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11 August 2008 01:53

Minutes of the Aug 2008 oPASS Meeting

I've just posted minutes of the August 2008 user group meeting. We had two great presentations, a short one from Dolores Tofel on how she uses Access with SQL Server, and a longer one from Amy Styers of EMC on the Top 10 Storage Mistakes. Details...
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04 August 2008 01:34

oPASS Meeting Tomorrow Night (Aug 5, 2008)

We've got two technical sessions scheduled for tomorrow night. The first is by long time oPASS member Dolores Tofel discussing using Access with SQL Server. This is a 15 minute presentation that is part of our effort to build more local speakers and...
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01 August 2008 08:08

SQLSaturday Update (Aug 1, 2008)

SQLSaturday #5 in Olympia is progressing nicely. 85 registered, venue locked in, and work under way for fund raising via sponsors. Speakers still needed! If you know someone in that area that might be interested, please forward the message. We're...
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05 June 2008 01:51

Notes from the June 2008 oPASS Meeting

Our main presentation was on 'Unlocking the Power of SQL Compact' by Steve Lasker & Ginny Caughey. Went better than I expected (not that I doubted their presentation skills) because for most DBA's it's a little looked at/noticed area...
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28 April 2008 01:09

Orlando Heroes Launch Event

I attended this on Friday along with fellow oPASS members Mike Antonovich and Ulysses Vasquez to represent PASS , and we were joined at the community table along with Shawn Weisfeld of The Orlando .Net Users Group and Ken Tucker of The Space Coast .Net...
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15 February 2008 01:14

Getting Geeks (IT Pro's) To Talk at User Group Meetings

User groups have to be about more than technical content if you want to sustain them over the long term, and the best way to create that 'more' is to work on getting attendees to talk to each other. Here in Orlando we experiment with different...
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11 February 2008 07:21

Next oPASS Meeting is Feb 12

For those of you in Orlando our next meeting will be held on Feb 12 from 6-8 pm at the offices of End to End Training , 225 S Westmonte Dr Ste 2010, Altamonte Springs. We have two speakers scheduled; Dan Wolford doing a product demo of one product from...
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19 December 2007 16:02

oPASS Meeting Notes

We had our final meeting of the year last night, minutes posted here . Pretty good turn out, 22 total. And given that we started the group back up in April with about 10 attendees, we're growing nicely. Highlight for me last night was getting more...
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12 December 2007 01:34

Managing Funds for User Groups

This question seems to come up a lot and it's worth discussing. Few user groups are incorporated, fewer still are true non-profits, so how you pay for pizza, charge sponsors, do the little things that need to be done without having a checking account...
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30 October 2007 18:56

If Exists (Select 1...) vs If Exists (select * ...)

If exists is a well known way to improve performance because it returns as soon as it matches a single row - at that point it knows the condition is true and there is no need to continue.During a recent www.opass.org meeting guest speaker Bill Graziano...
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29 October 2007 18:29

How Much Pizza and Soda for a User Group Meeting (Why You Should RSVP)?

After a few meetings of oPASS this year the numbers I use are 2 slices of pizza and 2 drinks per person, plus about 10%. I order the large pizzas and get a mix of crusts and topping - remember to get vegetarian! In our case we also have one member who...
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13 October 2007 16:36

Bill Graziano Visits oPASS & JSSUG

Bill Graziano (main man at SQLTeam.com, consultant, and VP of PASS) was in town recently to speak at both the Orlando and Jacksonville user groups as a guest of our company, End to End Training. If you attend a user group you know that gettings speakers...
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09 August 2007 13:52

Fewer Seats Make for Better User Group Meetings?

We had a visitor from another group at our recent www.opass.org meeting and it was interesting that one bit of feedback was because we had filled every seat the visitor felt it made for a better experience because people talked more to each other - due...
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08 August 2007 17:37

User Groups, Geeks, and Puzzles

Last night we had one of bi-monthly meetings of oPASS (Orlando SQL Servers User Group) and we had a pretty good time, ranging from some nice raffle prizes to a good presenation on XML to our now standard puzzle event. There's nothing quite like a...
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27 July 2007 19:29

User Groups Moved to New Domain

We've just moved all the PASS chapters that were hosted on ~.ssc.com domains over to ~.sqlgroups.com. This is part of the final cleanup as we try to make sure we don't have anything left pointing at SSC. If you're the leader of one of these...
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