This Just Got Crazy Real

Sitting on the plane, just a few rows back from Mark Souza, and a few rows ahead of James Rowland-Jones as we head to Seattle for the PASS Summit. We met some else on our flight heading to the Summit as well, and I know of a few folks on other planes arriving around the same time that we will. Mark and JRJ are going to head to the Microsoft campus for some meetings and I am going to head downtown and hope to be in my hotel room by around lunchtime.

If I was a bit more organized I would have put together a Summit Preview blog post using quotes from the movie Highlander. Why that movie? Simple, because right now I feel as if this is our Quickening, where all the immortals gather to sort out who will be “the one” and win the Prize.

Well, I would use that movie except for one little detail. The SQL Community is not about one person, winning a prize for having bested all the other immortals over a thousand year battle. Instead, to me, the entire SQL Community is “the one”. And while we are still a tad shy of having been on Earth for one thousand years in many ways the kindness we show to each other and to the first timers we meet along the way seems to be a part of human nature that goes back tens of thousands of years.

You are going to hear this phrase a lot this week: This is Community. When you look around the room during the keynote it will be hard for you to feel otherwise.

To me the Summit is a lot of things: a Community, a gathering, the Quickening, a summer camp, the Super Bowl of SQL conferences, a place where I can hear many different languages being spoken, and a place where I can help make a difference.

I don’t know of any other place quite like it for SQL geeks like myself.

See you soon.