Today was my big, somewhat stressful day at the PASS summit in Seattle. I gave two, 75-minute Community session  presentations, one on SQL Server 2008 Full Text Search at 10:15AM, and the other on DMV queries at 1:30PM. In between, I hosted a Birds of a Feather table at lunch on Database mirroring. This basically meant that I was “on stage” for about five hours straight.

I have done many presentations for local user’s groups, and smaller regional events in the Denver area, but PASS was my first big, national event, so naturally I was a little nervous. There are lots of things that could go wrong (at least in your own mind). Will your laptop fail? Will your demo’s crash? Will you suddenly become tongue-tied?

As it turned out, all three events went quite well. I had about 30 people in the Full Text Search presentation (which was lower than I expected) but I got a lot of good questions, and people seemed to appreciate the demo’s. The BofF lunch was very well attended, with lots of of good questions and discussions about database mirroring and other HA and DR strategies. Luckily, I had Sunil Agarwal, who is a Program Manager in the SQL Server Storage Engine Group at Microsoft, sitting next to me to field some of the questions, and add some extra credibility to my efforts. 

Finally, I had about 250 people show up for my Dr. DMV presentation, with lots of questions during and after the talk. I got a lot of very positive feedback from attendees after the talk, which was very gratifying. When I was done with all of this, I felt like I remember feeling after finishing the last final for the quarter in college! Now, I can relax, and enjoy PASS for the rest of the week…