PASS Summit 2009 Recap

The PASS Community Summit was an excellent experience for me - and I hope it also was for anyone else who was fortunate enough to attend this year.  Rushabh Mehta mentioned during his keynote on Wednesday that attendance this year was down only 9% - whereas conference attendance in general was down over 30% this year.  That certainly is proof of the value that I experienced - the PASS Summit is definitely the conference of the year for great SQL Server content.
Sessions
Most of the high points for me were actually outside of the excellent sessions - but I'll start with them.  There were way too many sessions for a single person, of course - I didn't get to see all of the ones I wanted to.  On top of that, I volunteered some time which took away from that traditional brain-expanding pursuit.  However, of those that I did get to attend, two stick out from the excellent pack as exceptional.
Paul Randal's session on transaction logs (and crash recovery) was simply superb - although I'm sure it's "old hat" to those of you who are real DBAs.  (I am most certainly NOT.)  It described the complete life and purpose of a transaction log in fine detail while remaining completely clear and focused.  In any technical topic, one of the difficulties is the spiderweb of relationships that need to be explained in a linear fashion - and Paul did that without problem.
Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari's presentation was also top-notch.  Two Italians playing "good cop"/"bad cop" with Inmon vs. Kimball data warehousing methodologies in "spaghetti English" was simply gut-busting.  I don't know if they intended to be that funny - but they definitely were.  On top of a great overview of both of those architectures, the SQBI.EU pair presented their "hybrid" approach that certainly appears to blend the better parts of both into a very practical industrial-strength, quick-to-delivery methodology.  I recommend that you investigate their ideas and download their whitepaper - I definitely will.
MVP Birds of a Feather Lunch
Many thanks to Mike Walsh for coordinating this event, and the efforts of many PASS volunteers for pulling it all together.  I had a great time, and was very pleasantly surprised that there was more than one person (me) wanting to talk about scripting and custom objects in Integration Services.  I know I learned some things - and got other points reinforced.  I will definitely take advantage of that opportunity, should it happen again.
Meeting Other SQL Addicts
I'm talking mostly about the other Twitter SQL geeks - but there were plenty of non-twits I got to meet as well.
Meeting up with Joy Mundy
I'm a fan of the Kimball group for many reasons - Ralph is a visionary in data warehousing, and he's got a great team of teachers and practitioners assembled there.  I first met Joy at a Kimball course, and I'd last seen her at the MS BI conference in 2008, where I'm sure I was a little overbearing - I just had to give her a demo of the Kimball SCD component I made to address what I saw as the problems in the SCD Wizard.  She certainly seemed receptive and took it all in - but I didn't happen to hear from her after that.  My obnoxious self couldn't not try again this year - so I snuck in to the end of her session and said hi.  This is what I recall from the conversation:
Me: "Hi Joy, I'm Todd McDermid - we met last year at the MS BI conference."
Joy: "Yes, I remember.  You know that part of our course where we spend half a day talking about how to do slowly changing dimensions?  We've cut that out now, and just tell them to use your component."
Wow.