Categories
Business Intelligence

Day 2 Review #sqlpass #summit12

To follow up on my first post about day one of this years PASS Summit, here is how day two played out

The “keynote” here was some PASS discussions, then Quentin Clark (MSFT exec) and Julie Strauss (wicked smart) doing an end to end demo on many things.. Hadoop, Azure, Data Explorer, Power View, Excel, etc. The blogger table was pretty annoying with their tweets during the demo calling it out as boring and not what DBA’s want, failing to remember that half the conference is BI people. I think the demo was “dry” but they showed many things and tied it together. I saw Julie at TechEd and she knows what she is doing. Of course every year the blogger table is going to say “zoom” on the presentations, which yes, they should be doing, or changing resolution, but to see the bantering back and forth on twitter is just bad overall for the people attending and watching and looking for info. The blogger/twitter table should be relaying information that people at home are clamoring for, not bad mouthing the presentation/presenters.

I hit up 4 sessions in all on Thursday Nov 8th..

1. BID-307-M: Using Power View with Multidimensional Models

As with day one, I mentioned I try to get to presentations by Microsoft employees, today was no different. The first one being with Bob Meyers and Sivakumar Harinath. This was a deep dive into the newly announced functionality yet to be released or given a date that will let us hit OLAP cubes with Power View. Honestly I wish Microsoft would have released this from the get go. One thing I don’t understand though is why Power View uses DAX to hit OLAP and TABULAR, while Excel uses MDX to hit OLAP and TABULAR. Seems split brained to me. Choose one and go. Many audience questions in this one, and one downfall of Microsoft Employee presentations is that they have a hard time saying “no” and get into discussions with audience members, many times taking too much time on some specific question.

Presentation was good, and we learned some things. New dimension properties for ImageUrl, Geography (for mapping), etc. And what will and won’t work with Power View and OLAP. Good stuff.

2. BIA-400-HD: Enterprise Data Mining with SQL Server

This was a double session, and I just stayed for the first half. Mark Tabladillo (marktab) is a PhD so that tells you something. Data Mining in SSAS/SQL Server has always been an enigma since day one. I don’t know of many using it in real life (besides the AdventureWorks Demo?) – it is kind of SSAS Cube Writeback, awesome, but not widely used. He showed how you can use the SSAS Data Mining cubes and Excel Add in to do forecasting, basket analysis and how to get into some of the options and get data out yourself to make your own visualizations, pretty cool stuff, but like I said, I left half way through…

3. BIA-309-M: Enriching Your BI Semantic Tabular Models with DAX

I left the Data Mining session early to get a good seat for this presentation. Kasper de Jonge from Microsoft is one I always try to get to as he is wicked smart as well, and usually the presentations are awesome, this one was no different. Getting into the details with DAX and just seeing someone like Kasper use PowerPivot, Excel .. it shows how “he” would use it, being a program manager, which is different than most. Great to pick up tips/tricks and just see how he goes about doing even the basics. He even showed off the trick on changing the DAX on an imported table to a DAX query to get whatever you want back from your tabular cube, he has a blog post that I went through a while ago to the same effect, which was cool.

4. BIA-206-M: BI Power Hour

Finally to end the day..Matt Masson and Matthew Roche again, with Patrick LeBlanc, Peter Myers, Sean Boon and Chuck Heinzelman.

This presentation reminded me of a Brian Knight spectacular.. throwing trinkets, books, etc to audience, goofy stuff. Pretty funny, and they go through SharePoint, SSIS, PowerView etc. Very lighthearted and a good way to end a 2nd day on non-stop technical things. Matt Masson is probably a stand up comedian at night, just funny stuff. I have seen Chuck present before and he is good, Sean showed us some PowerPivot with Olympic data and Shark bite data, Patrick with a Windows Phone app and Azure and SQL Data Sync, Matt with SSIS data app, and Peter Myers filled in at the end by capturing data from the audience over mobile and slicing/dicing it. I have seen Peter before as well and he is very methodical, it was his first “power hour” and it showed, but hopefully he does it again and is a bit more prepared.

Thursday night was the appreciation night, and gather at the EMP (music museum) in Seattle. They shuttle you over and back. Two free drinks, food (I think I had mac and cheese 3 nights in a row for some reason last week), and you can tour around the museum. There was #SQLKaraoke, but the sanctioned one, not the one at Busch Gardens. Live band and you get to sing, pretty cool stage and everything. Again, bummer, my voice was out or I would have sang a tune.

So to wrap up my 2nd full day, BI, BI, BI all day. More to come with the last day and overall thoughts for this year.

Categories
Business Intelligence

Day 1 Review #sqlpass #summit12

This SQL PASS Summit was my third, and it was good. Kind of crazy timing as we just had a baby 2+ weeks ago, so I am very lucky I got to go.

Day one was Wednesday Nov 7th. There is a kickoff thing the night before which is always good to see everyone again, etc. There are pre-cons two days before (5th, 6th). Myself, as with many I talked to, came out the 5th, thinking the conference started the 6th, which we were mistaken, so it was kind of a free day, but still things going on. The website said 6th-9th so we all assumed without digging into the detail. At least I wasn’t the only one.

The first day keynote was good, Ted Kummert from Microsoft which I have seen a few times now, and the same cast of characters, Amir Netz showing off more Power View and Movie data. The big things announced that made me perk up were SQL Server 2012 SP1 and Power View over OLAP (coming soon?). No big flashy giveaways like BUILD, but good keynote, then the fun starts.

I attended 4 sessions on Wednesday

1. BIA-303: What’s New in Analysis Services 2012? – Chris Webb

This was my first session of the day, and it was in 305-TCC. TCC was across the street, which maybe was like that years past, but I never had to go to any, so everyone seemed lost. We finally got there, but then Chris Webb told us that the abstract was wrong in some places and the talk would mostly be about tabular, not multidimensional. Oh well, good stuff anyways. There was one slide about OLAP stuff. The biggest thing I got out of this was xEvents for SSAS, and how to pull into PowerPivot. This is the first time I have seen Chris Webb present and it was good.

2. BIA-316-M: Enterprise Information Management: Bringing Together SSIS, DQS, and MDS

For the second session, it was two Microsoft employees. I like to try to hit many sessions by Microsoft Employees because well, they usually have worked on the products, and they get into details, and they sometimes let some juicy details slip.

Matt Masson and Matthew Roche are great presenters, funny and play off each other. They showed and telled SQL Server 2012 MDS and DQS and discussed how it could and should be used in orgs. Master Data is a huge issue in many businesses and the Microsoft solution looks really good. Using DQS along with SSIS to clean your data, or as a very smart “spell checker”, and then MDS to track changes, workflow, and send back data to source systems if you’d like. The big thing here I took out was how they see MDS fitting into businesses, and that a BI team should implement MDS/DQS to make sure their dimensional data is clean and the “golden master” they need for great BI reporting, and updating back to source systems is a secondary thing.

3. BID-212-S: Around the World with SharePoint BI Toolbelt

This was a typical Brian Knight session. Not as huge of a production as some of them I have seen. Just him and his employee/bi architect and a helper/demo person.

They showed quickly how to get SharePoint setup for Excel Services and Power View and then did some demos. Overall good stuff but seemed a bit rushed and some things didn’t work. They demo’d PerformancePoint, which who knows what future that has, but seems like the best tool for OLAP scorecards in SharePoint. Performance Point has been an enigma for us to do anything with, not sure we ever will. I always see it demo’d and see the benefits, and see what it can do, but we never get around to doing it. Maybe someday, or maybe it will just get replaced by something..

As I said he brings up a sales person from his team or someone new to show how easy it is for a non-techie to use Power View (or whatever tool they present) and go through a little demo.

4. BID-102: Mobile Business Intelligence for Everyone, Now!

Final presentation of the day was with Jen Stirrup, who also won the PASSion award on Thursday. I also chatted with her briefly Wednesday morning, which was good as I haven’t met her before this summit. The presentation was OK. It was a 100 level, but I wanted to see some Mobile BI. I have some high expectations as I saw Jen Underwood present on Mobile BI at TechEd, so was expecting more of the same. Jen Underwood was actually in the audience and answered some audience questions.

The presentation had some technical glitches, and also dug a little to deep into visualization discussion, which is good, but I wasn’t expecting it in this one, maybe a different session. Jen showed some stuff on her iPad, and talked about how she uses Azure and SSRS in Azure, and also HostedPowerPivot, which was good stuff, but nothing new that I didn’t see at TechEd.

I use MobiSSRS for SSRS reports on iOS and that works great, she didn’t mention it, but Mobile BI presentations can get into the “3rd party app here and there” instead of what you can do out of the box. With mobile BI though, the first question is, “do you run SharePoint?” and the second is, “It is Enterprise?” because that makes a big difference in what you might try to do

Wednesday was a good day, I didn’t do much in the evening besides just grab a bite to eat and hit the hay. Bummer this year was that I started getting a cold on the way out on the plane, and it ate at my voice all week. Nothing to serious but enough to not want to talk in a pub about BI much as you have to yell.

More to come about Day 2 and Day 3, and overall thoughts..

Categories
Blogging

Publicize now for WordPress Hosted Blogs

This is just a test of the Publicize feature of Jetpack that supposedly works with WordPress.org/Hosted blogs.

Categories
Geeky/Programming Ramblings

No Laptop for a Week

This past week I went to the PASS Summit 2012 in Seattle (more on that in a later post). But I did something that I haven’t done ever. I went to Seattle without my laptop.

Now, if you have ever been to a tech conference, first off the wifi and network in the hotels are slow because you have thousands of geeks doing the same thing. 3g/4g slow too, so you are already hampered by that fact.

Next, you are up early, to breakfast/conference sessions all day, usually till 6:30 pm, and you then have conference events every night till 9, 10, 11 whatever, so you aren’t in your hotel much, maybe to sleep, shower, drop your bag off.

I found that I could “get by” without my laptop, but there were things that weren’t easy, and things I couldn’t do easily when I wanted to.

First trial was an email sent to me with a PDF that asked “can you sign this and get it back today”. Ok, let’s see. Download a PDF signing app and do it in iOS. Works. Little hokey to get the file back and copied and back in the email, but works.

Then, a couple of days later, “go here and fill this web form out”.. well, let’s cross our fingers it works in mobile safari or chrome without issue. It was clunky but worked.

I would say the biggest gripe though I had was this: lack of keyboard. Now I know with iPad (and things like Surface with the touch cover) you can get a keyboard, but I don’t have one of those cases for my iPad so I was just winging it with the iPad.

With no keyboard, it is *very* hard to sit down and bang out paragraphs at any fast type of rate. Blog post? Not quickly. It is just a slow down without a physical keyboard to type on. Other things like emails, twitter, web, whatever, work fine with just the iPad. And of course consuming/reading content is great. Just that typing something like this post here, I waited till I was at my desktop at home to write it. I think I would pull my hair out just trying to use the soft keyboard on the iPad.

Overall it got me by like I said, but there are still some gaps, at least for me, in what I need to do that can’t be handled without a laptop or physical keyboard. Maybe next year 🙂

Categories
Agile Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence – 3 Years of Agile

Last year at the PASS summit, I ran into someone and was discussing project management and Business Intelligence. They were so adamant that agile couldn’t work. And I had to correct them, as I have been doing agile now for three years at Trek in our BI group.

Yes, some things don’t exactly parallel to software development, but many things do. Sprints, Standups, estimations, stories, points, scrum master, releasing/delivering value on your iterations. And now even more with process like unit testing of SQL code and more, things are getting closer to software development in that regard.

I have an entire blog category dedicated to agile – more concepts but also talking about Business Intelligence teams in some of them.

Just remember, you can do BI and Agile, it works, and you can deliver a ton of value to the organization. Someone who might argue with you, well, they don’t know what they are doing in BI or in Agile, or the organization isn’t willing to change, which of course then it wouldn’t work.

Advice. Make sure you hold retrospectives, and make sure you make adjustments from whatever comes out of them.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Search Google Drive and Gmail from Chrome Omnibox

If you are like me, and live in Google Chrome, you probably use other Google Services. I use Google Drive and Gmail extensively. I would love it if when I searched in the Google Chrome Address Bar Omnibox, that it could search other places.

Well, you kind of can. On the Omnibox..

Right click, Edit search engines..

The under “Other Search Engines”: add two entries..

Google Drive | drive.google.com | http://drive.google.com/?hl=en&tab=bo#search/%s

Gmail | gmail.com | https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/#apps/%s


then if you type drive.google.com and hit “tab” instead of enter, you can type in your search term, same with the gmail.com shortcut.



If you do all that, then you should be able to search Google Drive and Gmail straight from the Chrome Omnibox.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Windows 8, WinPCap, Compatibility Mode.

I have been running Windows 8 since the 2011 BUILD conference, the dev preview, then the consumer preview, then the release preview. So RTM wasn’t much of a jump for me. I have it installed on my BUILD samsung tablet, as well as on my work laptop.

While I have seen a few things not work, that would be expected, one is WinPCap (packet capture) software , which is an integral part of Wireshark. Turns out it doesn’t really work in Windows 8, at least the installer doesn’t.

What I had to do was run the install in “Windows 7 Compatibility Mode” and it then installed and I could capture traffic.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Tools You Should Use: Tasklist

Day to day we all use many different systems and tools. Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Twitter, Facebook, Powershell, Visual Studio, Sublime Text, iTunes, and the list goes on and on. There are so many cool utilities and tools out there, and many people aren’t aware of the majority of them, but at one point or another, they could benefit from using them..

The first tool/utility I’d like to tell you about is: tasklist (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491010.aspx)

tasklist is a cmd line utility built into windows that you can use to see running processes. With any utility, run “tasklist /?” to see options. You can
run it with /S and pass in a remote system name, pretty cool. Also authenticated using /U and /P. You can see many other options as well. Format, Verbose, etc.

You can use this to get the running processes on a remote system. Want an easy way to see who might be remoted (RDP) into a machine?

tasklist /s COMPUTERNAME /v /FI "ImageName eq Explorer.exe"

Pretty cool huh? Just think of the other possibilities. Log the running tasks to a csv and track over time with memory usage. Check remotely for a process running. tasklist should be able to help. And used in conjunction with other tools, you can do a lot of remote admin work.

I’m hoping to highlight on more utilities and turn those posts into a series, so stay tuned.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Reset your "Lost" Password in Ubuntu

I have a few VM’s setup at home. One is Ubuntu. I haven’t been on it for a while. Figured I knew what the password was when I set it up months ago, but for some reason it wasn’t work. So how to change?

1. Reboot into “recovery mode”

Reboot, hold down shift and the boot menu will come up, choose the option with (recovery) at the end.

2. Mount as root

Once through that, choose the option to mount as root.

3. Reset Password

#passwd username (username is the username you want to reset)..

enter the password twice, and then

#reboot now

Bonus: If you get “Authentication token manipulation error” as I did, you need to remount your file system as read/write at the root prompt.

#mount -rw -o remount /

Bonus 2: Once you actually get into the system, it is going to probably complain about your keyrings password not matching. Goto your home folder (make sure you have all folders shown) and goto .gnome2/keyrings and delete and files and reboot.

Overall not that bad, but yeah, don’t lose your passwords. Keep them in a password manager! (I didn’t with this one of course, didn’t keep it in my head either!)

Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming

#msteched TechEd 2012 Conference Highlights

Last week I was in Orlando at Microsoft TechEd 2012. It was a great conference, especially for me, since I am all over the place with technology. There was DBA, SysAdmin, Developer, etc sessions.

What did I take away? Here is a quick overview.

Azure. The cloud. It is here (well it already was) but now with IaaS and persistent VMs, the game is changed for Azure. Also with websites and media streaming and other stuff Azure is becoming *the* platform.

SQL 2012 – While I was away, the BI team upgraded to 2012 at work. While I have been playing with 2012 for a while, it just got real. BISM stuff and SharePoint/Kerberos stuff came to light this week. Good stuff

System Center while I didn’t focus much on this, System Center is where it is at. You can now monitor your Azure cloud, your on-prem VM (HyperV or VMWare) and do tons of other stuff. Sky is the limit with this product.

There is so much more but it was a great time. Good people, good sessions, smart presenters, and just information oozing out of every room. Orlando in early June is like a sauna though 🙂

I am really pumped to get back in the saddle and start implementing some of this stuff in day to day solutions. Was so excited I actually moved my blog to an Azure website this weekend. It moved fine and I had to do some MySQL stuff to get my content moved, but it is basically sitting there idle as I can’t change the DNS over without pay more than I am willing to. More to come in this arena though.

To the cloud! (and the Tabular cube, and the System Center, and so on and so forth)…