The best thing about the PASS summit for me is...

This past week I attended the PASS Summit 2016. I went there with 6 co-workers and I had a terrific time. This time the weather wasn't that bad, when I left Princeton, NJ, it looked like it was going to rain for 5 days straight. It was actually sunny on a couple of occasions  :-)

One thing I really liked were the chalk talk sessions they had with the program managers of SQL Server and Azure SQL DB. People attending these sessions could ask questions and the team then answered these questions. There were also some cool announcements, I documented those here: Some cool SQL Server announcements SQL Graph, Adaptive Query Plan, CTP1 of SQL vNext, SQL Injection detection

Another thing I really liked, and this is not specific to this PASS summit, is that I got to see some of the people I befriended over the years. I chatted and hung out with some of them.

I liked all the sessions I attended, the one negative feedback I have is that there were a couple of sessions at the same time, so I had to pick one of them. This is not such a big deal because once the sessions are made available online, I will just watch the ones I really wanted to attend first.


So now back to the title of this post..... what was the best thing about this PASS summit for me? It is the fact that going to this summit reignited my love for SQL Server, and the passion for learning about SQL Server. I have laid low for the last couple of years but now I feel like a spark has been lit again,  I have so much to learn.

One of the best ways for me to learn is to blog about it. So here is what I am thinking I will do:

For December I will do a SQL advent series, this series will be about windowing functions. Everyone knows about the basic ones that were introduced in 2005, but very few people are using the stuff introduced later.

After that I will do a  series about r and SQL Server, it will take me around 3 months,  and I will probably do two posts per week.

After the r series, I want to do a series about the QueryStore.

I will also do a series about new stuff in SQL Server 2016, but that will be in between all the other posts. Whenever someone asked during a session how many people were already on SQL Server 2016, very few hands went up, this is the reason, I want to blog about this as well.


For all these series of posts, I plan to have a repo on github with a yet to be determined name. Then I will have all the SQL code for all the series organized there


So that is my plan


P.S.

If you want to read about my time at SQL Pass 2016, read these posts


SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 2
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 3
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 4
SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 5


You might be thinking, where is day 1?  The day 1 posts is mostly about Seattle, if you are interested in that one, here it is:  SQL Pass Summit 2016... day 1.... just looking around