PASS Data Community Summit 2025 Recap

2026-01-26 (Last Modified: 2026-01-25)

Page content

This is long overdue but life and distractions happened. It’s been a little over two months since I returned home from PASS Summit 2025.

Monday

Due to the US federal government shutdown, I was encouraged to change my flights to Seattle from Tuesday to Monday. My airport wasn’t directly affected by the FAA fight cutbacks at that point, but both my connecting airport (O’Hare) and destination (Sea-Tac) were, so I erred on the side of caution and moved my departure up by a day. Travel was a bit stressful due to delays in getting off the ground in Rochester and parked at a gate in Chicago, but it all worked out.

After checking into the hotel, freshening up, and taking a bit of time to decompress from travel I walked over to the convention center to pick up my badge. I grabbed some lunch from Dough Zone across the street and then hung out in the lobby of to see who’d come by. By the time the day’s pre-cons let out, I’d met up with 2 old friends and met two new ones!

From there, some of us found our way to a little restaurant near Pike Place Market called Conversation which was surprisingly quiet. Good food, good discussions.

Tuesday

Since Tuesday was my original travel day, I had lots of time available and didn’t see any pre-cons that I wanted to sign up for at the last moment. I opted to spend the morning touring a bit of Seattle on foot while doing some geocaching. My route took me down to Pike Place Market, past the Gum Wall, to the Seattle Great Wheel, back up through the market to find some food, then off to the Space Needle. From there I headed to the REI flagship store, then back to the hotel. Approximate map. All told, I covered about 5 1/2 miles in 3 hours.

After a brief rest, I ran through both of my presentations and looked for more improvements I could make to them. Then it was on to the first official event of Summit - the Networking Event! This is always a great opportunity to meet folks who are new to Summit and share our experience in making the most of the event. Not to mention getting that first “check-in” with folks we haven’t found yet.

Wednesday

As is tradition, Wednesday started with SQLRun/Walk. We had a small group this year for both, but attendance for the walk was up 33% from last year!

Most likely due to Microsoft Ignite being the same week as Summit, we didn’t have the usual Microsoft keynote on Wednesday. Instead, Redgate delivered theirs, The Data Professional of the Future.

I attended 3 great sessions on Wednesday including two speakers I’ve never seen in-person previously, and got some new things to check out once I get some systems upgraded. I also made sure to attend Power Hour, snagged some swag, and had a good time there.

For the first time in my Summit attendance, I skipped Games Night. I wanted to go but decided that since I had two talks to give on Thursday, I needed a quieter night.

Thursday

Thursday was The Big Day, at least for me. I only attended one morning session after Microsoft’s keynote which was Andy Yun’s (blog | bsky) Mitigating Your Data Bloat with Partitioning & Data Virtualization. Between this and Deborah Melkin’s (blog | bsky) Optimized Locking: Improving SQL Server Transaction Concurrency (which I saw at PASS Summit on Tour), I really need to get my hands on SQL Server 2025.

I was underwhelmed by Microsoft’s keynote. SQL Server 2025 didn’t get much attention at Ignite, so I was hoping they’d make a big splash here. Instead, I found it pretty subdued. Perhaps my expectations weren’t set appropriately; I thought we’d be seeing something that we hadn’t yet seen from other Microsoft presentations and the preview releases, but that didn’t happen.

Hobby Huddle

After lunch, I got to speak to a small group in the Community Zone about my experience as a mentor for our local FIRST Robotics Competition team. I probably rethought, rebuilt, or reorganized this short talk ten times. It’s really hard to tell this story in only 10 minutes and I ended up taking close to fifteen.

Big Show

I took the afternoon off from sessions to get myself ready for going on stage at 4:15. First up was some time in the speaker lounge for another run through my demo code. Unexpectedly, there was a problem in my code due to a change I introduced on Tuesday but I was able to correct it. From there, I walked around the convention center a bit, plugged in some music, and found a quite place to sit by the giant windows to settle my mind down.

Once into my room, I got set up on stage and chatted a bit with folks as they filtered in. There were a few friends in the crowd, spread out around the room. We decided it would be distributed high-availability heckling (dHAH). As 4:15 arrived, I snapped a selfie to commemorate the moment and kicked things off.

Pre-presentation selfie at PASS Summit 2025

Overall, the session went well. All my demos went to plan, and I finished up a little earlier than I’d anticipated, mostly owing to getting very few questions along the way. Afterwards, I had a few people come up to the podium to ask a few questions and we stayed there for about 15 minutes chatting.

On stage at PASS Summit 2025. Photo by Mikey Bronowski

Looking back on it, I have very little memory the time I was up on stage speaking. It’s not a complete gap in my memory, I just don’t recall the details of that hour - more that it happened, not exactly what happened.

When I got the notification that I’d been selected for Summit, I was thrilled. Then nervous. I thought back to Drew Furgiuele’s (blog | bsky)post-Summit reflections and worried that I’d have the same feelings. Is this the top? Is there nothing more to chase after? Talking to people over the course of the week, seeing the evolution of Summit and my own trajectory, I’m not as worried about it as I was before Summit. There are so many ways for me to contribute to the community. Continuing to do presentations for user groups and SQL Saturdays, and trying to branch out on what I talk about that will have a wider audience.

Friday

Friday is always a quieter, more relaxed day at Summit. I caught two sessions on Friday, then spent the second half of the afternoon in the Community Zone, catching up with folks I hadn’t had a chance to talk to yet that week. As people filtered out, a few of us started working out dinner plans and found ourselves at Radiator Whiskey, then met up with some other folks at Yard House. I had an early flight on Saturday, so I asked folks to make sure I was out by 10 PM. We only missed that target by 30 minutes, which may be a record.

After-Hours

There were relatively few after-hours events compared to years past. Informal gatherings were smaller and more scattered as well. Because the Sheraton wasn’t one of the main hotels for this year’s event, their bar was not the center of evening gatherings as we’ve gotten used to, and we struggled to find a good replacement. We gravitated toward Regency Hyatt, but discovered that the upstairs bar closed at 10. The downstairs one wasn’t set up well for conversations in comfortable seating. Grand Hyatt’s lobby bar was small, but we made it work for up to about a dozen people on a couple nights. Fortified hosted a nice Happy Hour on Thursday at Yard House.

Photos

Shortly before Summit, I accidentally brought back the idea of #sqlselfie and was challenged to a selfie showdown by Deborah. She defeated me. Easily. Every year, I say I’m going to take more photos, especially selfies, and every year I only do marginally better. Photo collections for 2025:

Future of Summit

I find myself worrying about the future of this event. Attendance has been declining since the return from COVID (truth be told, this started before COVID), and the number of big exhibitors/sponsors seems to be on the decline as well. Summit 2026 will only be one day of pre-cons and two days of sessions, as opposed to two and three, respectively. This represents the first format change since I’ve been attending Summit, excluding the two years it was online. Shortening the event makes the trip tougher for a lot of people; if you’re not attending a pre-con, it could be as short as two nights (assuming a redeye home). If you can work in SQL Saturday Oregon/SW Washington, that makes the flights and jet lag more manageable. In addition to that, visiting the US from abroad is becoming less appealing because…reasons.

But we’re also starting to see more competition from other large events. Microsoft Ignite has been scheduled the same week as Summit multiple times since COVID, and this year Live!360 ran the same week as well. Looking into next year, Microsoft announced in early November that they were adding a SQL Server-specific event in conjunction with March’s FabCon, called SQLCon and trying to attract many of the same speakers we see at ~~SQL Saturday~~ Day of Data, Data Saturdays, and Summit. Redgate’s recent announcement of taking on a new majority shareholder also makes me concerned for the future of this and other expensive community-focused events hosted by the company. Will there be changes made to how decisions about these events are made? Will they be seen as viable and valuable going forward? That remains to be seen.

Final Thoughts

Overall - another successful year at PASS Summit. Reconnecting with folks, finally getting on stage, and getting some new knowledge to apply at work is hitting the trifecta for me. There were a number of folks I was hoping to see who weren’t able to make it this year, which is disappointing, but that just means I’ll have to reconnect elsewhere. There are also quite a few people who were in attendance who I didn’t spend enough time speaking with. This is something I need to work on more, but it’s hard to strike a balance between that and attending sessions for my employer.

The Call for Speakers will be opening in a couple months, and I need to get moving on ideas and abstracts; it’d be great to speak two years in a row!