This is a followup post of My PASS Summit 2011 Recap – 1, (I know it’s been few weeks that I posted that blog post) where I wrote about the first 2 days of Pre-conferences of PASS Summit 2011. In this blog I will recap the rest of my trip. (really I don’t want to go for a 3rd part in this series, it might well be Jan 2012 if it goes into the 3rd part…).
On Wednesday Oct 12th, for the first time I had the pleasure of attending the PASS Summit keynote in person, I followed PASS keynotes online in the past couple of years. First it was Rushabh Mehta, PASS President’s brief welcome speech and then it was Ted Kummert, Senior VP, Business Platform Division, Microsoft Corp. Ted announced the official name of the next SQL Server Release as SQL Server 2012 and it would be released in the first half of the year 2012. The following were some of the pictures I took during Keynote on Day1.
PASS President – Rushabh Mehta.
Ted Kummert – Senior VP, Business Platform Division, Microsoft Corp
That day, I attended the sessions “Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer” by Benjamin Nevarez, “SQL 2008 Query Statistics” by Andrew Kelly and “What’s New in Microsoft SQL Server Code Named “Denali” – Engine and Tools” by Aaron Bertrand. The sessions were all a good.
On day 2 of PASS Summit, after the Keynote, I attended “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting” by Klaus Aschenbrenner. That day after lunch, I knew there was a book signing by all the authors of the book SQL Server Deep Dives – 2. Since I owned the Volume 1 of the book, I knew what to expect from this book, so I bought the book and was there for the book signing and got my copy signed by the authors of the chapters. Post lunch, I attended 2 more sessions “SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple” by Joe Webb and “What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache” by Kalen Delaney. Later that day, I went to Microsoft Corporate Head Quarters and visited Visitor Center and Microsoft Official Store. These are some of the snaps taken during that visit.
Microsoft Company Store
Visitor Center at Microsoft Corporate Headquarters at Redmond, WA
One of those pics at Visitor Center at Microsoft Redmond Office.
On the final day of the Summit, I attended the Keynote by David DeWitt – Technical Fellow, Data and Storage Platform Division, Microsoft Corp. These are some of the pics I managed to click during the Keynote. 
In the second half of the day, I attended 2 sessions “Isolated Disasters in VLDBs” by Kimberly Tripp and “SQL Server Memory Management” by Thomas LaRock.
During Breakfast, Lunch and refreshments on all of the Summit days, I had the opportunity to meet fellow DBAs, SQL Server users in different designations. I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Graziano, Brent Ozar, Steve Jones and many more MVPs.
The next day, Saturday I took a 4 hour tour of the Seattle city conducted by Show me Seattle. Then on Sunday, I had my return flight to Baltimore and an hour drive brought me back to home.
— Bru Medishetty