I’d like to congratulate the freshman class of SQL PASS Speakers for 2014. You are joining a very small group of people who have spoken at the SQL PASS Summit. In total there have only been a few hundred people who have spoken at the SQL PASS Summit. The number of speakers year to year as we all know is a pretty small group, and each year we also have a small group of people who are first time speakers. Let’s review some of the numbers which this handy chart that I made (we are all data people here after all).
As you can see from my graph, the total number of speakers has hovered around 200 speakers for the last 5 years (all the years worth of data which is available on the SQL PASS website). The number of new speakers is obviously a smaller number, with the number of new speakers each year getting to be a smaller and smaller number. As we can see in the next chart the number of new speakers year over year is actually getting smaller (again, only using data since 2010 as that is all that’s available).
And if you prefer percentages instead of numbers, I made one of those as well (yes those 2011 percentages really are that high as this is change, not growth)…
If you haven’t figured it out by now, getting into the club of SQL PASS speaker is a really hard club to get into, and you’ve earned the spot which you’ve received. Never let anyone tell you that don’t deserve that session spot, or that you took someone else’s session. Sessions are given based on abstracts which means that you earned your spot.
Now do yourself and your fellow speakers proud this November. Give a great presentation, don’t be nervous if someone you’ve seen present comes and sits in your session, and have a great time at the PASS Summit. There’s nothing like speaking at PASS, so have fun and enjoy what’s probably your first (and hopefully not last) session on the big stage of international conferences.
UPDATE: The speaker count for 2014 does NOT include all Microsoft speakers as they haven’t been announced yet. This is one of the reasons that the speaker count is lower for 2014. Another is the fact that this year a lot more speakers have two sessions, where in previous years only a few speakers have had more than one session (see graphic which I stole from Kendal below).
Denny
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I would also assume that Microsoft does not use a blind speaker + abstract selection process (nor should they).
This is my favourite part of this post:
“Never let anyone tell you that don’t deserve that session spot, or that you took someone else’s session. Sessions are given based on abstracts which means that you earned your spot.”
And anyone who tells you otherwise probably shouldn’t attend conferences.
Do you happen to have the freshman class broken out by Relational and Business Intelligence.
No, sorry I don’t have it broken down like that. All I did was download the list of speakers for each year. For more details analysis I’d need to get a data dump from PASS.