This is a summary of my last day in the PASS Summit. I have already written about my first, second, third and fourth days. Today was a very intensive day with some really great sessions. I learned so much today…

The day began with Rob Farley (Blog | Twitter) and with a session by the name of Table Expressions: So Much More than CTEs. Rob talked about all kinds of table expressions and their usage. It was more of a standup show rather than a training session. I can't say I learned anything new from this session, but it as a fun way to start the day. Thank you, Rob!

The next session was Data Internals Deep Dive by Bradley Ball (Blog | Twitter), also known as "SQLBalls". The title of the session was promising, and Brad has certainly met my expectations. I learned some new things about the internals of several data structures in SQL Server, such as the various allocation pages as well as regular data pages. Now I know how to read and interpret hexadecimal values inside a data page. Isn't it great? You can download the presentation and scripts from this session from Brad's resources page (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Continuing the internals route, I then attended the SQL Server Transaction Log Internals session by Tim Chapman (Blog | Twitter) and Denzil Ribeiro (Twitter). Just like the data internals session, I learned a lot of new things about the structure of the transaction log. I learned about VLFs, log blocks, log records and how it all fits together. This was a very educating session. So now I not only know how to read and interpret data pages, but I also know how to read and interpret the transaction log (well, at least parts of it). Tim and Denzil haven’t uploaded the materials from their session yet, but they promised to do it soon, so check out their blog or Twitter, if you're interested in those…

The next session was presented by the one-and-only Paul Randal (Blog | Twitter). The session was titled Index Fragmentation: Internals, Analysis, and Solutions. This is the second session by Paul Randal that I attended, and I enjoyed both of them very much. Paul is a fantastic presenter, and it's such a great experience watching him on stage. I think that he can make any topic interesting. Let him talk about black cherry trees, and he will probably come up with a fascinating presentation with lots of internals. Anyway, this time he talked about the internal structures of indexes and what exactly happens behind the scenes throughout the lifetime of the index, such as index creation, page split, rebuild and reorganize. I learned a few things, and I had a great time. Thank you (again), Paul!

You can download the presentation from here, and Paul will probably upload the scripts to his resources page soon.

The last session was about Parallel Query Execution. It was presented by the almighty Paul White (Blog | Twitter). I started this conference with Paul, and there couldn't be a better way to end the conference. Paul talked about parallel execution, and explained how exactly a parallel query is executed behind the scenes and what exactly a CXPACKET is. Just like his pre-conference session, I learned so many new things, and it helped me fill a few important gaps about query and execution plan analysis. This was an excellent session. Thank you so much, Paul!

You can download the presentation here.

That's it! The summit is over. What a week!

I had such a great time here. I learned so much stuff and I have so many things that I want to do when I'm back at the office. I also met so many people from all over the world, and I will definitely keep in touch with many of them. In addition, I learned more about PASS, and I have some new ideas about how to make our Israeli chapter even better.

Goodbye, Charlotte!

See you next year in Seattle!