Today I attended the first day of the European PASS Conference 2010 in Neuss, Germany. People from all over the world (even from South Africa!) were gathered to attend the 21 sessions today. Tomorrow 25 more sessions will follow.
Volcano
The Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) caused a few speakers to stay at home due to the closed airspace in Europe, but they presented their sessions anyway via LiveMeeting. For example Paul Turley presented two sessions from his home in the US; for him it was the middle of the night!
Keynote
In his keynote Donald Farmer addressed the 'information platform' with the basic question 'What is information?' and 'What is a platform?'. With many examples from Microsoft customers, a note on the SQL Server 2008 R2 feature Parallel Data Warehouse and a short demo with the PowerPivot add-in for Excel 2010, he showed that the Microsoft BI Platform is the way to go.
Sessions
I attended the sessions on SSRS by Paul Turley, code on CodePlex by Markus Raats, Filestream by Klaus Aschenbrenner, Self-Service Reporting Strategy by Paul Turley and indexing by Bodo Danitz.
It is too much to elaborate on now, but I enjoyed every session. Thank you all.
Dinner
The traditional dinner in 'Zum Schiffchen' in Düsseldorf was fun as always; it is the third year in a row that I visit this PASS Conference and it is also the third year that this evening takes place in 'Zum Schiffchen'.
During the day we were encouraged to speak to as many sponsors as possible and they were giving away drinking vouchers; I happened to collect to 18 of them and therefor I had a free dinner, including desert, three beers for me, and all beers for JP and one for Volker (he had enough vouchers to cover his other beers).
Day 2
Tomorrow will be a long day, starting at 8.30 and finishing at 17.00 hours. I'll write more then.
posted @ Thursday, April 22, 2010 11:58 PM