A late start today, and my apologies for that. Thursday was a busy day for me and the update slipped my mind in the chaos. You can follow the #Summit14 tag on Twitter or watch on PASSTV to get an idea of what's happening.

The PASS Summit continues to be very exciting and exhausting as the community grows closer together. I see more and more people I know, and find so many of them know each other, and spend time talking. The Community Zone, which used to be mostly deserted while sessions were going on, is now full of people most of the time. I really think the move to record and sell the sessions to attendees has reduced the pressure to see as many sessions as possible. 

This means that more and more people are networking, talking about SQL, or just life, and building an event that is a very exciting. While I didn't participate in any of the evening events on Wed or Thur, I did see lots of posts and notes that showed people really enjoying themselves. However I also see lots of notes during the day from people that are learning things.

I had an encryption session that wasn't full, but I got lots of interesting questions. There were more people looking to secure their systems, though a surprising number of people using TDE had never attempted a DR restore. Please, please, do this. Make sure that you know how to restore systems. Whether you're a developer or DBA, at some point hardware will fail and you need to be sure you can recover your system.

The highlights on Thur for me entailed lots of pictures. I took a few with friends, and had many more people want to take them, as I was wearing a ridiculous outfit. I wasn't the only one, but it was for a good cause and we raised a lot of money for Doctors Without Borders, so I was happy to dress up. It was all in fun, and good to see so many people participating in a fun event.

It's a long week, getting longer as many of us get older, but it's a fantastic way to get excited about SQL Server with your fellow SQL Server professionals.