PASS Business Analytics Conference Summary

The PASS Business Analytics Conference in Chicago finished yesterday, and because I was there and because I did a fair amount of cheerleading for it (see here and here for example) I wanted to post a few thoughts on how it went.

I’ll be honest and say that I had a few worries before the event. Would anyone want to go? Would the sessions be a repeat of what get on the BI tracks at the PASS Summit and hundreds of other SQL Server conferences? In fact, everything went really, really well. Some of the sessions were quite sparsely attended (though this had nothing to do with the quality of the content – some of the best sessions didn’t get much of an audience) but overall there was a very respectable number of people (1200ish?). I had as many people in my session on OData as I’d get at any other large conference, and it was standing room only in at least one of Marco’s sessions. I also rather liked the fact that it was smaller than the Summit – it made it much easier to meet all the people I wanted to meet. If it carries on for a few years it could easily attract a much larger number of people.

Regarding the content I was particularly pleased because a lot of the topics I’d asked for turned up on the schedule. In fact one thing that struck me (and a few other people said the same thing to me as well) was that this was the first conference I’d been to in a long time where there were sessions that I really wanted to see in every time slot. My favourite session of the whole conference was Marc Smith on NodeXL; anyone that reads my blog knows I’ve been a big fan of NodeXL for a long time, but I learned a lot from this session because it concentrated on the basics of social network analysis rather than the tool itself. This was a prime example of the kind of topic that you simply wouldn’t get at a regular SQL Server conference – it was a business analytics session. Even the more technical presentations, such as the one on HPC Services for Excel, was outside the usual boundaries of SQL Server BI. Incidentally, I must get round to playing with HPC Services for Excel – you could use it to parallelise some DAX calculations, or even to batch process large numbers of PowerPivot models on desktop machines overnight…

So, in summary, the conference was a big success and I had a great time. I’ll definitely be going back next year. And did I mention that I got to meet Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame?