, I couldn’t justify it before joining Delphix.  When I was offered a spot to join the Delphix team and attend, I jumped at the opportunity.  Look at this booth and these impressively talented Delphix employees-  how could you resist??

Pass Summit 2016

The Summit event has around 5000 attendees and is held in Seattle each year around the last week of October.  Its held in the Washington Convention Center which is a great venue for a conference.  I’d attended KSCOPE here in 2014 and loved it, so was looking forward to enjoying this great location once more.

As I’m just re-engaging the MSSQL side of my brain, I have some catching up to do and there was no place better to do it than at Summit.  I was able to dig in deep and attend a few sessions around booth duty and meeting folks I’ve rarely had opportunities outside of Twitter to interact with before this event.

Brent Ozar came by the Delphix booth to say “Hi” and absolutely made my day!

Opportunities to Learn

There is always that challenge of learning about what you need to know and what you want to know-  this event was no different.  I had a list of features and products that I really need to come up to speed on, but with cool technology like Polybase, Analytics with R and performance talks, it could be a bit distracting from my main purpose here.  I’ve always been a performance freak and I still find it pulling me from the database knowledge that is important to day-to-day tasks.  I know this is why I find such value in Delphix-  It frees the DBA from spending any extra time on tasks that I find more mundane so we can spend it on more interesting and challenging areas of database technology.

What I did learn was that many of the companies that are realizing the importance of virtualization for on-premise and in the cloud, aren’t coming close to Delphix in features of ensuring they have the basics down first.  You can’t just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk, too.  I’m proud of Delphix and what we’ve accomplished-  that we don’t say we can do something we can’t and continue on the path to be Azure compliant for 2017.  Azure was everywhere this year at Summit and will continue to be a major push for Microsoft.

Pass Women in Technology Power-  ACTIVATE!

Another important recognition at Summit was the percentage of women attendees, the women in technology program at Summit, along with the support of the everyone at Summit of the WIT program.

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The WIT luncheon and happy hour was on Thursday.  In support of this day, over 100 men showed up in kilts.  It may seem like a small gesture, but it shows in how the men and women interact at this conference and the contribution of everyone at the event.  There is a lot more collaboration and the community is on average, much more interactive and involved than I’ve experienced at any Oracle event.  It’s not to say that Oracle is doing it wrong, it’s just to say that the SQL Server community is much farther ahead.  They refer to their SQL Family and they take it seriously in a good way.

PassTV

Due to all of this, I was given the opportunity of a PassTV interview, met a number of incredible experts in the MSSQL community that I’ve only previously known on social media and appreciate being embraced.

I want to thank my great cohorts from Delphix who manned the booth with me at Summit.  We had incredible crowds that kept us so busy answering questions, doing demos and talking about how virtualized databases can increase productivity and revenue.  Sacha, Venkat, Jonathan, Dante and Jenny and Richie- you all ROCKED!

Thanks to everyone for making my first SQL Pass Summit conference AWESOME!!