Notes on the 2020 PASS Virtual Summit – Part 3 from Blog Posts - SQLServerCentral

Tuesday notes! Today I’m in Execution Plans in Depth by Hugo Kornelis. Notes:

• Today the presenter is using the Cadmium/EventScribe platform instead of GotoWebinar
• Started off with a lot of people not being able to hear the presenter, that was fixed quickly
• Being able to see questions and comments is nice. Not much traffic there outside of audio and one other item
• The other item was a password protected download hosted outside the meeting software. It needed 7zip to make it all work and that wasn’t obvious, so that was the 2nd batch of questions. Definitely would be nice to have that all ‘in the environment’ for things like this and maybe also get that up on the screen before things start.
• Hugo is on webcam overlaid on the deck and he’s been having to shift the position from bottom right to bottom left because it obscures some of his graphics (fair to note that he realizes this) – speakers, block off some real estate if you’re going to do it this way.
• He also mentioned struggling a bit with the mirror image problem, he’s pointing the opposite way we expect sometimes
• There is a pause button (I don’t think Goto has that?) which is really nice. I had to get up to answer the door, hit pause, came back and resumed and caught up going into the lunch break.
• Class is longer chunks today and that’s a struggle for me, I’m so used to 50-60 minutes.
• I’m watching at my desk at home and because I use a 43? 4k monitor I can also watch from a more comfortable chair to mix it up
• It’s also nice to be able to get fresh coffee and healthy snacks compared to hoping you can find either during breaks

Couple more notes from Monday:

• Itzik was great about putting up the countdown timer every time we want on break, I’d like to see everyone do that
• I did the pre-con eval last night as soon as class was done. There’s a daily raffle out of people that do the eval if you need motivation, but speakers really appreciate feedback and it’s worth trying even if you can’t state it perfectly

Related to both pre-cons, the recordings are going to be available for 72 hours. I can appreciate that’s important to speakers to protect their investment in building a day long class, but given the classes are right before the Summit I suspect few will have time or energy to go back to re-watch parts of it vs trying be to engaged in the Summit (though logically, that’s backwards given the Summit content will be online for longer than 72 hours!).

The Welcome Reception is at 8 pm and then some “networking bubbles” at 8:35. I’m going to try to be on for both of those, but I’m far less enthused than I would be if this was all in person.

Continuing to explore the Summit site, I see there are Microsoft focus groups but they are after the Summit. Maybe that’s good, doesn’t take time away from learning?

If you go to “Who’s Attending” there is an A-Z list of those who allowed their name to be published, but the search bar up top seems to be faster. That said, the “attending” page has a button for “Show Only My Chats” and that’s the only place I could find messages I sent or received to people that allow chats. I’m hoping there are notifications I just haven’t found yet, because that is not obvious. [Found them on the mobile app!]

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