Traveling, Talking, and a PASS Attack Have Happened

Well, this fall has been crazy. As you may have noted from a couple of my previous posts, link to speaking and pass attack, I have been busy this fall. With multiple speaking engagements and additional travel for work, I have been on the road more than I have been home. Rather than handling each event independently, I will give some synopsis here.

SQL Saturday #235 – New York City 2013

This was my first trip to New York City which is kind of ironic since I was born in Avoca, New York and lived there for five years. I spoke on Building BI Solutions with Excel 2013. During the presentation, we had an energetic conversation about pushing more of the BI work to business users. My take is that those users know how to interpret the data better than the technology staff. Ironically, they are doing it already thanks to the prolific “Export to Excel” functionality available in most BI tools. The event was a lot of fun to participate in.

SQL Saturday #238 – Minnesota 2013

This was the first SQL Saturday in Minnesota that I did not have a lot of other responsibilities beyond speaking. I felt a little guilty, so I brought my sixteen year old son, Alex, and he volunteered in my place. Turns out he did awesome and had a great time as well. I spoke in back to back sessions to open up the day. The first session, Beyond Power Pivot – Building Tabular Model Solutions, covered the development of tabular model databases using SQL Server Data Tools and the “enterprise“ features only available in Analysis Services. The next session was “Power to the User: a Look at Power BI”. This session was a lot of fun and is a whirlwind demo of the Power BI features in Excel 2013. This was a huge event with around 400 attendees and 8 tracks. Kudos to the organizing committee for a job well done.

PASS Summit 2013

Summit this year was a good event. Due to a myriad of work related crisis, I was unable to enjoy the conference as much as I had hoped. We discussed the role of the user groups in SQL Saturdays during an organizer’s meeting. I hope that we begin to see the control of these events go back to user groups rather than treated as unrelated to user groups. As the event progressed, I was able to attend a few sessions. I am still asking for the single button install of SharePoint BI, but for now I will live with the 80 page install doc. One thing I like was having the vent in a warm location. That was definitely more enjoyable than a cold, damp Seattle fall. I still look forward to the next Summit and hope to see many of you there next year.

SQL Saturday #237 – Charlotte BI Edition 2013

Immediately following Summit was this SQL Saturday. There were a lot of big time speakers that came from the Summit and they still let me talk. This session was on using Power Pivot and Power Query to test ETL processes built with SSIS. The best part was when my computer died during the demo. When I got it restarted, an error message came up on SSIS and a number of people in the room gasped. We all knew that I would not be able to fix that right away, some moved on with half of the demo working. It all turned out okay as I had screenshots in the deck to show the changes. Overall, it was a good event and gave me a chance to see some peers one more time.

CodeMastery – Atlanta

This was the first of two CodeMastery events within a week of each other. This was a lot of fun for me as I was the keynote speaker and had the opportunity to speak about the Changing World of Business Intelligence. Having been trained as a preacher, this was the closest to that type of speaking I have done in some time. We had a good, interactive audience for this event. I also presented on Power BI at this event, once again introducing a lot of people to what Microsoft is doing with BI these days.

CodeMastery – Minneapolis

Back home in Minneapolis, I participated in this CodeMastery as a speaker as well. At this event, I once again discussed the power of Power BI and Microsoft’s strategy. We had about 80 at this midweek event which was great.

Live 360 – Orlando

At Live! 360, I had the opportunity to speak at two of the 360 events – Modern Apps Live! and SQL Server Live! This event was a lot of fun to participate in. I had the opportunity to speak five times between the two events. The part that made all of this interesting was losing my harddrive that weekend. I had to rebuild demos and recover presentations all week long. Through it all I was able to get all but one presentation’s demo up and running. Funny thing though, I tweaked the demo, and it worked partly during the presentation. Nice job by 1105 to put this together. I look forward to being at the Vegas event in March.

CodeMastery – Boston

This event was also supposed to have happened by now, however, it was rescheduled to next week. If you are in the Boston area at the time, register for the event and join us for some free training. Hopefully, I will see you there.

As I wrap up this post, I have to say a big “Thank You” to my family who has had to put up with a lot of travel over the past few weeks. Without their love and support this would have been a really rough time.

Turkey Image Source: http://bit.ly/1bBFIF4

Traveling and Talking to Wrap Up 2013

I am writing this blog post en route to New York City for SQL Saturday #235. This begins a fairly busy travel and speaking schedule for me this year. Having spent much of the summer at home with my family which was great, I now embark on some trips, primarily out east.

For starters, I am kicking off my busy end of summer, beginning of fall, in New York City. I am looking forward to being there for the second time. This should be a great event. As Regional Mentor for the NorthEast this trip allows me to be in that region for an event.  I will be speaking on Building BI Solutions with Microsoft Excel.

Next, up is some quality time in Boston. I have a contract that will put me in downtown Boston for about 4 weeks. After that trip, I skip a week and then return to speak at CodeMastery which is a Magenic event in late September.  If you are in the Boston area, I will be speaking on the difference between SQL Server Analysis Services Models – the Multidimensional and Tabular Model Smackdown.  More details of this event will be coming soon, but pencil it in for Thursday 9/26.

While not traveling far, I am speaking at SQL Saturday #238 in Minneapolis right before PASS Summit in Charlotte. This is right in my backyard, so to speak, and I look forward to another great event in the Upper Midwest. I currently do not have the sessions that were picked, but look forward to seeing you there.

October will be spent at PASS Summit. While I was accepted to speak this year, I look forward to meeting a number of people at the Community Zone and the other events at the conference. I will follow that up by going to SQL Saturday # BI Edition in Charlotte. While I have not received word about speaking, I plan to attend the event in either case. Should be a nice way to wrap up my time there.

In November, I am headed to Atlanta for another CodeMastery event. This should be a nice time to visit there and spend some time with people there.

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Upon returning from Atlanta, I am back in Minneapolis for a CodeMastery event there. Having had a major role in running this event over the past couple of years, I am truly looking forward to speaking there. Check out http://codemastery.com for details on all of the CodeMastery events as they are announced.

Finally, at least at this time, I will be presenting 5 times right before Thanksgiving. This will be my first time presenting at SQL Live and second time presenting at Modern Apps Live. Join us for this awesome 360 Live event in Orlando.

I look forward to meeting new people and visiting with old friends throughout all of these events and travels. If you see me there, say Hi and ask for one of my “famous” superhero cards! See you around.

SQL Saturday #149 and CodeMastery–Minnesota Events

We are less than two weeks away from SQL Saturday #149 in Minneapolis on September 29, 2012 with two preconference sessions on September 28.  In case you haven’t heard, we are having the main event on a Saturday.  Yes, the precons are on Friday this year.  Check out the details here.  I am really excited about this event as we have a great group of local, regional, and national speakers at this event.  There are nine rooms being used for this event, so go out to the site and build your schedule.

The following Tuesday, Magenic is hosting CodeMastery with a BI track at the Microsoft Technology Center in Edina, MN.  This event includes a sessions on managing the BI stack in SharePoint and xVelocity.  The other track is Windows 8 development with sessions on WinRT and Game Development.

I’m a Speaker at Both Events

Besides plugging these two awesome events on their own, I am also a speaker for both events.  Here is what I will be speaking on at each event:

SQL Saturday #149: A Window into Your Data: Using SQL Window Functions

In this session, I will walk through the window functions enabled by the OVER clause in SQL Server.  Come join me as we celebrate the SQL Server 2012 release of analytic functions and expansion of aggregate functionality to support tasks such as running totals and previous row values.  Thankfully, this is a demo heavy session as it is one of the last sessions of the day.

CodeMastery: Data Mining with the Tools You Already Have

The next week, I will be presenting on data mining tools which Microsoft has made available to us in SSAS and Excel.  The goal of this session is to help developers understand how to implement data mining algorithms into their business intelligence solutions.

I look forward to seeing you at both events.  They are priced right, FREE!