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

PASS Attack!

It’s Friday. Tomorrow I present two sessions at SQL Saturday #238 – Minnesota. Then I take off for PASS Summit 2013 on Sunday. I then wrap up the week at SQL Saturday #237 – Charlotte BI Edition.

I hope to see a variety of you at these different events.

If you come to SQL Saturday 238, you will find me in two sessions to kick off the day followed by time at the Magenic or PASS booths. I am presenting on Power BI and Tabular Models. If all goes well, my son will be joining me. He is a bit taller …

Next up is this years Summit. While I am not speaking at this event, I will be participating in the Community Zone as well as many of the volunteer meetings on Tuesday. If you are a user group leader, SQL Saturday leader, or other volunteer, be sure to connect with other volunteers to share ideas and generally grow the SQL Server community.

Finally, I will be at the SQL Saturday event in Charlotte. At this event, I will be presenting on Using Power Pivot to Drive Quality into ETL Processes. I am excited about this session as we used this method on a project with great success. This is just another great way to use Power Pivot to improve your development processes. You will likely be able to find me at the PASS booth during some of the day as well.

I hope PASS Attacks are deadly. But it should be fun and memorable. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Countdown to PASS Summit 2012 – 9 to Go – My First Summit

We are less than ten days to the start of PASS Summit 2012. I thought it would be fun to put together a countdown blog series so here goes. My first blog is about my first PASS Summit. I attended my first PASS Summit in 2007 in Denver, Colorado. At the time, I was working for XATA Corporation as their data architect. I had attended a different conference a couple years before, but was introduced to PASS through my local user group (PASSMN). The Summit had a better list of topics and presenters and I was very interested.

I would travel to this conference alone and I really only knew a couple of the other attendees. As far as I remember, there was not as much there for first timers. I felt further out of place as a first time speaker (later on that) and did not know all of the regulars. Ironically, back then, I was not very interested in networking, I came to learn. Little did I know how that would change throughout the years that have followed. I wanted to attend a lot of sessions and learn as much as possible. (I heard Itzik for the first time, and learned to love T-SQL even more. J)

So, what how was your first Summit? What was your focus? Did you network, learn, or were you able to do both?

Only nine days to go. I hope to see you there! If it is your first time, take advantage of the first timer programs. It is a great event made even better as a result.

Great User Group Meeting Tuesday, Now on to Madison and SQL Saturday #118

Minnesota SQL Server User Group Meeting Review (4/17/12)

First of all, I have to thank the awesome speakers who presented at our user group meeting on Tuesday night, April 17.  Mark Souza ( T | B ) for a great question and answer session.  He was open about SQL Server and where it is heading.  Some items that interested me is that SQL Azure was running the SQL Server 2012 platform in production by December 2011.  Microsoft is committed to releasing more changed through the SQL Azure platform at a faster clip.  This will allow them to continually improve the quality of releases for the boxed version as well.  (Speaking of which, the boxed version is not going away any time soon.)

Mark also spoke about leaving data at its source and using tools to bring the data together for reporting and analysis.  He touted the Hadoop integration efforts as key part of this strategy.  If you have followed my blog for a bit, you know that I do a lot of work with Oracle and MSBI.  As a result, I had to ask when a good version of Oracle drivers would be available.  While he did not have a good answer on this at the time, he did mention that OData is a data access solution for me to look at. Look for a future blog post as I explore this protocol to ease some of my Oracle.

After Mark finished answering the variety of questions asked by the crowd we handed the microphone to Itzik Ben-Gan ( T | B ).  As usual, he took an entire hour to help us understand that we did not know all of the possible ways to use the APPLY operator.  However, I also learned about the DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF function which allows you to change the system settings the Optimizer uses to create a plan.  For instance, DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF(1,16) will tell the optimizer to use 16 processors in its plan.

SQL Saturday #118 – Madison, WI (4/21/12)

Finally, I will be out at SQL Saturday #118 in Madison this weekend.  I have two presentations there – A Window Into Your Data: Using SQL Window Functions and Performance Monitoring and Tuning in SSAS.  Maybe I will see you there.

I’m Speaking at SQL Saturday #118 in Madison Wisconsin

If you happen to be in the area on April 21, 2012, join us at Madison Area Technical College – Truax Campus, 3550 Anderson Str., Madison, WI, 53704.

For more event details check out the event site for more info: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/eventhome.aspx?eventid=199

Follow this event on Twitter with hashtag #sqlsat118, and get news on all our events with #sqlsaturday.