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.

SQLSaturday 285 Atlanta - #sqlsatatl

SQLSaturday #285 in Atlanta is this Saturday! I will be attending #SQLSATATL for the first time and presenting my "SSIS 2012: More Than Just a Pretty UI" session at 2:30pm in the ETL Room #211 (please check the Schedule page on the website or the Guidebook app just in case it changes). This is one of my favorite sessions, since it only has 2 slides, the rest is all demos! If you haven't seen the new features added in SSIS 2012, this session will give you a demo of as many of them as I can get through in the time allocated.

If you are going to be in the Atlanta area this Saturday, you should register and attend this FREE event that is put on by volunteers with speakers from all over. SQLSaturdays are always a great event to learn new stuff and do a lot of networking with your fellow peers! Also, don't forget to stop by the sponsor area and see what they have to offer, without these awesome sponsors we would not be able to put on these great events.

See you in Atlanta!

Power Map Updates

Microsoft just announced on the Power BI blog that the April update for Power Map is available for all Office 365 subscribers. This update adds the capability to add sound to any Power Map videos you export out of Power Map. They have also added some Geocoding updates that are detailed on the blog post as well.

The biggest change that is mentioned is that the Power Map Preview that has been available as a separate download for Excel 2013 will no longer expire on May 31, 2014! They plan to put out an updated version of this standalone add-in that will not expire in May. They are still recommending that this add-in not be used in production environment, but this does give you the capability to use Power Map without an Office 365 account in Excel 2013. Not sure what this means feature wise for Power Map Preview, my guess is that they will not keep it up-to-date, for that you will have to get an Office 365 subscription (highly recommended by me, as I have the Home subscription that allows for 5 desktop installs along with 5 tablet and the new iPad versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint).

Accelerate Your Insights

If you missed the live stream of the SQL Server 2014 launch event in San Francisco earlier this week, it is now available for on-demand viewing on Microsoft's Accelerate Your Insights page. Great overview of the new data platform and BI updates that are all part of this new release of SQL Server and other platform updates. Interesting news that came out of this event was the re-branding of PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse) as APS (Analytics Platform System) as it now is not limited to just hosting a PDW region on the appliance but also a Hadoop region on the same appliance. This should help to sell these appliances even more as you can use the same appliance for both "un-structured" and structured data and be able to do analysis across both regions using the same tools we are used to including Excel.

The biggest feature that is being focused on for SQL Server 2014 is having In-Memory available on the entire platform and the huge performance improvements that brings. In-Memory was first introduced in SQL Server 2012 but was a read-only index, now it can be clustered and fully update-able, which makes it a huge change to how you can access the data in the databases. Looking forward to working with clients to enable these features as it really does push SQL Server to the forefront of enterprise databases.

Note: If you have any issues with the videos not streaming smoothly (as I had) you can just right click on the video window and save the MPEG-4 video files locally.

SQLSaturday #297

SQLSaturday #297 in Colorado Springs is this coming Saturday! If you haven't registered yet, why not? It's a free event that has the best SQL Server professionals traveling from all over to present and attend this awesome event. If you able to make into Colorado Springs by Saturday, you should be at the event! I will be presenting "Capture Change and Apply it With Change Data Capture & SSIS" at 3:15pm (keep your eyes on the schedule page or use the Guidebook app to track any changes to the schedule). I'm looking forward to seeing everyone this Saturday, make sure you register and support all of the sponsors of this event when you are there.

Below are some more details from Chris Shaw's blog about the food drive that is also being done as part of the event:

What we are asking is that when you come to the event on April 12th that you bring with you food items that you would like to donate the more items that you bring the better your odds are in taking home one of these awesome SWAG items. We will soon be sending everyone who is signed up more details on individuals can participate in our food drive. You don’t have to bring any food items to be registered for the giveaways and there will be opportunities to participate in our Data-Rodeo for additional chances to win. Why a Data-Rodeo you ask? This year’s theme in going to be centered around the old west, our event will be taking place in a historical building that is over 100 years old, in the heart of the oldest part of town.

See y'all on Saturday!

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.