Bringing together the brightest SQL Server professionals from around the world is the dedicated pursuit of PASS and our educational user events are, quite simply, the best.

Our annual international user conferences unite SQL Server user-experts, solution providers, MVPs, and Microsoft developers and executives for several days each year to deliver technical user education, hands-on training, peer-to-peer exchange, and in-depth presentations from the top SQL Server minds from around the globe. Visit our Conference page for details around our upcoming annual user event.

PASS is also hosting one-day regional seminars that will focus on one or two specific SQL Server-related topics beginning in 2002. Be sure to see if a PASS regional seminar is coming to a town near you!

PASS Webcasts deliver great SQL Server technical information straight to you desktop. Convenient and topical, PASS Webcasts are presented by the industry's best and regularly feature presentations directly from the PASS annual or regional user events.

LiteSpeed for SQL Server's low impact, high-performance compression technology enables organizations to reduce storage costs and SQL backup and recovery windows—while maintaining complete control over the backup and recovery process.

The LiteSpeed for SQL Server backup engine compresses data up to 95 percent, in half the time required by other backup solutions. LiteSpeed speeds up restore times through its ability to recover individual database objects and encapsulate complete database restores into a single file.

Fast backup and recovery solution for Microsoft SQL Server Desktop and Developer Editions offers low impact, high performance compression technologies that allow developers to reduce storage costs and backup/recovery windows, while maintaining complete control over the backup and recovery process.

Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise provides an agent-less easy-to-use database issue discovery solution that enables you to identify and resolve SQL Server performance problems within your SQL Server environment. This powerful tool pinpoints the underlying SQL server contention issues and processes for fast and efficient database administration.

With Spotlight, DBAs can drill down to locate in-depth information about the source of thousands of SQL Server performance problems such as: a specific user, a resource-intensive SQL transaction, an I/O bottleneck, a lock or wait. Spotlight for SQL Server Enterprise sets a baseline for normal activity for each instance, and can set thresholds, notify users and display alerts when it detects performance bottlenecks of any kind.

Using a SQL Server back end with a Java application server may sound like an unnatural proposition but there's no need to bow to such arbitrary limitations. In this article you'll get step-by-step instructions on making a JDBC connection between the four most popular Java application servers and Microsoft SQL Server.

Learn how six months of benchmarking and test programming to find the right object-relational mapping tool can pay off. Vanatec's OpenAccess turned out to be just what Tangent Systems was looking for to allow its customers to process a wide range of documents quickly, efficiently, and easily. Stored procedures can be an effective way to handle conflicting needs, but it's not always so obvious how to write them so they both perform well and scale.