24 Hours of PASS scheduling

I have a new appreciation for Tom LaRock (@sqlrockstar), who is doing a tremendous job leading the organising committee for the 24 Hours of PASS event (Twitter: #24hop).

We’ve just been going through the list of speakers and their preferences for time slots, and hopefully we’ve kept everyone fairly happy.

All the submitted sessions (59 of them) were put up for a vote, and over a thousand of you picking your favourites. The top 28 sessions as voted were all included (24 sessions plus 4 reserves), and duplicates (when a single presenter had two sessions in the top 28) were swapped out for others. For example, both sessions submitted by Cindy Gross were in the top 28. These swaps were chosen by the committee to get a good balance of topics.

Amazingly, some big names missed out, and even the top ten included some surprises. T-SQL, Indexes and Reporting featured well in the top ten, and in the end, the mix between BI, Dev and DBA ended up quite nicely too.

The ten most voted-for sessions were (in order):

Jennifer McCown – T-SQL Code Sins: The Worst Things We Do to Code and Why
Michelle Ufford – Index Internals for Mere Mortals
Audrey Hammonds – T-SQL Awesomeness: 3 Ways to Write Cool SQL
Cindy Gross – SQL Server Performance Tools
Jes Borland – Reporting Services 201: the Next Level
Isabel de la Barra – SQL Server Performance
Karen Lopez – Five Physical Database Design Blunders and How to Avoid Them
Julie Smith – Cool Tricks to Pull From Your SSIS Hat
Kim Tessereau – Indexes and Execution Plans
Jen Stirrup – Dashboards Design and Practice using SSRS

I think you’ll all agree this is shaping up to be an excellent event.