Welcome to the dog days of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. It is hot, so if you are like me you, are preparing for the Fall, with cooler weather and the start of the holiday season. While the Great Pumpkin may leave you sitting in a pumpkin patch alone again this year, there is one Fall classic that always comes through: the PASS Data Community Summit 2024 which starts the week after Halloween and goes from November 4-8.

I have been going to the PASS Summit for many years, and it was wonderful getting back to Seattle last year for the final year in the Seattle Convention Center: Arch areas of the conference center. This year the conference has moved to the more appropriately named, for our purposes at least: Seattle Convention Center: Summit. It is going to be a change after so many times to the previous location, but it is also going to be amazing as this is a  state of the art venue that has only been around for a few years!

The main reason to go to the PASS Summit

Nostalgia aside (and there is always plenty), we don’t go to the PASS Summit for the city or the building, we go for the people and what those people are teaching us. As such I have again chosen a few sessions I plan to try to attend:

---

Everything You Know About Isolation Levels Is Wrong (Erik Darling)

I haven’t seen Erik speak in person, and I love learning and teaching about Isolation Levels. And since I now know that everything I know is wrong, I might as well find out what I have wrong.

Inside the SQL Server Transaction Log (Bob Ward)

First off, Bob is a great speaker and pretty entertaining even if I didn’t care about the topic. As an writer and editor, I rarely get to exercise anything close to expert level skills, but an expert level refresher on how the Transaction Log works in SQL Server is going to be awesome.

Fabric Architecture: Data Warehouse or Lakehouse, Which is the Right Choice? (Ginger Grant)

I have sat in on a Ginger Grant precon in the past, so I know her skills are there, and we have quite a bit of Fabric content on Simple Talk, so it would be good to attend a pretty beginner session or two on the subject this year.

Optimizing SQL Server and PostgreSQL for Power BI (Eugene Meidinger)

I want to go to this for a few reasons, not the least of which to see Eugene, who I have been trying to get for Simple Talk for a while. Kidding aside, a nice overview of optimizing SQL Server and PostgreSQL, along with some PowerBI will be awesome.

Know the Less Known about PostgreSQL (Devrim Gündüz)

I hadn’t previously heard of Devrim before now, as I am not really embedded in the PostgreSQL community quite yet, but I wanted to note a PostgreSQL session and this one really popped when I saw it. The list of terms he mentions are ones I want to know more about, so go I will try.

I say “try” because I assume I will be equally as successful attending my picked-out sessions as most years. Honestly, the PASS Summit is as much about networking and making connections as sessions for me. After 25 years there are familiar faces everywhere, and far more new faces to meet as well. There have been a few years where I only made it my own session and spent the rest of the conference in the halls saying “hello”, “how are you”, and “I haven’t seen you in at least a year” all day. (Don’t tell my old boss, but those were some really great years!)

One more thing that might alter my schedule

There are still some sessions that will be announced later. Vendor sessions are forthcoming, including some from Redgate. Also, (announcing this here for the first time in forever), we are planning a Simple Talk presence during the PASS Summit. Several sessions and a few surprises yet to be announced.

Hint: Surprises will be first announced in the in the Simple Talk newsletter. If you aren’t already subscribed, this would be a great time to do so you can be the first to know about surprises at the PASS Summit, and maybe more in the future too.

All that is left is to sign up and hang on through the heat (or cold if you are on the other side of the globe!) So, as you are sitting in front of the A/C, fan, or perhaps a bed you made of ice cubes trying to keep cool, Fall will be here before you know it. As hard as that is to fathom as I am writing this blog.