#Summit15 Date and Time Script Updates!

Finally getting caught up after a very quick but fun week with lots of networking and learning and #SQLFamily at PASS Summit 2015 in Seattle.

This year's Summit was the first time that I got to present a full 75 minute presentation, so I was a bit stressed about that all week since my session was not until 9:30am on the Friday of the conference. The thing that was very reassuring is that I was doing my Date/Time Dimension talk that I have done many times over the last few years at SQLSaturdays & User Groups across the country.

I also got to do another Lightning Talk for the 3rd year in a row at a PASS Summit (wonder if that is some kind of record). The Lightning Talks for those that have not seen or done them can be more nerve racking than the 75 minutes sessions since they are only 10 minutes. When you are used to presenting for 60-75 minutes, 10 minutes or less is very difficult, unless you narrow the topic way down. For this year's Lightning Talk I decided to focus on Power BI, my new favorite tool in the Microsoft BI stack. And to get that focus down it was on creating dashboards really quickly using Power BI. This was not the first time that I had demo'd Power BI, but it was the first in a big venue with questionable internet access. And I did have a small issue with getting the Google Analytics Content Pack to actually refresh once I got it all setup, but I was able to move on and get the 2nd part of the demo working.

With Friday's 75 minute session early in the morning I didn't have much hope of filling the room, plus it was across the street from the main convention center in one of the overflow rooms. I had around 25 people in the session and most of them were very engaged, which was awesome. It is always better to present to a smaller audience that really wants to see your session over a room full of people that are just there because it was close or they didn't want to leave from the previous session. I didn't have any major technical issues and I was able to get through the whole presentation with a few minutes to spare and lots of questions answered throughout (I even remembered to repeat the questions for the recording).

In the week after I received a couple of emails from those that attended my session with some questions about the scripts that I provided to build the Date and Time Dimensions as I covered in the session. And we found that there were some errors in both scripts, which I have posted the fixed versions in a link below. This feedback is awesome and I love to know that people are trying to use the scripts and sharing these issues so that I can make the scripts better for everyone else that comes to this session later. Please feel free to reach out to me if you see any other issues or have questions about these scripts.



Thanks to everyone that attended my sessions and hope that you got something out of them that you can use in your work! See you again next year at PASS Summit 2016!

#SQLSatOregon & PASS Summit 2015! #summit15 #powerbi

Time really does fly! Less than 2 weeks until SQLSaturday Oregon in Portland on 10/24 which I will be presenting my new "Power BI Is Awesome!" presentation @ 3:30PM. Lots of fun with Power BI for an hour. I really love this tool so it will be very fun and if you are there bring your questions and issues and I'll see what I can do to help everyone out. I'll also be in the Performance Clinic at 4:45PM to answer any SQL Server BI questions that you have.

I'll be enjoying Portland for the weekend, including a trip to Providence Park to cheer on my Colorado Rapids in their final game of the 2015 season on Sunday. I know that their season is already over, but I'm looking forward to seeing them play in another stadium and the Portland Timbers stadium is high on my list!

After the game is over Sunday evening I'll be making the drive up to Seattle for PASS Summit 2015! This will be the first year that I'm presenting a full hour session after doing Lightning Talks the last 2 years in a row (I'm doing another one this year again, for 3 straight years now). If you are going to be in the Seattle area on 10/26-10/30 I can't recommend attending PASS Summit 2015 any more highly. I have lost count of how many PASS Summit's I have been to now, but I think it is my 9th time! My Lightning Talk on "Power BI: From Nothing to Dashboard in 10 Minutes!" will be on Thursday, 10/29 @  4:45PM and my full session "Date Dimension: Past and Future in One Script" will be on Friday, 10/30 @ 9:30AM. If you still have not registered for PASS Summit 2015, you can still use the discount code LC15WTG2 to get $150 off the registration fee.

Hope to see you all in Portland and/or Seattle in a couple of weeks!

24 Hours of PASS: Growing Our Community Recordings #pass24hop

All of the recordings for 24 Hours of PASS: Growing Our Community sessions are now available! I was honored to be selected for this event and you can get to the slides and recording for my "Introduction to the Power BI Designer" session using this link. Thanks to the team at PASS for going a great job editing out the technical difficulties that happened in this session, I had to look at it a couple of times to find the break, so they did a great job fixing that.

There were many good questions that I answered most of them at the end of the session, but there was one that I didn't know the answer to at the time, which was what version of the SAP Business Objects Universe does Power BI Designer/Power BI work with. I found this support article that lists SAP Business Objects BI 4.1 SP2 or higher as the version that the current Power Query for Excel supports, which I would assume is the same for the Power BI Designer and PowerBI.com. I also found this blog post along with this video on YouTube that demos this connectivity with the existing Power Query for Excel.

That was the only unanswered question that I know about from the session, if any of you have other questions after watching the session, please feel free to send me an email or just post it in the comments below.

Thanks again and I hope to see you at the PASS Summit 2015 in Seattle on 10/27 - 10/30. Don't forget to use the discount code LC15WTG2 when you register to save $150 off the current price!

Oh and one more thing for tonight's Women's World Cup final, GO USA! :)

What a week! #pass24hop #summit15 #newbeginnings

Glad that I had a full 2 week vacation before this week! Amazing what can happen in one week.

Week started off with accepting an offer for a new job at Chipotle! Looking forward to using all of my SQL BI knowledge to help them out. It has been a great run at RevGen Partners and I appreciate all of the help and support I have received over the last year there. I'll miss all of the friends that I know there, but the good thing is I'm staying in Denver, so I'm sure I'll run into them many times in the future.

Many have asked why I decided to move away from consulting and the only thing that I can say is that I realized that I really want to see how the decisions and changes that I make will go over a much longer period of time. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just started to feel like I wanted to see things over the long term, not just for the next few weeks/months. I really enjoyed that in my time at Visa where I got to see a decision that I had a lot of influence in turn into something much bigger than I ever would have hoped, but it took time and patience to see that happen. I see a lot of great potential for that at Chipotle and I am looking forward to the challenge of Retail/Food Service which I have not worked in since High School (yay Pizza Hut New Haven)! Thankfully for all of you I'll be in the HQ buildings, not in the kitchen. ;)

Next thing this week was my 24 Hours of PASS: Growing our Community presentation "Introduction to the Power BI Designer" on Wednesday afternoon. I was very well prepared and ready for it, once we opened it up I was happy to see over 200 attendees in the opening minutes. Then the strangest thing that I have seen with GoTo Meeting happened when the whole session came to an end for everyone about 15 minutes in. After my initial panic of trying to figure out what to do I just clicked on the email link and sure enough it was back up and working fine. Lost some attendees, but still had over 150 when it was back up and running again and I only lost a few minutes. Session went well and there were lots of good questions at the end, wish I could answer all of the when/what type questions, but that is all part of doing a presentation on a beta product that we don't know everything about yet. Stay tuned to this space for a link to the video once it is posted next week and I'll answer any questions that we didn't get to at the end of the session.

Then on Thursday night I got the email that I didn't think I was going to get until later on Friday. After 4 attempts I'll be speaking at PASS Summit 2015 in a regular session slot! I was jumping for joy last night when I got the email and had to read it 4 times just to make sure. I know that there is a lot of controversy in the SQL Community about the selection process for PASS Summit, but I have been a Program Committee Volunteer for 3 years in a row now and I know that it has gotten better over those years and has helped me understand what it takes to put something like this on (along with organizing 4 SQLSaturdays). So, in October I'll be presenting my "Date Dimension: Past & Future in One Script" session, which is definitely one of my favorite sessions that I have done many times over the last couple of years. The cool thing is that this presentation came from a Lightning Talk that I did at PASS Summit 2013 (my first time speaking at a PASS Summit). Just goes to show you what patience and experience can do. I'll also be doing another Lightning Talk at PASS Summit 2015 on "Power BI Designer: Nothing to Dashboard in 10 Minutes!". Looking forward to putting this one together since it should be a lot of fun and for those doubters out there I will even be able to show how to do at least 2 dashboards in 10 minutes! :)  If you have not yet registered for PASS Summit 2015, please click on this link and use the discount code LC15WTG2 to get $150 off!

And not to get too political or anything, but the week was topped off with the SCOTUS gay marriage decision, which my response is: "It's about time!". Way to go SCOTUS, very proud to be an American today!

Looking forward to the US Women's World Cup game tonight against China and relaxing a bit over this weekend, cause after reading this I'm already really tired. :)

What a week!