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Introducing your Summit 2023 Pre-Con & Learning Pathway speakers

May 18, 2023

The first speakers in the lineup for PASS Data Community Summit 2023 have been announced! Check out the speakers, and full details of the Pre-Cons and Learning Pathways. Read on for more info and why some of our speakers are particularly excited for what’s in store this year.

What’s a Pre-Con? 

For the uninitiated, a Pre-Con is a full day of learning with a recognized expert in the industry. They’ll share everything they know on the Pre-Con topic, and you’ll have access to them the whole day, as well as learning alongside your peers who are likely solving similar challenges. It’s a great way to start the week at Summit and accelerate your learning. 

What’s a Learning Pathway? 

Learning Pathways are a popular concept at Summit. They’re a curated set of sessions created by the speaker team responsible for their Learning Pathway topic, and they’ll ensure you leave with the tools and information to implement new practices or make decisions at the end of it. It’s a great option for first timers at Summit, or those of you who have a specific goal for your professional development.  

Who will you meet?  

The full listings of our first speakers and sessions that have been announced for Summit 2023 are available now! If you’re excited, you’re not the only one – here’s what some of our speakers have to say about this year’s conference: 

“I’m so excited to be back at Summit with my Pre-Con “Performance Tuning Secrets: Learn from My Mistakes”. Whether you’re a first timer or an alum at Summit, I’m making it my personal goal to help you avoid the pitfalls I’ve hit along the way. We’ll look at common and unusual performance gotchas, and a framework to triage performance problems without jumping to conclusions. We’re going to have fun!” – Kendra Little, Staff TPM for Data Platform at Stack Overflow 

“Delivering a full day pre-conference session at PASS Summit is an amazing opportunity! Instead of a quick 1-hour session where you can’t really dig into things, you get the full day to explore topics and help people make connections with technology. Having the time to really answer questions and explore together and finally seeing the lightbulb go off is what really makes the session. From the attendee perspective, they will see a lot of nuggets within Power BI that they haven’t considered before taking their business analytics journey to the next level.” Patrick LeBlanc, Program Manager at Microsoft

“This year we’re bringing the first-ever PostgreSQL Learning Pathway to Summit! It’s been a delight to connect with some of the best in the PostgreSQL space to discuss how we could create a stellar learning track. Most developers and DBAs are being asked to support multiple database platforms and, increasingly, PostgreSQL is part of that picture more than almost any other relational database. So this is the perfect opportunity for those with a limited amount of PostgreSQL experience to walk away feeling empowered with a solid grasp of how to get started with PostgreSQL and the aspects that are most important to understand first, including some query tuning activity.”Ryan Booz, Redgate PostgreSQL Advocate

More information about the speaker & session selection process

To build out a high-quality and varied program for Summit, a multi-phased selection process is happening right now. Our Pre-Con and Learning Pathway speakers are just the first to be announced – you can expect to see more session announcements in June & July!

A team of community volunteers rate each session submission without seeing the speaker’s name and profile, then the reviewed and scored proposals go through a second review with the speaker names included. Finally, proposals are considered and weighed across all topics, tracks, and levels, and against our DEIB commitment to reach our diversity goal of 40% of speakers from underrepresented groups.

The volume and quality of session submissions has blown us away. We’re delighted to share that we’re ahead of our target to support diversity amongst our speakers, and you’ll be enjoying an incredible selection of sessions in Seattle in November!

What topics can you expect to see at Summit’s Pre-Cons?

Here’s a taster of the 15 Pre-Cons published so far:

  • Beyond the Basics: Elevate Your Power BI Skills – Pragati Jain, Augustin Dokoza Bukvic
  • T-SQL Querying and Query Tuning for Data Analysis and Beyond – Itzik Ben-Gan
  • PostGIS and PostgreSQL: GIS Data, Queries, and Performance – Ryan Lambert
  • Queries Gone Wrong: Caching, Statistics, Cardinality -> Solutions! – Kimberly Tripp
  • Power BI Hidden Gems – Patrick LeBlanc, Adam Saxton

Check out the full details of all 15 sessions.

There are also five Learning Pathways running Wednesday through Friday at Summit, on the following topics:

  • Cloud DBA Fundamentals
  • DevOps
  • PostgreSQL
  • Solving Real World SQL Server Problems
  • The Battle of the Data Transformation Tools

Find out more about the Learning Pathways.

Throughout the Summit program, which will be fully announced later this year, we’ve been guided by feedback from the Community Insights survey earlier this year, and from previous attendees and the community. You can expect to see sessions aligned with the following tracks:

  • Analytics
  • Architecture
  • Database Management
  • Development
  • Professional Development

Evolving trends and technologies

Microsoft’s Data Platform remains central to PASS Data Community Summit and we’re thrilled to be celebrating the latest developments on the Microsoft stack again this year. What we’re also learning, from the community and wider industry trends, is that more and more organisations are adopting additional databases alongside SQL Server as a key part of their journey to the cloud.

As part of our commitment to staying ahead of the latest trends and helping people navigate this shift, we’re dedicating more sessions than ever to PostgreSQL, as you can see from the PostgreSQL Learning Pathway. And as well as PostgreSQL, you can also expect to see content on MySQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, and broader topics involving analytics, ML and AI. We’re looking forward to welcoming a growing multi-database community to Summit.

Excited? Don’t take our word for it! 

Registration is open now 

If you’re ready to connect, share, and learn with fellow data professionals and industry leaders in Seattle in November, register now and benefit from the launch price – that’s a 30% saving on the standard price, and only available until June 7! 

Stay tuned… 

Be the first to hear about speaker and session announcements, ticket price bumps, and what to expect at Summit this year. Join the mailing list and follow us on Twitter, and we’ll keep you updated.  

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