Notes FROM PASS 2012

At this past PASS Summit in Seattle I got a chance to sit down with PASS President Bill Graziano and Executive Vice President of Finance Douglas McDowell to talk about this year’s PASS Summit and the future directions for the PASS organization. Bill said that this year’s PASS Summit was the best attended Summit ever with 3,894 delegates -- up 13% from last year. The PASS organization itself now has over 127,000 members and 259 chapters. In the upcoming year the PASS organization is making changes that will help them expand their global presence. Bill mentioned that 25% of the current SQL Saturdays are already outside of the US and that changes are being made internally to help PASS better serve the global community.  To facilitate this global growth PASS is moving toward reserving spots on the board for members coming from outside of the US and Canada plus they are looking to grow their EMEA and virtual chapters. Bill estimated that in the last year PASS provided 540,000 SQL Server training hours and that they were looking to expand that in the upcoming year.

Douglas told me that one of the biggest events of this coming year will be the new PASS Business Analytics Conference. The upcoming PASS Business Analytics Conference will be held from April 10th - 12th at the Sheraton Towers in Chicago. While the PASS Summit is geared toward DBAs and database professionals the upcoming PASS Business Analytics Conference is targeted toward business analysts, data scientists, line-of-business managers and IT Pros. The conference will feature over 60 business and technical sessions plus four optional preconference workshops. You can find out more about the PASS Business Analytics Conference at: http://www.passbaconference.com/.

Bill also confirmed that the the next PASS Summit in 2013 will move from Seattle to the Charlotte Convention Center. The dates for the next PASS Summit are Oct 15-18 and there will be two days of preconference sessions. Early registration is now open and the early bird rate is $1095 for the 3 day Summit. You can find out more about next year’s PASS conference at:: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2013/.