The second day of the full PASS Summit was packed with sessions. If fact, it was hard to select from the 56 sessions that were available.

The day started with the Rushabh Mehta announcing the 2009 PASSion Awards, an annual award given by PASS to those volunteers that have given a lot of their time volunteering. This year, two awards were made. For the North American award, it was given to Allen Kinsel , who gave a lot of time volunteering for the PASS Program Committee.

The international award was given to Charlie Hanania, for his volunteer work putting together the European PASS Conference. I meet Charlie last spring at the European PASS Conference, and I have to say that he really deserved the award. He is a great guy who helped make the 2008 European PASS Conference a great success.

After the PASSion Awards, and a keynote by Tom Casey, I gave a presentation on  “Identifying SQL Server Performance Problems Using SQL Trace.”

Immediately after my presentation, I headed to the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives autograph party, where about 30 SQL Server MVPs were on hand to sign copies of this new book. The royalties for the book will be donated to the War Child International charity. Myself, and the other MVPs, signed over 200 books.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in meetings before heading back to the hotel to catch up on work. Tomorrow will be my first fully free day at the PASS Summit, and I hope to take in a lot of sessions.