Wendy Pastrick started with a song.

She urges us all to get our session evals completed by November 15th (please do this – it's how speakers improve). You can fill out a session eval at PASSSummit.com – find the session and click on the Evaluate Session button. You'll need to log in.

Financials look really good. Overall revenue dropped by 1% this year, but expenses dropped by 6%, leaving a decent surplus (I hate the terms "profits" and "profit margins" in this context, but maybe I'm in the minority there).

Wendy thanks Chris Yates, Diego Nogare, and John Martin for their service on the board. Then welcomes Tim Ford to the stage, who is quick to tell us that he will not be singing.

SQLSaturday has turned 950 events old. I remember speaking at #33 in Charlotte, and wondering how big this event would get.

Tim congratulates Hamish Watson for winning this year's coveted PASSion Award. As a reminder, Hamish is one of the candidates running in this year's election. If you haven't voted yet, what are you waiting for?

Seattle native and cybersecurity specialist Tarah Wheeler takes the stage. Her presentation is about how security and regulation represent a common set of problems for all of us. The regulations that govern our data security (and the inability to delete data in a lot of cases) complicates things, especially for companies that operate globally. She talks about encryption as a best practice, but if you can delete the data, tracing events becomes very difficult, encrypted or not. She also says that "the only data that is 100% secure is data that does not exist." She's not wrong there. She ends by suggesting a few things:

• See if your company has – and is monitoring – a [email protected] e-mail address.
• Treat all data as hackable – including texts, Twitter DMs, Facebook messages, and private channels in Slack
• Become familiar with your company's vulnerability disclosure policy (and if it doesn't have one, bring it up).