Notes on the 2020 PASS Virtual Summit – Part 4 from Blog Posts - SQLServerCentral

Last night (Tuesday) was the main reception and then “networking bubbles”. The reception consisted of DJ Leanne playing assorted music (and seeming to have a good time doing so) with a chat window for attendees and a bartender/mixer (mixologist?) making a few variations of a SQL Sipper .Reading that, it probably feels underwhelming and I admit that was my first impression too, but then the chat window just started scrolling. Someone called it ‘speed Twitter’ and that’s close to it, people saying “hi” and not much in the way of long conversations, but for me (not a Summit first timer) it somehow absolutely captured what’s it like in-person to walk into a room with music and a hundred or more people you know.

Part two were the networking bubbles, maybe 20 different music themed video chat rooms. I tried a couple, some had the music and some didn’t, and said hello to a few people. Not a great browsing experience, you had to exit a room, click on whichever one you wanted to go to next, then launch the browser again. I didn’t see a fast way to just go from room to room to room. It also seems like most rooms had 3 or 4 people, was hard to find out where (or if) the crowd was. Not terrible, but not quite compelling either, for me at least.

Today was more like a usual Summit day, attending sessions and getting interrupted for work stuff a couple times. It was nice to be able to pause a session (even the live ones). The recordings of live sessions are not available the same day, there are some from today I would have liked to watch tonight.

The keynote was at lunchtime and went fairly well. Rohan talked about being in a studio versus on stage and in what was a nice touch, showed the studio with the cameras and the teleprompter. The rest was kind of the standard keynote, maybe most interesting was that sometime in the future query store will gain the ability to add query hints.

Not much exploring today. It does seem like the phone app is slightly different in a few places, so need to look at that more.

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