The PASS Data Community Summit 2023 happens the week of November 12 in Seattle. WA. It will be my first time back in Washington state since 2019. Skipping over the years that the Summit didn’t meet in person (I missed last year’s in-person Summit with a broken foot), this year I am ready and raring to go back to the Washington State Convention Center like nothing has changed.

Of course, so much has changed since I was last in Seattle for the in-person event because even the convention center has changed names. It is now the Seattle Convention Center, and it is taking place in Arch? Sure it sounds weird if you went to the WSCC lots of times before, but if you check out the pictures here, it will all seem like the PASS home we all came to love.

When it comes down to it, there are two primary reasons that the Summit is exciting for me. The people and the sessions. Quantifying who those people are would take more pages (and time) than I can fit in to an Editorial. For me, there will be thousands of people there that can be classified into three groups:

• People I have known for 10-30 years
• People I have known for less than 10 years
• People who I haven’t met yet but if I do, I will hopefully meet them again.

Then there are the sessions. I did not list any specific people that I want to see because that answer is basically “all of them.” Sessions are different. While I am the editor of Simple-Talk, when I write about technical stuff, I write about SQL. Primarily SQL Server’s version of SQL.

So, when I first pulled up the list of sessions to see which ones I wanted to attend based on title alone (I only had a spreadsheet at the time, you have the entire catalog to search now!), what do you know… these are people I mostly know. Not all of them, some are names I had never even heard of. So here is the list (in no specific order):

Erland Sommarskog
Analysing and Resolving Deadlocks

Who doesn’t like a session on concurrency and how to make it better?

Itzik Ben-Gan
What’s Wrong with my T-SQL Code?

You had me at T-SQL

Deborah Melkin
Conquering the Monster Proc – How to Combat Legacy Code

While I am certainly glad that this is no longer my day job, working with weird, screwed up code typically makes for an interesting session!

Jeff Iannucci
Making the Most of Query Store in the Real World

One of the skills I never quite acquired as a practicing DBA/programmer was using Query Store. I mostly was a programmer and built ETL in the years after it was built. From all I have used it though, it is very useful.

Lee Coates
Comparing Microsoft SQL Server to Open Source DB Systems

This one caught my eye as something that might be useful in my “normal” job as a technical writer/editor for relational databases. It is clear there are a lot of differences, but even more similarities.

Tiffany Garden
DBA Past, Present, and Future

I am always interest to see what people think the past present looks like, and how that future is affected by their ideas. (I am also not so secretly hoping the rather weird song by the Shangri Las will come up as well.)

James Serra
Enhancing your Career: Building your Personal Brand

Finally, a wee bit of professional development. It is part of my job (which I still can’t get over, honestly), and any help I can get the better.

So, these are my first picks, what about you? Put your picks in the comments and I will post them to a later editorial about how much we all are getting chuffed for PASS!