Douglas McDowell talks about day 1, the video montage featuring folks here from all over the world, and the fiscal year. The important point I took from this is that PASS is a not-for-profit committed to investing its revenue and other resources back into the community. They are hiring another full-time community evangelist, adding IT resources for online resources like the SQLSaturday site, and further expanding global efforts.

He introduces the new board members: Wendy Pastrick, James Rowland-Jones, and Sri Sridharan. They will serve their current term through the 2014 calendar year.

Tom LaRock comes on stage talking about the history of PASS and its community of volunteers. He announces this year's PASSion award winner: Jen Stirrup. Amy Lewis and Jesus Gil were honorable mentions. Congrats to all! 

Registration is open for PASS Summit 2013, October 15-18 in Charlotte, NC. Home of SQL Sentry. 🙂

Quentin Clark talks about the analysis of analysis (e.g. prediction models for election results that were very accurate), and deeper analytics being implemented around hotel guests and retail customers. Then we go into a data lifecycle story – a demo complete with movies and ZoomIt (but perhaps too much of the former and not enough of the latter). Basically the story is that Microsoft is making it possible to pull in data from disparate sources and use it together seamlessly for both review and for predictive analysis. Which is a lot more complicated than it sounds.