June Presentations

I have a few presentations that I'll be doing in June that I wanted to highlight here in case anyone is in the area or attending these meetings.

First up on June 12th, I'll be doing a new session that I created "Building a Better Workstation". This session is a collection of a bunch of my lessons learned trying to figure out the best strategy for working with OSs and SQL Server installs on workstations and laptops over the years. I will be doing this presentation remotely for the BIG PASS group run by Mickey Stuewe (blog | Twitter).

On June 18th, I'll be doing another new session titled "Business Intelligence (BI) for the .NET Developer" for the Denver .NET Meetup Group. This session will help .NET developers and anyone that is just starting out in IT know what Business Intelligence is and some ways that you may not of even thought of for getting into BI. Should be a fun session that I really hadn't thought of putting together until Andreas Taber (blog) requested I present at his group. I will be doing this presentation in person.

On June 19th, I'll be doing another presentation as part of Pragmatic Works' Free Training on the T's. This time I'll be doing the "Building a Better Workstation" session that I will do the week before for BIG PASS. Always happy to do a presentation as part of this free training series, will be strange now doing it as an employee of another company though.

Further out in my calendar, I have been selected to speak at SQLSaturday #312 in Sacramento, CA on July 12th. I don't know what session I'll be presenting yet, but as soon as I find out, I'll let you all know! This will be my first time in Sacramento, so looking forward to spending a couple of days out in that part of CA with the #SQLFamily.

SSDT-BI for VS 2013 Update

Not too long after I posted on my blog about the release of SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2013 the download was pulled with a message that it would be fixed in a few days. After a few weeks, the updated download was made available on Friday. Not sure what the issues were with the original version, as I was not yet using it regularly (not lucky enough to work with any client going to SQL 2014 yet).

If you did grab that download when it was available the first time, you should upgrade to this newer version. The update did not fix any of the backwards compatibility issues with SSIS that I highlighted in my original post. Microsoft is saying that they have fixed the issue that was causing these breaks with backwards compatibility so that newer versions of SSIS and SSDT-BI will work with each other going forward. Based on how that was stated it does not mean that they will be able to fix the issues with 2008R2 and 2012 not working in latest versions of SSDT-BI, just that newer SSDT-BI releases should work with SSIS 2014 and later going forward.

S3OLV May 2014 Meeting

Thanks to Jason Brimhall (Twitter - Blog) and Stacia Misner (Twitter - Blog) I had the opportunity to present a session to the SQL Server Society of Las Vegas (or S3OLV, love that acronym) last night. I presented my newly renamed "Date and Time Dimensions for Every Day and Time in No Time" talk, which I used to do as a Doctor Who themed presentation for the 50th Anniversary last year. Session went fine and as mentioned at the end of the session I wanted to make sure that my scripts to create your own date dimension in SQL and slides are available to everyone that wants to use them. Hopefully these will give you a good start on getting a date dimension up and running for your data warehouse. If you have any really cool updates that you find for the script or errors that I have missed, please let me know so that I can share it with others as well!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Seems like only a little while ago that I posted on this blog about moving on to work at Pragmatic Works, but it has now been over 2 years! It has been an amazing 2 years and probably the most challenging time in my entire career. Over the last 2 years I've had the chance that I think many would love to have working with some of the best in the SQL community and doing some really cool stuff for many different clients.

I decided recently that I was having some issues with the amount of travel that I was doing, especially to the East coast. While it is great that I have had the opportunity to see my Dad twice in the last 6 months because of travel to the East coast (he lives in Philadelphia) it is very draining on me and my family. So, I started looking for something local in Denver. I wanted to stay in consulting, if possible as I really love to see different client environments on a regular basis that challenge me to learn with each new client. I also needed to work for a company that understands being involved in the SQL community and backs it up with more than just words.

With that criteria I was able to get a new consulting position with RevGen Partners! I know a bunch of people that currently work and previously worked for them, so it was easy for me to judge how good of a company they are from them. I'm starting with them Monday and looking forward to starting a new adventure. I'm also hoping that I can keep up with all of my friends/co-workers at Pragmatic Works especially the ones that I will see at other SQL events in the future. Thanks to Brian, Adam, Mike and Bradley and many others for an amazing 2 years and I know that I will be seeing each of you again.