SQL PASS Summit 2014 – Day 3 & Summary

Here we are, the final day of the conference and my time in Seattle. I am writing this just before boarding the plane home. The sun finally revealed itself in the morning! Great weather, shame we were inside. No Keynote but instead there were two morning sessions before lunch. I choose to go to a talk on the key issues with Power BI. These were actually to do with Licensing and the scheduled data refresh. Quite interesting but it demonstrated that there is some ironing out to do with Power BI.

Second session covered the details of different types of SQL Joins – Nested Loops, Merge, and Hash. A talk that was paced nicely and a refresher that was at a level good for beginners too.

Final session of the conference for me was some advanced SSRS reporting. It was completely demo driven and there were a few little techniques I hadn’t employed before in there which made it worth seeing. Brian Larson delivered solid examples and his experience with the technology shows. SSRS is definitely showing its age now, however. Still no mention of any future updates…

After this we had to leave early in order to grab an evening flight back which was a shame as there was another Azure Machine Learning session that I would have really liked to attend.

Overall I’ve enjoyed my first time at PASS Summit immensely. It has been great to meet and mingle with new people.

On the downside, there seemed to be quite a mix in terms of what the schedule said the level was for sessions and what I felt that the session turned out to be once attending.

I certainly hope to attend next year! It has been a great experience and I hope to see more of Seattle, perhaps adventuring south, next time (It was announced the Seattle would host PASS again next year, albeit a little earlier in October). We did get to see a lot of it, arriving a week early, even driving up to Vancouver and back down. The scenery in the North Cascades is fantastic! We also got to sample plenty of the food. I’m sure I’ve put on a ton of weight as a result.

Anyway, back to the UK and back to the job. I look forward to trying out Azure ML once I get back!