DBSync is a zero-maintenance data replication and ELT platform for data teams who want to move fast—without dealing with complex setups.
By Nick Harshbager, Power BI Sentinel
Let’s welcome Power BI Sentinel who’ll be joining us, once again, as a Bronze Sponsor at PASS Summit. Nick Harshbager is Director of Client Success at Power BI Sentinel and has been to many PASS Summits, and is one of the originals from #SQLfamily. We asked what keeps bringing him back to this conference.
Meet Power BI Sentinel, your new SaaS product that’s like having the Mount Rainier of data oversight for your Power BI & Microsoft Fabric Estate. Just as the Space Needle offers a panoramic view of the city, Power BI Sentinel provides unparalleled insights for managing your Power BI estate. It tracks user activities and protects against potential data drizzle with automated backups. Power BI Sentinel: Your reliable partner for a secure and well-managed data environment.
2024 will actually be my 18th time attending PASS Summit as a Sponsor! PASS Summit 2024 will be my third time attending with Power BI Sentinel, and I’ve attended 15 times in the past with my previous company, SentryOne.
The conference is professionally run and provides the opportunity to have high quality conversations with data professionals at all levels of the organization.
PASS Summit also provides an invaluable platform for marketing and lead generation, and we’re really look forward to connecting with the global data community once again in Seattle this November!
We’re excited to announce the session line up for PASS Data Community Summit 2024! Selected from the community, and reviewed by the community, we saw an unprecedented number of proposals from our call for speakers that took place in March-April this year. The volunteer Program Committee are excited for you to now explore this year’s program.
We asked and you delivered! With a staggering 1,100+ session submissions in total, we were overwhelmed and humbled by your enthusiasm during 2024’s call for speakers. This year marks an increase of approximately 300 more submissions than in previous years and reflects the support and engagement of an incredible community!
As shared in a previous blog, the selection process is designed to be thorough and unbiased to ensure that every submitted proposal is given fair consideration, while enabling us to curate a solid and culturally diverse program. Our aim is to ensure the program meets the evolving needs of the data community and discusses the topics and challenges data professionals need to understand in order to advance their knowledge and careers. Here’s a brief overview of our multi-phased approach:
In this first phase, each submission is carefully reviewed and rated by at least three Program Committee members without access to speaker details. Their focus is solely on the quality and relevance of the content – topics, titles, abstracts, goals, prerequisites, and overall coherence.
In the second phase, the Program Committee track leads perform a second review, but this time with speaker information, allowing for a comprehensive review resulting in a shortlist of the top-rated and team recommended sessions.
Next, our internal team assembles the program, balancing a number of factors such as content goals, topics, levels, team ratings and recommendations, community representation, and diversity, all within the parameters of our new session lengths. New session lengths have been introduced this year as a direct result of the community’s feedback.
In our final phase, the drafted program is reviewed by a fresh set of eyes to ensure that popular and relevant topic areas are covered, and a diverse and engaging lineup has been selected in order to meet attendee expectations.
One limiting factor the organizing team face each and every year is the venue capacity and what the conference space will allow. This isn’t a new challenge and is something the organizers have faced at previous venues, including the previous Arch and TCC buildings at the Seattle Convention Center. At Summit (the new venue we are using this year), the organizers are restricted to scheduling a wide ranging and comprehensive program into just 16 session rooms.
Despite what may initially appear to be a great number of sessions per timeslot, the volunteer Program and Selection Committee were challenged with only being able to accept a total number of 150 community sessions for this year’s program. When faced with a record breaking 1,120 proposals, it made for an incredibly difficult selection and notification process.
To give you a better understanding of this aspect, let’s look at the numbers.
We were humbled to receive an overwhelming 1,163 total submissions during our call for speakers this year. After removing test, incomplete, and cancelled submissions, there were 1,120 eligible submissions for 2024’s general program. Of these sessions, 98 sessions (pre-conference and learning pathway sessions) were reviewed and selected as part of our early-bird process and notifications went out to these speakers at the end of April.
This left the Program and Selection Committee with 88% of the original submissions, or 1,022 session proposals, to review and select to fulfill just 150 general session spots.
From here, the 150 community session spots were broken down by session track:
| Analytics | 32 |
| Architecture | 24 |
| Database Management | 57 |
| Development | 24 |
| Professional Development | 13 |
And even further down by session category:
| Community Keynote | 1 |
| Pre-con | 14 |
| Learning Pathway | 26 (5 pathways) |
| Deep Dive | 5 |
| Session – 75-minutes | 23 |
| Session – 60-minutes | 32 |
| Session – 45-minutes | 24 |
| Panel | 1 |
| Lightning Talks | 12 |
This year, we introduced two new session lengths: 60-minute and 45-minute sessions. These have been added as a direct result of attendee feedback, highlighting a preference for a range of session lengths. This change has been a key factor which has also influenced the selection process due to the limited number of sessions that could be chosen per session length category.
By introducing two new session lengths to this year’s program the sessions were broken down into the following per categories and tracks:
As you can see, the competition for session spots across categories and tracks was incredibly tight, especially considering the high number of submissions received:
To further add to the complexity of building this year’s program, of the 1,120 eligible sessions, 444 sessions were rated between 4 and 5, while 480 were rated between 2 and 3, truly making this year one of THE most difficult review and selection processes to date.
We would like to thank and congratulate all of the speakers who submitted proposals for this year’s PASS Data Community Summit. Your engagement and support is unmistakable and the quality and expertise of the proposals is unmatched. We hope this blog post helps to reassure the community, and in particular any speakers that weren’t selected, that it was an incredibly competitive year with an extremely high-quality intake of sessions.
We always want to be transparent about the rigorous selection processes involved in shaping the PASS Summit program. Our intention is to deliver the best educational program possible each and every year, and we’d encourage any speakers who weren’t selected for this year’s program to please apply again next year.
The volunteer Program and Selection Committee overcame many challenges in order to build this year’s program, and we believe that the selected program soundly reflects the best of what our community has to offer and what the audience have expressed they want. We’re thrilled to announce our selected sessions and cannot wait for you to experience them.
Stay tuned for more updates on the agenda as we get closer to this year’s event, and make sure you’re signed up for our newsletter to be the first to hear about additional sessions from our partners and sponsors.
With the agenda now available to view, we’d highly recommend that you map out the sessions you’re interested in now and put the case forward for your attendance at this year’s PASS Summit. If you need help doing this, check out the Convince your Boss letter template, which you can customize to list your chosen sessions and demonstrate the incredibly valuable content presented at this year’s event.
Don’t delay, the next price increase comes into effect on July 10, so to secure the early-bird rate and save $200 on a 3-day ticket make sure you register before this date.
By Ivan Peev, Cozyroc
We’d like to introduce June’s Sponsor of the Month for PASS Data Community Summit 2024, Cozyroc! Cozyroc have been long-term supporters of the event and have been attending PASS Summit since 2009.
COZYROC, a leading provider of ETL solutions, is proud to be an exhibitor at the PASS Data Community Summit. This year, we’re excited to showcase our latest Data Integration components and COZYROC‘s Cloud Integration Platform, featuring easily configurable, Off-the-Shelf integrations (gems) with popular SaaS applications.
The best conferences you can possibly attend are the focused conferences. If you are SQL Server professional, fan, geek, partner, there is no other event than the PASS summit to further enhance your knowledge and understanding of the SQL Server platform.
PASS Summit is the place to meet and network with the best minds in the SQL Server universe. It is like going to a multi-day rock concert where you can hang out with the stars in the time between the breaks.
Effortlessly connect, retrieve, and transform data from various Web APIs and services, streamlining your business workflows with our comprehensive range of 270 SSIS components, connectors, and tasks available in the COZYROC SSIS+ components suite or migrate your existing SSIS workloads to the COZYROC.Cloud, benefiting from SSIS in the Cloud at a competitive price.
Join us at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle and take your ETL processes to the next level.
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