PASS Summit 2015: the Exhibitors

2015 was my first time attending a PASS Summit conference. I've been to a handful of other tech conferences. So I never felt like a noob--hopefully I didn't act like one. Like many others, I went hunting for SWAG. That meant, of course, I had to visit the vendor exhibits. There's a handful of exhibit pics below *Picture quality isn't the greatest.
Sorry about that. What do you notice? If you're a return visitor, you may already know I'm not a fan of 3rd party SQL Server tools. And you can probably see where I'm going with this post.

Good lord, everyone and their brother had a product that makes SQL Server faster, safer, more efficient, and cheaper to own. It's a wonder any of us DBA's can tie our own shoes without them. Color me skeptical. Most of the software products I saw looked like derivatives of native SQL Server functionality. Some features were solutions to problems I've already addressed in my past work environments. Other features solve problems I've never encountered.

Don't get me wrong. I like SWAG as much as the next person. And I'm grateful to the sponsors for defraying the costs of attending PASS Summit. But if it's all the same, it would be wonderful if I could score a quick t-shirt or mug and skip the sales pitch.