I went to the first  Community Summit in 1999. This was one of the first conferences of my career, and I was excited to have one focused on SQL Server and data. I met Kalen Delaney and shook her hand after having her educate me about how tempdb worked in SQL Server 7. That event started a 20-year journey of traveling to subsequent Summits nearly every year since. Over the years, I have a lot of memories from Summits, mostly of people that I've met and talked with. Much of the time I've been at any of the Summits was spent on networking and business purposes more than learning, but I have picked up a few things along the way.

Early on Brian Knight and I delivered a presentation in a debate format. We were talking about the pros and cons of using identities. It was an enjoyable session and one where we learned a few things. A developer from Microsoft was in the audience and helped clarify some of the specific numbers related to limitations and scaling issues with using the feature.

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