I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at and attending the PASS Summit in Seattle this year.  CapTech Consulting sponsored my trip to participate in the event, where I presented on two topics: creating a healthcare payer data model and administering SQL Server Reporting Services.

The PASS Summit is an annual conference put on by the Professional Association for SQL Server.  The conference brings together a mix of community speakers, Microsoft employees, and many eager-to-learn attendees.  Located at the Seattle Convention Center, there were two days of pre-conference sessions and three days of community and spotlight sessions.  The 2011 Summit drew a record 5000 registrations.

The summit was even more exciting than usual this year due to many announcements made by both Microsoft and PASS.  Some of the business intelligence highlights are listed here:

The second day of the 2011 Teradata Partners Conference started with Teradata business leaders talking about how the company is growing and investing . Mike Koehler, Teradata's CEO, described the new line of products, in particular ClaraView, Aprimo and Asterdata. Mike showed some quick statistics on the explosion in digital data from mobile, social, and sensor. The trends which  really drove his point were the increase in the Teradata’s Peta Byte Club and the 2011 IDC Digital Universe Study (sponsored by EMC) showing that in 2011 1.8 ZettaBytes (1.8 Trillion GigaBytes) of information will be created and replicated.

This was closely followed by Steven Levitt's session. The author of popular books "Freakonomics" and "Superfreakonomics," described his moments of truth in learning calculus and other interesting facts .