TechEd has its appeal, but of all of the conferences I attend, I must admit that I love the PASS Summit most. I look forward to it every year. The event is physically and mentally exhausting, but I always come home feeling refreshed and inspired. I really enjoy meeting people who use the products I work on, hearing about their issues, and trying to help them out as much as I can.

My schedule this year is even more hectic than previous years, with three breakout sessions and a pre-con event. I’m co-presenting each of my sessions with talented Microsoft folks, and have been busy working on putting the finishing touches on my talks to ensure my audience is entertained (they might even learn something, too).

SSIS Design Patterns [BIA-299-P]

This is the SSIS pre-con event that I previously posted about. The day will be split between the five authors of the SSIS Design Patterns book that came out last month.

In this full-day session, the "SSIS Design Patterns" (Apress, 2012) author team – Matt Masson, Tim Mitchell, Jessica M. Moss, Michelle Ufford, and Andy Leonard – will describe and demonstrate patterns for package execution, package logging, loading flat file and XML sources, loading the cloud, dynamic package generation, SSIS Frameworks, data warehouse ETL, and data flow performance.

Data in the Sky: Efficient On-Premise to Cloud Data Transfer [CLD-306-M]

Co-presenting with Wee Hyong Tok, a PM from the SSIS team. If you’ve seen any of my SSIS presentations in the past, you’ve probably seen Wee Hyong’s material before – I love stealing his slides as my own.

Thinking about moving some of your operations to Azure? Have multiple remote sites, and want to use the cloud to centralize and share data between them?? Just like hearing talks about data transfer performance?! Have we got the session for you!
We’ll cover some common user scenarios and describe when and how to use the latest Microsoft data transfer technologies, including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Data Sync (a capability of SQL Database), and more.

Enterprise Information Management: Bringing Together SSIS, DQS, and MDS [BIA-316-M]

Matthew Roche and I will be presenting a follow-up to our TechEd presentation with some new and interesting integration scenarios.

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) – an industry term for managing your data for data integration, quality, and governance – is an important part of the SQL Server 2012 release. This session revolves around a demo that brings together the EIM functionality in SQL Server 2012 and tells the "Credible, Consistent Data" story. You will see how SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Data Quality Services (DQS), Master Data Services (MDS), and other Microsoft technologies work together to provide a comprehensive EIM solution.

BI Power Hour [BIA-206-M]

Back by popular demand – I actually had a reviewer give me a bad score in my PASS session last year because we didn’t have a BI Power Hour session! My fault for trying to make the audience laugh by showing them my demos from TechEd… We have a new lineup of speakers for PASS, as well as some old favorites. This one will be great – of all of the presentations I do in a year, this is the one I enjoy most!

The legacy continues. The Microsoft Business Intelligence team is excited to once again present the BI Power Hour. In this entertaining session, we dazzle you with new demonstrations that expose the lighter side of BI while highlighting the flexibility and power of the Microsoft BI Platform. If you’ve never been to a Power Hour session, you don’t know what you’ve been missing. We promise you’ll walk away impressed – and with a smile on your face.