PASS Summit 2014 #summit14 #sqlfamily

I'm back home after an amazing week in Seattle for PASS Summit 2014. Love visiting Seattle, especially when there are lots of #SQLFamily there to enjoy it with!

I got into Seattle on Sunday afternoon via train from Portland. Was the first Amtrak train that I have ever been on and was a nice relaxing ride from Seattle to Portland. I guess I thought that I would see more of the coast on the train, didn't realize that it was going more inland, still some great scenary.

The week itself went by really fast with PASS meetings on Tuesday and the conference itself starting on Wednesday. My presentation on SSDT, "What Version of SSDT do I Need?" was on Wednesday afternoon, so it was good that I got that over with early in the week. I presented this session in the first set of Lightning Talk sessions with Brent Ozar, Luke Jian, Mark Vaillancourt, Tim Radney and Craig Purnell. Was great to share the spotlight with all of these speakers in a full room and we got through all of our presentations with time for questions at the end! Tim, Craig and I were all in the same Lightning Talk session at PASS Summit 2013 as well.

Below is the updated version of my slides, with a change to the table of SSDT versions, correcting a small oversight on my part.

With the presentation out of the way I was able to enjoy the other sessions and parties throughout the week and see as many of my #SQLFamily as possible. Overall the week went very well and I'm already looking forward to PASS Summit 2015 back in Seattle on October 27 - 30!

Thanks again to everyone that attended my session and I'm looking forward to an even better 2015!

Speaking at PASS Summit 2014! #Summit14

I am honored and thrilled to announce that I was selected for the 2nd year in a row to present a session at the PASS Summit! PASS Summit is an annual conference put on by PASS (Professional Association of SQL Server) with thousands of attendees from across the world, this year it is being held on November 4 - 7 in Seattle, WA. There will be over 200 different sessions presented by speakers from the community and Microsoft on a wide range of SQL Server topics in 5 different tracks. If you are interested in attending, please use this link to register and be sure to use the code UNSUMF59 when you register to get $150 off your registration fee (if you use it by this Friday 6/27 you will save a total of $450 off the full registration fee).

I will be doing a Lightning Talk (short 10 minute presentation) titled "What Version of SSDT do I Need?", which is a small part of the "Building a Better Workstation" presentation that I have already presented a couple of times. I'm sure that it will be a fun session as there are currently a lot of questions/issues with what versions of SSDT work with what in each version of SQL Server.

Looking forward to seeing everyone in Seattle in November!

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.

SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2013

Microsoft quietly released SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2013 as a separate download a couple of days ago: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42313. No blog post or anything yet that goes through all of the features, so my assumption is it just adds the same functions that SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2012 does for the latest version of Visual Studio (at least until later this year when Visual Studio 2014 is released). I also assume that this adds support for SQL Server 2014 BI, same as the previous updates for SSDT have done now for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013.

Just for review, SSDT-BI is for SSAS, SSIS and SSRS development. For database projects, they have now built that functionality back into all versions of Visual Studio 2013 (available as a separate download for Visual Studio 2012) and can be updated via Visual Studio 2013 directly. For more updates on SSDT, make sure you follow the SQL Server Data Tools Team blog.

Update: At about the same time I posted this Kasper de Jonge posted about SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2013. Biggest disappointment is that there is NO backwards compatibility with SSIS 2012 or SSIS 2008R2 projects, so if you are only doing SSIS development on previous versions of SQL Server, don't jump on this upgrade just yet. No explanation was given for this incompatibility or if it will be fixed in a future update. Just keeps getting more and more complicated.

SSDT SQL Server 2014 Update

Microsoft has announced that a new version of SSDT for Visual Studio 2012 is now available for download and that an update for Visual Studio 2013 will be released through the update tools built into VS 2013. This new version adds support for SQL Server 2014, which will be available next Tuesday (April 1st). Along with support for SQL Server 2014 there are some new features in SSDT, including:

• Filtering Data when using View Data - filter the rows shown and even hide columns along with applying aliases to columns and sorting the data by columns
• Azure Integration - Add and connect to Azure databases without needing to setup firewall rules or other complicated network setup
• Change T-SQL Query Connections - Change the database that the query window is current attached to so that you can execute the same query against another database without having to disconnect and connect

There are few other new features that I have not mentioned, make to check out the SQL Server Data Tools Team blog for more details!

This release is for the data tools portion of SSDT only, SSDT-BI for SSAS, SSIS and SSRS development will be released separately at a later date.

More SSDT Changes

I just realized after an exchange on Twitter that I had not posted about the recent announcements about the recent changes to SSDT!

Previously I posted about the split of the Business Intelligence projects from SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) into SSDT-BI when CTP1 of SQL Server 2014 was released in June. As I mentioned back then I thought this was a strange idea that SSDT needed to be split up this way since we had BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio) back in the SQL Server 2005/2008 days and when SQL Server 2012 was coming out they changed that name to SSDT and added the database projects to it as well as all of the BI projects (SSAS, SSIS and SSRS). Now, with SQL Server 2014 it looks like the teams at Microsoft have again decided that these tools need to be split up even with some of the database project functions being included with Visual Studio 2013 at release.

I don't know about any of the behind the scenes stuff that might be going on at Microsoft related to this, but just be aware with SQL Server 2014 there are 2 separate tools and neither of them will be included in the installer (at least as of the last few weeks of posts that I have seen on the Microsoft blogs). You will have to download SSDT and/or SSDT-BI separately from the web. Also there is even more confusion over what you are able to have integrated into the different versions of Visual Studio with Visual Studio 2013 now available.

To help clear up the picture a bit, check out this blog post from Matt Masson from the Microsoft SSIS team: http://www.mattmasson.com/2013/10/sql-server-data-tools-business-intelligence-downloads/. This picture should get much clearer in the next months as SQL Server 2014 is finally released. Also, here is a good post from the SQL Server Blog that also gives all of the download links for SSDT and SSDT-BI as it stands right now: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2013/11/13/microsoft-sql-server-data-tools-update.aspx.

As always I will keep up with all of the news around SSDT and SSDT-BI as I use those tools a lot today and I'm very curious how it will all work with SQL Server 2014 and on.

SQL Server 2014 CTP1 & SQL Server Data Tools June 2013 Update

At the beginning of the month I posted about the next version of SQL Server being called SQL Server 2014, well now the first publicly available build of it is available for download! You can download it from this link along with a post about the new features included. To download it you will need to have a TechNet or MSDN subscription, which I have recommended for anyone that works with the Microsoft server technologies before to keep up with the latest versions.

There is also a good blog posts about getting started with the new in-memory OLTP in SQL Server 2014 (previously called Hekaton) by the SQL Server database team. I'm sure that there will be more of these posts for the other new features in SQL Server 2014 over time. If you have access to an Azure account you can now also create a VM with SQL Server 2014 CTP1 via a template, which is a really quick way to get a new server setup to test out.

And for those that are using SQL Server 2012 a new update to SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) has also been updated with the new June 2013 update. New features added include Data Compare, Extensibility and Build & Deployment Contributors and a few others. When you go to the download page you will also notice that there is a separate download for what is now being called SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2012. Not sure why Microsoft is doing this, but yet again the BI functions look like they are being separated out into separate downloads. This goes against everything that I thought SSDT was going to fix with it being a single tool, but I'm guessing the different groups in Microsoft are having issues working together to provide a single download for all functions in SSDT, which is too bad.