25+ Years: The Story of PASS - PASS Data Community Summit

25+ Years of Connect. Share. Learn.: The Story of PASS

We’re celebrating a milestone most communities never reach: 25+ years of data professionals showing up for each other, from a single Microsoft-seeded user group in 1999 to the global, multi-platform PASS Data Community Summit you know today. Here’s how we got here.

Where It All Began

In 1999, Andrew “Flip” Filipowski, owner of Chicago database-tools company Platinum Technology, Inc., partnered with Microsoft to launch the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), an independent, user-run organization backed by seed funding from Microsoft and CA. A founding board of roughly nine volunteers, including long-serving leader Kevin Kline, set the tone for what PASS would become: built by data professionals, for data professionals.

The Engine Behind the Community

PASS Summit launched the same year and quickly grew into the largest conference in the world for the Microsoft data platform, drawing 5,000+ attendees at its peak in Seattle. But it wasn’t just the marquee event. It was the financial engine funding everything else: local user groups, free training, online learning, and staff. That single-event revenue model worked for two decades, right up until it didn’t.

Underneath the flagship conference sat 270+ local and virtual groups meeting monthly around the world, feeding speakers and volunteers up to SQLSaturday and PASS Summit, and pulling energy and content back down to the local level. If you’d ever shown up to a chapter meeting, you were part of PASS, whether you’d registered anywhere or not.

SQL Saturday: Grassroots Training Goes Global

In 2007, three Florida-based community leaders, Andy Warren, Brian Knight, and Steve Jones, launched SQLSaturday: free, one-day training events designed to be run entirely by local volunteers. Saturday was a deliberate choice. It let attendees skip missing work and made it easy to book low-cost venues like schools and universities.

The formula spread fast. At its peak, SQLSaturday ran close to 120 free events a year, from Los Angeles to London, with event numbers climbing past #900. For a huge share of today’s data community, SQLSaturday was their first event, and often their first time on stage.

In 2010, at SQLSaturday #33 – Charlotte, the franchise was handed over to the PASS organisation to manage and support.

Redgate Steps In

On January 28, 2021, Redgate Software acquired PASS’s assets, including SQLSaturday and its full content library. Redgate wasn’t a stranger stepping in cold. As former co-founder and CEO Simon Galbraith put it, Redgate had started at roughly the same time as PASS and traveled alongside the community for two decades as a Global Alliance Partner.

Redgate moved fast to protect what mattered:

The flagship event returned as a free virtual PASS Data Community Summit in November 2021, a new name honoring the PASS legacy while reflecting a broader, more platform-diverse community.
SQLSaturday came back, with its domain and trademarks donated to the SQLSaturday corporation.
The Library of 3,000+ sessions and training videos was preserved rather than lost.

When the Music Stopped

COVID-19 didn’t just cancel a conference, it broke the business model underneath the entire organization. The 2020 PASS Summit moved online, virtual registration fell far short of in-person revenue, and multi-year venue commitments didn’t disappear just because the events couldn’t happen. On December 3, 2020, the PASS board voted unanimously to dissolve. By January 15, 2021, PASS had ceased operations, putting SQLSaturday, the user-group tools, and a library of thousands of recorded sessions at risk of going offline for good.

Where We Stand Today

The 2024 PASS Data Community Summit marked 25 years since the community began, with a brand refresh in Seattle that deliberately kept “PASS” in the name even though it’s no longer an acronym. It means too much to the people who built it to let go.

In 2025, PASS Data Community Summit returned in person to the Seattle Convention Center, November 17–21, alongside a new series of smaller PASS Summit On Tour events in New York, Dallas, and the Netherlands. And the community keeps broadening: today’s Summit spans not just the Microsoft data platform, but PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, Oracle, AWS, and Google technologies too.

That growth continues in 2026, with the Summit expanding into a three-region series: PASS Summit East in Chicago, PASS Summit Europe in Frankfurt, and PASS Summit West, coming to Seattle November 9–11.

You’re Part of This Story

From nine volunteers in 1999 to a self-sustaining, worldwide, multi-platform community, the throughline hasn’t moved: this is a community built by data professionals, for data professionals, to connect, share, and learn. Whichever event brought you in first, a SQLSaturday, a local group meeting, or your first PASS Data Community Summit, you’re part of the same 25-year story.

PASS Summit West General Program Now Live!