SQLSaturday #190 Denver This Weekend!

SQLSaturday #190 Denver 2013 is this Saturday, September 28th! The Denver SQL Server User Group and volunteers have been working really hard to put together the best SQL Server training day in the area, so why have you not registered yet? The event is completely FREE and supported by the best sponsors in the business. Come to learn, share and network with 200+ other SQL Server professionals with 30+ different sessions in 6 separate tracks. For just $10 you can also stay right where you are and get a great lunch (it will not be pizza, we promise). At the end of the day we will have lots of great prizes to raffle off from all of the sponsors. And if you want to network even more we will have an After Party at Darcy's Bistro & Pub with some appetizers.

If you want even more training we are offering pre-cons this year as well on Friday, September 27th for $125. For that you get a full day of training in one of the 3 sessions that we are offering along with lunch and snacks/refreshments available throughout the day. The 3 sessions we are offering this year are:

• Predictive Analytics in the Enterprise by Carlos Bossy
• Real World SSIS: A Survival Guide by Tim Mitchell
• SQL Server Internals from the Practical Angle by Dmitri Korotkevitch

If you haven't registered yet for any of this great training, go to http://denversqlsaturday.com now!

Building a Technical Presentation - Part 3

After a longer delay than I wanted, it's the final part of my Building a Technical Presentation series! If you missed Part 1 or Part 2, see those links to catch-up.

Practice, Practice, Practice and Practice Some More!

The biggest key to success with presenting that I have learned over the years is that the more practice you can do the better you will feel when it is time to do the presentation. Most of the time that I have been really nervous for a presentation is when I have not practiced the presentation enough or it has been a longer break from presenting. I actually had that happen just this last weekend at SQLSaturday #191 in Kansas City. I was doing a presentation that I have done at least 5 times now, so it was nothing to do with not knowing the material, but it was just because it had been a few months since I was at a SQLSaturday and presenting in front of people. The nervousness only lasted for the first few minutes of the presentation, but it was a weird feeling that I don't recall having in the recent past since I have been presenting pretty regularly this year.

So, you might ask how do I practice? Well everyone does it a little different and you will have to find the way that works best for you. For a lot of people they will stand in front of a mirror and do the presentation or use a video camera or even do it in front of friends/family. I have found that I can practice in my head and it comes off as well as I expect, but that has only come after a few years of doing presentations. The most important thing is to find the way that works best for you and do it, trying to do a presentation cold, without practice is not recommended unless it is something that you are EXTREMELY comfortable talking about (or it is a panel discussion or something like that which really requires no preparation).

Presenting

The next thing that will happen, is to actually do the presentation! Hopefully you have had the chance to get to the room you are going to the presentation early to make sure you understand how things are setup. Leave yourself plenty of time to get your laptop setup and test the connections to the projectors. If you are going to be using a microphone, that is another good thing to make sure you have time to test out and get connected correctly, nothing throws me off faster than fighting with a mic to get it working. Same goes for making sure your slides are working and showing up correctly on the projector.

If you have some time with the people in your presentation before the session starts and there won't be a formal introduction, it might be a good time to do some conversation starters or what some call, "Breaking the Ice". That can help both you and the crowd get relaxed and ready for you to present to them. I like to try and do it sometimes as it does help to take your mind off of the presentation for a few minutes, especially if you are extremely nervous.

As you were practicing, hopefully you worked on not putting in a bunch of "umhs" and "ahs" that are typical time fillers you might say as you are trying to think of the next thing to say. Don't feel like you have to fill every single second of a presentation with your voice, a few pauses are natural and good for the audience as it gives them time to "digest" what you just said. It also gives the audience a chance to ask some questions, assuming you are going to take questions during the session. When questions are being asked it is a good time to take a drink of water to help calm your nerves as well.

Once you have finished your presentation don't forget to thank the audience for attending your session and this is also a good time to thank the selection committee for the event, if appropriate.

Feedback

After you have completed the presentation you will probably be on a bit of a "rush" as your adrenaline will still be flowing and hopefully it all went well. Now you will want to hear from others how you did, hopefully you will get some people that come up to you and tell you how it went, but you can also ask those that you know what they thought too. Another great way to get feedback is to use sites that specialize in that, like speakerrate.com, which I have used for years to track my presentations. This does require that people go to the site and fill it out which can be difficult to get them to do especially when there is no internet access. Some of the events that you go to will provide speaker feedback forms, so you can either collect those at the end of the presentation or the event will collect them and provide the results to you. It is always good to keep track of how well you are doing. Try not to take all of the feedback too personally, some people will be a bit rough, and others will not give a lot of details, so take it all together to help you improve.

Demos/VMs

For this series of posts I wanted to focus on just the speaking and presenting fundamentals for those that have not presented before. The big step that you eventually need to take with presenting will be doing live demos along with talking about topics. While this can be very scary to do, you can make it easier on yourself by making sure that the environment you do these demos in is stable and repeatable. I switched many years ago from doing any demos on the actual laptop or computer that I have connected for the presentation, just because of the stability issues as you usually have lots of other programs running in the background on your main computer (think about Dropbox, backup and virus scanners, IM programs, etc. that are all running in the background). Instead of trying to remember to manually stop all of these programs before you start your presentation, I have switched to using only Virtual Machines or VMs for my demos. The reason I do this is because the VM is something that I build, so it gives me the experience on installing all of these programs and also I make sure to only install what I need in those VMs. And for me the best feature of VMs is that you can setup what are called Snapshots in most VM hosting programs, where the disk image is "frozen" to that point in time and you can just restore back to that before you start your presentation so that you know everything is reset to the way it all worked the last time.

I have tried just about all of the VM hosting applications out there over the years and I have been using Oracle's free VirtualBox for the last 3 years without any issues. Previously I was doing a lot of my demos on a Mac and using either VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop and both worked perfectly fine on the Mac, so if you are using a Mac I can recommend both of those, along with VirtualBox which also runs on the Mac. For the last couple of years I have been using Windows laptops, so I did try Microsoft's Hyper-V, but found that it was not built to work well with a laptop, since it has issues with wireless networking and display resolutions. Hopefully with some of the future upgrades to Windows maybe I can switch back to Hyper-V, but at this point I'm using VirtualBox exclusively.

For whatever VM program you do choose, the other big hurdle will be where to get your licenses to install Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, etc. As I have mentioned in previous posts I do have a personal TechNet subscription that provides those for me, but that program is being phased out. You can use the evaluation versions of Microsoft server software in your VMs, with the warning that those are time-bombed, so make sure you do check before you do your presentation that you still have time left. Otherwise you hopefully have access to an MSDN membership through your work. I still have hopes that Microsoft will come out with some membership that does not require as much cost as MSDN in the next year to replace TechNet, but no word yet on that.

Conclusion

So that covers everything that I have been thinking about to put into this series of posts and helps to document how I go through the process of creating new technical presentations and then some tips on actually doing the presentations themselves. Thanks for following along with this series and I hope that you found it useful. The best thing that I can hope comes out of this series is if even one person that has not presented before uses this to help them put together their first presentation. If you do that, please feel free to contact me with any feedback!

SQLSaturday #191 & PASS Summit 2013

For those that are in the Kansas City area, I'll be there this weekend to speak and enjoy the area (hopefully getting to ride some coasters at Worlds of Fun too). So, if you are in the area, make sure you stop by to see my session in the Amazon room at 11:15am on SQL CDC and SSIS 2012, titled "Capture Change and Apply it With Change Data Capture and SSIS". Currently registration for the event is full, but you can get in on the wait list. Hope to see you all there! This is my 2nd year in a row at the KC SQLSaturday event, so I'm really looking forward to catching up everyone that I know in the area, and meet a bunch of new ones too.

Today, PASS released the full schedule for PASS Summit 2013 in Charlotte, NC where I will also be presenting! I have attended the PASS Summit every year since 2007 when it was in my backyard at Denver. This year I'm really excited that I get to join the long list of great speakers, while I'm only doing a Lightning Talk session (10 minutes or shorter presentations) this year, I'm hoping that will lead to being chosen for regular sessions in the future. My presentation titled, "Master the Date Dimension Like a Time Lord" will be on Wednesday, October 16th at 3:00pm in 212A-B in the Lightning Talk 101 or LT-101 session. I have made a point of attending the Lightning Talk sessions over the last few years, because it is a great way to see new speakers and lots of great quick presentations in just a single session (yes, I know there are 2 separate Lightning Talk sessions, LT-102 is on Thursday, same time, same room with fellow Coloradan, Jeff Renz presenting).

Road Warrior Gadgets

I found a few gadgets that I have been using on my business trips that I wanted to show to everyone else hoping that it will help you as much as they have helped me!

Asus WL-330NUL Multi-Mode Pocket Router

I heard about this small ASUS router from Larry Hryb (Microsoft Xbox's Major Nelson) on his podcast, episode #485 as he was listing off a few different portable routers he has tried. He has since mentioned a few others, but I bought this one based on the details on the ASUS and Amazon pages and reviews and the size and cost.

This little device that is no bigger then a pack of gum and does 4 different things and does them all very easily! First off it only has 2 connections. On one end is the USB cord that nicely folds up into the device when not in use, but it is a very short cord. The other end is a standard ethernet port.

Now onto what this micro sized device does! The 4 functions that it can do are:

1. Portable Wireless Router (wired to wi-fi)
2. Hot Spot Sharing (wi-fi to wi-fi)
3. USB Ethernet Adapter (wired to USB)
4. Wireless Adapter (wi-fi to USB)

So far, I have been able to test it in the first 3 modes.

Mode #1 is great in a hotel where you have a wired connection, which is usually faster and more reliable than the wi-fi that you can connect up to and share with up to 8 devices. And the best part is you only have to login to the hotel's network setup once and it then it just works on all of the devices!

Mode #2 is also pretty cool when you are using wi-fi in a hotel or anywhere else and you want to share it with up to 8 devices and login only once (same a Mode #1).

Mode #3 works just as you would expect, just plug it into the USB slot and then use it as a regular ethernet adapter. This mode works perfectly for my Macbook Air in both Windows 8 and OSX, that does not come with a ethernet port at all. Mode #4 should work the same as the wired ethernet adapter, just that it functions as a wi-fi adapter. The only downside about using Modes #3 and #4 with OSX is to make sure you download the latest drivers from the ASUS site. For Windows just plug it into a USB slot and it has the drivers on the device (you may still want to download the latest version from the website though).

Awesome device and the fact that I can just plug into hotel wired networking and plug it into a USB power plug to power it and be up and running in minutes on all of my devices is just awesome! Also a little bit of a tip that I learned from the Major Nelson Radio podcast is to set the SSID on this device to the same SSID you use at home with the same password, then you don't even have to setup a new wi-fi connection, it should just see it and connect to it just as if you were at home! Probably one of the best devices I've bought recently, especially with as much as I rely on hotel wi-fi when I travel. And it only cost around $40!

Google Chromecast

I'm sure by now most of you have heard of the Google Chromecast, which is an HDMI connector that allows you to "push" internet content from your devices to the TV. The one thing that I wanted to bring up is how to use this in a hotel! When I first ordered this I had my doubts that I could get this working with hotel wi-fi, and I have not yet tried to connect it directly to the hotel wi-fi and you probably don't want to since it would possibly be visible to everyone else on the same wi-fi. What I have been able to do is use the ASUS WL-330NUL detailed above as the wi-fi connection in Mode #1 or Mode #2! Again if you setup the ASUS wi-fi SSID to the same as you home wi-fi network there should be no reason why you can't unplug the Chromecast from home and just take it with you (I just ended up getting 2 of them, one for home and one for travel. Again, another very cheap device at only $35! The only downside to the Chromecast is that most older TVs do not have power thru the HDMI port, so you will have to use the provided USB cable and power plug to get it up and running (micro USB plugs into the other end of the device).

Once you get the Chromecast up and running on the TV it is very easy to send any video content from YouTube, Netflix and others that are adding support for it. The difference in how the Chromecast works over other similar devices/protocols (like Apple's Airplay) is that the actual video processing and streaming is off-loaded from your device to the Chromecast itself (this is why it needs it's own wi-fi connection). This makes it so that you can do whatever else you want with your device/laptop and even queue up more content to the Chromecast and then use your device for whatever else you want. I have been considering buying another Apple TV or Roku to take with me on trips, but now the Chromecast has filled this need and is much smaller than either of those options!

SanDisk Connect 32GB Wireless Flash Drive (SDWS2-032G-E57)

The last device I wanted to cover is these new flash drives from SanDisk, called the SanDisk Connect, that have built-in wi-fi for some of the same functionality I already covered in the ASUS WL-330NUL above. But, this one also has a micro SD port that allows you to change out the storage up to 64GB at a time. It still functions just like any other flash drive, but the storage is swappable and the device does have a battery built in that allows for up to 4 hours of wi-fi sharing! This is pretty cool, gives me the perfect way to carry around all of my music, video and pictures as I travel. Now while a lot may be saying that you use various cloud solutions for that and while I agree, I also see this as a backup to that and a much easier way to get to it if there is no open wi-fi. If you have an iOS device you can download the SanDisk Connect app and it will allow you to read/write content directly from those devices. I think that there is also an Android app, but those of us with Windows Phones will have to use the built in website, which doesn't allow for uploading. It does still have a USB port although it is only USB 2.0 so copying a lot of content to it can take awhile (a very long time for 64GB). The other warning is that the micro SD must be using exFAT for the filesystem in order for it work with this SanDisk device you CANNOT reformat the micro SD to another format.





The other thing that I will add that I found cool is a credit card sized storage for up to 8 micro SD cards that I also carry around with the SanDisk Connect. For those that want something a bit bigger that uses full size SD cards, there is also the SanDisk Connect Media Drive.







Hopefully these devices might help you get through the pains of travel a bit better, feel free to share out the link to this post to anyone that will benefit from it! :)

I promise I'll be back soon with the 3rd and final part of my Building a Technical Presentation series, make sure you read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't yet.

SQL Community Updates

Just a few quick updates on things going on with the #SQLFamily!

SQLSaturday #190 Denver Pre-Cons

We are offering pre-cons for the first time this year at SQLSaturday #190 in Denver on Friday, September 27th. There are 3 different pre-cons to choose from and they are priced at $99 until 8/31 on 9/1 the early bird price will expire and the cost will go up to $125, so register before 8/31! Below are the 3 pre-cons we are offering:




Carlos Bossy - Predictive Analytics in the Enterprise 
Tim Mitchell - Real World SSIS: A Survival Guide 
Dmitri Korotkevitch - SQL Server Internals from the Practical Angle

Go to http://denversqlsaturday.com for more details and to register for the pre-cons and the SQLSaturday itself on Saturday, September 28th!


SQLSaturday #237 Charlotte BI Edition

If you are in the Charlotte area for PASS Summit 2013, stick around through the weekend and come to SQLSaturday #237 on Saturday, October 19th. I am honored that I have been selected to present my "SSIS 2012: More Than Just a Pretty UI" session at the event. Looking forward to seeing everyone that was at PASS Summit earlier in the week and those that were not able to attend Summit.



Charlotte BI Group - October Meeting

And while I'm talking about the Charlotte area I am also planning on attending the Charlotte BI Group meeting on Tuesday, October 1st as well. I'll be in the Columbia, SC area that week, so why not spend some time with other #SQLFamily and get a preview of what Melissa, Jason and Rafael will be presenting at PASS Summit a couple of weeks later!

Charlotte BI Group - August Meeting

I had the pleasure of presenting my "Capture Change and Apply It with Change Data Capture and SSIS 2012" session at Tuesday evening's Charlotte BI Group to a full room with lots of great questions asked by the attendees. For those that attended, thank you very much for your comments and questions and to the organizers of the group: Javier, Melissa, Jason and Rafael thank you all for letting me present and meet with your group.

For those that want to see the slides that I presented and try out the demos that I showed in the presentation, below is a link to download everything.


The requirements for these samples to work are SQL Server 2012 Evaluation, Developer or Enterprise Editions, AdventureWorks2012 and AdventureWorks2012DW. Also as I mentioned in the session you must have full admin rights to the SQL Server instance that you are going to try and setup CDC on, so a local instance on your own workstation/VM is recommended.

Thanks again and I will see you all again in October at PASS Summit 2013 in Charlotte and/or SQLSaturday #237!

Building a Technical Presentation - Part 2

For Part 2 of my Building a Technical Presentation series, I'm going to cover getting all of the ideas for your presentation together and creating the slides. If you missed Part 1 of this series, click here.

Putting Thoughts Together

After coming up with the Subject of your presentation we covered in Part 1, hopefully you also had a bunch of ideas on what you want to cover in your presentation. I have used multiple different tools to capture all of these ideas in the past, including pen & paper, Notepad and Evernote. Lately, I have just started to put these ideas into PowerPoint directly since that is where they will end up for the presentation anyway. I'll just start to put all of the ideas down on a basic bullet list template in PowerPoint and maybe try to start organizing them into a rough outline of what I want the presentation to cover. Do worry too much at this stage to get everything in the correct order or even on slides that make sense, at this stage it's more about just getting all of your ideas down. Try not to edit this too much, even the things that you think are not going to be a great idea may help you come up with something else later on, so put it all down.

Creating the Slideshow

Now that you have most of the ideas together for your presentation (you will not have everything at this point as you will always come up with new items as you build/practice it) it's time to start making the slides that you will use for this presentation. There are some presentations that will not have many slides and others that you might end up with way too many. It is hard to strike that proper balance and only after presenting multiple times will you start to get a feel for your pace. My general rule of thumb is to not try and do more than 5 or 6 slides for a 45-60 minute presentation, when there is a demo involved. As I mentioned in Part 1 you should not push yourself into doing your first presentations with live demos, so the number of slides will be higher if you are presenting in a 45-60 minute slot. As a rule of thumb for myself I know that I will usually talk on each slide for an average of 5 minutes.

The easiest way to start building your slideshow is to start with the title slide. I like to keep it simple, just the title as you submitted the session in large text to make it very clear. Keep in mind that this will probably be the slide that you will pull up before you start your presentation, so you can add some graphics and animation to catch people's attention as you are waiting for the session time to begin and the attendees to take their seats. You should also put your name on this slide along with some basic info like your title and company that you work for (or get a company slide template that has the logo on it, then you can skip typing the company name on your intro slide).

For my presentations I tend to use the bulleted list format for most of my slides, if the material on the slide lends itself to a table, chart or graph I will do that as well. The biggest thing to keep in mind with the text that you put on slide is to not put every word you are going to say on it, use the text on the slide to be summary of what you are going to talk about. Some like to use pictures or other graphics and animations to "spice" up their presentations, but that is completely up to you and how you think the audience you are presenting this to will take that. I think that this is another thing that you will start to use more as you get more comfortable presenting and using the tool to build your slideshow in. Also keep in mind that the more this "spice" you add to the presentation is more of the time that they are not paying complete attention to you and maybe even what you are saying. Just keep the amount of text on these slides to a minimum as much as possible, you want them to be used for you and the audience to keep track of where you are in the presentation and to get the summary points for notes. You don't want to put so much text on them that the audience feels they need to read everything on the slide instead of listening to you.

Along with adding graphics and animations to your slideshow the next big debate is over manually advancing your slides or having them automatically timed. I have yet to do a presentation where I use automatically timed slides, but is becoming a more popular way to do presentations, especially when you have a lot to cover in a short time. Automatically timed slides as you can imagine require a lot of preparation ahead of time to make sure you are in sync with the slides. The big issue with this type of presentation is that you will need to let everyone know to hold questions for the end or have a way to pause it to take questions. Some presenters love doing it this way, as it helps them to keep on time and make sure that they cover everything. That last point is where I think this method goes wrong, I like to make my presentations dynamic and I know that I have never covered the material in my presentations the same way twice. Keeping the audience involved is important and by them not being able to ask questions will make it very hard for them to stay involved.

Dedicate the last couple of slides in your presentation to a quick summary slide, which allows you to go over all of the points you covered. Also put in a slide with your contact info, email, blog address, social networking details, etc. and make sure to mention if you are going to post your slides or extra material to your blog or other site and give them that address and when to look for it.

Now that you have your slides completed you should put the tool into presentation mode and click through each slide to make sure that everything flows well and that you don't have too much detail on the slides. Make sure to read through everything on the slides or even have a friend/family member go through them to make sure you didn't make any silly mistakes. At this time you may have too few or too many slides, which is fine we will get into fine tuning this in the next part of this series.

I'm Speaking at PASS Summit 2013!

While I didn't make the cut for the regular sessions at PASS Summit 2013, I have been selected to speak in one of the two Lightning Talk sessions that will be during the conference on October 15-18 in Charlotte, NC! If you haven't yet registered for the conference, use the code SUM521CH to get $150 off.

I'm beyond excited to finally get to present at the PASS Summit, which I have been attending regularly since 2007. I don't yet know the details of which of the two Lightning Talk sessions I will be in, but as soon as I get those details I'll post an update here. I'm also very happy that they chose the funnest of the sessions that I submitted, which is titled "Master the Date Dimension Like a Time Lord". If you read my blog post on Monday then you already know that this session will be related to a regular presentation that I'm already working on for User Groups & SQLSaturdays (I actually submitted it as a regular session for PASS Summit as well).

Hope to see you all in Charlotte for PASS Summit 2013 and if you are coming, come and say hi!

I also got news last night that I will be presenting at SQLSaturday #191 in Kansas City on September 14th! This will be the 2nd year that I have presented at the Kansas City SQL Saturday, so I'm really looking forward to seeing familiar faces there in September. I will be presenting my CDC/SSIS 2012 session titled, "Capture Change and Apply it With Change Data Capture & SSIS".

Building a Technical Presentation - Part 1

I've been looking for something that I could do a multi-part series on with my blog for a few months now and as I started work on a brand new presentation I thought that would be a perfect subject! While I will always encourage people to get into presenting, it can be a bit daunting for anyone that has not done them before or you did them a long time ago (high school or college). Hopefully this series will help you get started on your first presentation and give it at a local user group in the near future!

Subject

As you might expect the first thing that you need to come up with for a presentation is a subject. When coming up with a subject for a technical presentation it can be very broad or specific depending on the time that you have available for the presentation. You can speak about a lot more in a 60 minute slot then you can in a 10 minute one. I have actually found over the years of presenting that I have done now that the longer the time slot the easier it is to come up with something, where the shorter slots require you to really have the details worked out. This might seem counter to how you might think it would go if you have not presented before, but once you get comfortable with presenting you will find that once you get started it will be easy to go for 60 minutes or more on a subject that you know a lot about.

The other thing to keep in mind when choosing a subject is whether or not you will do any demos in the presentation. When you are just starting out with presentations, especially technical presentations I would recommend staying away from doing live demos in your presentations until you are more comfortable. Live demos add a whole set of issues that are very different from just a standard presentation and I will cover that in a later part of this series. For first time presenters I would suggest coming up with something that you can cover by just talking and presenting slides, maybe even a video. Watch out with videos that they aren't too long and if they have audio that the audience needs to hear keep in mind that is time you are not presenting anything. For first time presenters you can use screenshots to cover the step-by-step process, instead of doing a live demo.

When choosing a subject for your presentation it is important to keep in mind what the audience is for the presentation and also if you plan on presenting it in different forums (webinars, user group, SQLSaturday, conferences, etc.). I try to make the subjects that I pick general enough in the early stages that I can mold the presentation to fit different forums and time slots as much as possible. I know that sounds like a lot to think of right from the start, but if you can keep all of this in mind it should help you create a presentation that you will be able to use in a variety of places. Along those lines, I almost never create a new presentation with the thought that I will only present it once. The only way that you are going to make yourself more comfortable presenting is to have something that you can do over and over again. As with everything else in life the more times you do the same thing the better it gets.

You would be amazed at the ways that you can find the subject for a presentation. I have spent hours just sitting down hoping that something will come to me and coming up with nothing and then as I'm sitting down watching TV or reading an idea will pop in my head. The idea for the subject of the presentation that I'm currently working on which inspired this series actually came up in a dinner conversation with a friend as we were talking about past projects. I remembered a specific project I was working on and as I described it to him he mentioned that I should write a blog post about it. I didn't think much about it at the time, but later that night it came to me that while it might make a great blog post it would also make a great presentation. The subject that I came up with was how to create a date/time dimension for a data warehouse, but make it easy to create, update and be reuseable. Sounds simple enough, which is what can make for great presentations, it is something just about everyone needs if they are creating a data warehouse, but they don't want to spend a lot of time on it. It is a broad enough subject that I can create a variety of different versions and it will also have some good demos/scripts that can be used by the attendees.

Title 

So, now that you have some subjects in mind for your presentation you can start to think about titles for your presentation. Depending on the presentation that I'm working on sometimes this comes out right away and other times it may take more time and I have even changed the title of a presentation after giving it a few times because I think that the new title is better. Do sweat it if you can't come up with the title right away, start working on the other pieces of it that I will go over in future parts and I'm sure that something will come up the more you work on it.

Some of the things to keep in mind when you are trying to come up with a title for your presentation is if there are any letter/word limits on the length of it. Depending on where you are planning on presenting this presentation you may find different submission rules for titles. For example, user groups won't really care how long your title is, but if you submit to conferences like SQLSaturday or PASS Summit there are limits and it is generally less than 100 characters. While that sounds like a lot you will find that it can be hard to convey everything you want in the title with that few characters. Thankfully it is rare it is just the title that people will see, usually there is also a session summary that will be many more characters in length that you can use (we will talk about writing these summaries/abstracts in a future part of this series).

There is always a debate on it the title of your presentation should be something witty or funny, especially for technical presentations. This really depends on what your audience for the presentation is, as you do more presentations you will get a better feeling for how comfortable you are with doing titles that might be less serious. I tend to change this up depending on what the subject of my presentation is and where I'm planning on presenting it. SQLSaturdays are a great example of it being like a major conference, but since it is on a Saturday it tends to be more relaxed, so funny/witty titles are more the norm. For a conference like PASS Summit they tend to not be so witty, but if you become known as a speaker that does those kind of presentations then using a witty title will work there as well.

As I mentioned at the top of this I decided on this series as I started working on a new presentation. This presentation that I'm working on is a completely atypical for my presentations, in that I came up with the title for it before I had most of the details for the presentation worked out. Don't get me wrong, I had the subject that I was thinking about, but I had not fully fleshed that out when the title came to me. The first thing that I came up with for this presentation title is because of an acronym. For those of you that don't know me so well, I am a big Science Fiction geek, my dad took me to see Star Wars on opening weekend when I was almost 6 years old (this is the FIRST Star Wars, later re-titled Episode IV, not this prequel stuff), so that had a huge impact on me and to this day I am a big Star Wars geek (yes, I'm very comfortable calling myself a geek). As I was thinking about this new presentation I was also thinking about the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who this year. If you follow Doctor Who you know that it is a time travel series with a character called The Doctor that cannot die of old age and in fact regenerates with each new actor that takes over the role (convenient plot idea to keep a show alive for 50 years). The "ship" that The Doctor uses for time travel is called the TARDIS which is an acronym that stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. So, when I knew that I wanted to do this presentation on how to easily create a date/time dimension in a data warehouse I knew that I had to work The Doctor in somehow! The first version of the title I came up with was "TARDDISS: Time And Real Date Dimensions In SQL Server", while clever I wanted to see if I could make it so it didn't sound like a snake was pronouncing this title. After some thinking I came up with "TARDDIS: Time And Reuseable Date Dimensions In Script", this title helped get rid of 2nd 'S' and also does a much better job of stating what the presentation is about.

That is the first part of this series, in the coming parts of this series I plan to walk through the steps that I follow to create this new TARDDIS presentation. The next part will focus on pulling together your thoughts for the presentation and creating the slideshow.

Power BI for Office 365

Sorry, I'm a little late with putting up this announcement, but I was really busy today so this is the first chance I have had to put up my thoughts on the new Microsoft Office BI announcement from the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston today.

For those that have not heard, Microsoft just turned the whole BI (Business Intelligence) world on it's head! First there were a couple of preview products that now have new official names:

• GeoFlow is now called Power Map, it is a mapping tool built into Excel 2013 that adds some great capabilities that were not previously available
• Data Explorer is now called Power Query, it is a tool for discovering, accessing and combining data from multiple different sources (online, private or enterprise)

These new offerings go along with PowerPivot and Power View that are already built into Excel 2013. All of these tools together are now going to be called Power BI and they will all only be available in Excel for Office 365! With these being all offered together in Office 365 they are also going to make all of them HMTL5 compatible, meaning that any mobile device or browser will be able to use all of the functions! Yes, that does include the iPad and Android tablets! As long as the browser can properly process HTML5 it should work. Another interesting offering as part of Power BI is Q&A, which is a new natural language querying language that you will be able to use to create quick graphs and charts based on a question.

All of this is a big deal for those of us that work in the Business Intelligence business because it is a huge push into cloud and end-user/self-service BI by Microsoft. Previously a lot of the offerings have been in the Enterprise BI space with Reporting Services, Analysis Services and even the initial versions of PowerPivot and Power View in SharePoint. Now Microsoft is making a bold move to make the easy to use BI tools available in the tool that everyone in business uses on a daily basis, Excel. Now, it's not going to be in the same desktop version of Excel that most use, at first it will only be in Excel on Office 365. Nothing that I have read indicates that this will cost extra, and based on how Microsoft typically launches these kind of enhancements I don't think that it will cost extra for existing Office 365 subscribers. The only pieces of this that you can try today on your desktop versions of Excel 2013 are Power Query and Power Map (and of course PowerPivot and Power View that are already included), see the links to download the latest versions of both. You can provide your email to be notified when the preview is publicly available at this link.

Looking forward to being able to try all of this out as I just purchased an Office 365 subscription myself. I know that a lot of Enterprise customers will be very upset that all of these tools are only available in Office 365, but I think that this is a very smart move and I can't believe that it won't eventually end up in the desktop versions of Office at a point in the future.

Here is a link to Chris Webb's blog post from today about these announcements that also has some links to other posts for you to get even more details. As soon as the preview is available I will run it through it's paces and post about it here.