Tag: PASS

Categories
Business Intelligence

Day 3 and Overall Impressions #sqlpass #summit12

To conclude my posts on the PASS Summit this year (see day 1 review and day 2 review), I want to go over the last day and then talk a little about the entire conference and my takeaways.

On Friday I attended three sessions. The last two of the day, the second to last one I was on the phone and missed the beginning and then decided to check out all the other things before they were done, and the last session slot, there wasn’t much appealing, and most everyone already left, so I skipped it.

1. CLD-303-A SQLCAT: What are The Largest Azure Projects in the World?

This was given by Kevin Cox and a another SQLCAT member. The SQLCAT team is crazy smart. If you can talk to any of them, you need to. Any chance you get. This was a good view of customers they have dealt with that are pushing SQL Azure to the limits. Since we are running a project now that we are going to be pushing SQL Azure (and Azure) hard, I thought this was good.

So customers have 20TB dbs, 10k databases, so it for sure can scale. Also some good tips/tricks on what you can do to use SQL Azure to the max like the other customers

2. BIA-203: Real-Time Data Warehouse and Reporting Solutions

I wasn’t sure on this one. Carlos Bossy gave a couple of presentations, and he seemed to know what he was presenting, but a topic like this is so situational it is tough to make it generic. Also, there isn’t a “huge” need for real time and I think I wouldn’t implement it the way he was saying anyways. Run SSIS 24/7 with a for loop that never ends? That is crazy. I’d rather pump data through something like StreamInsight with some code than that SSIS solution. Or run things every couple of minutes or something. “near real time”. Also his solutions was using replication which is fragile.

3. BIA-402-M: Optimizing Your BI Semantic Model for Performance and Scale.

Probably one of the better sessions. Again, Microsoft guys letting it all out here. Akshai Mirchandani and Allan Folting from Microsoft. Basically going *in depth* on how PowerPivot and Tabular does what it does with columnar compression, etc. Where you can look and dig under the hood to find ways to make small changes and optimize processing or querying depending on your need. This is a session I want my entire BI team to watch together.

Overall Takeaways Technically:

Azure, Hadoop, Tabular, Power View, BI, DAX, Excel. You can see a pattern here. I am sure there were good “DBA” and DB Dev sessions but I didn’t go to any. BI is taking shape with Microsoft’s strategy and it is all tabular/excel azure/hadoop stuff. Exciting times.

Overall Thoughts of This Year’s Summit and SQL PASS

Guidebook – was ok. I thought it could have been better. I have used before at conferences. Why no native Windows Phone app?

New Layout – the last two years I was at the summit, things were laid out (as far as where things were) pretty much the same. This year it was changed up. Took a day to get the “lay of the land”

Keynotes – kind of the same as usual. I mentioned in by part 2 blog about how the blogger/twitter table needs to grow up, just want to say that again here. First day there was some drama, second day more drama and badmouthing/infighting. Just needs to stop. Leave the drama at home.

Seattle – Seattle is great. Not going to Seattle next year since the summit is in Charlotte, is going to be tough. I know where to go in Seattle and I like the area. I am worried out Charlotte.

Reg Dates – as I mentioned in my day 1 review, many people came out a day early since the dates said 6th-9th. Same thing next year. Should really say 7th-9th.

Hash Tags – on twitter, usually the hash tag is #sqlpass .. this year they said use #summit12 , some people were using #summit2012 and confused. Also, using #summit12 wasn’t looked at by as many people which stinks as I used that on all my tweets. Next year they need to just keep it as one hash tag.

Karaoke – I have been to the unsanctioned one. It was great. Not sure sanctioning karaoke like this year makes sense. It loses some of what made it cool to begin with. I could get into a lot of detail here but I hope people understand what I mean… taking something “underground” and trying to make it mainstream, usually doesn’t work as well.

#sqlfamily – this is something that I have many thoughts on. I will say things but I don’t think many want to hear it. “sqlfamily” isn’t as big of a family as those in the echo chamber think it is. I would say 99% come to the summit and have no real idea of what it even means. 1% that tweet, present, schmooze think everyone else feels and interacts the same way they do, and it just isn’t true. I met many people at breakfast/lunch and after hours that in fact have no real want/need to be totally ingrained with the clique. Many don’t even use twitter, etc. They are just going to work, doing their job, trying to learn. etc. I think it would make sense fo the sql/sql pass community to step back and think about that for a while.

This year I wrote a blog post for the SQL Server Blog before the summit to drive excitement, which was cool. The first day at the keynote a guy sat next to me and we were talking before it started. He was like “dude, I read your blog on the sql server blog!” – To me that was so cool. He said I was a “rockstar”. No, I am not a rockstar (or an MVP – but the blog says I am, maybe the emails have been going to my spam folder all these years) – I am just a regular tech guy that is passionate about technology, SQL, BI (and a ton more). I was really happy though to see that people are reading that content and it is firing them up, it is what my intention was. And if you read that post, I took back a ton of good stuff from the summit. I am already starting to formalize and get strategy/implementation plans going for things I directly learned.

So to close, my third summit was great. Great content, meeting new people and seeing old faces and having lively discussions and knowledge sharing during the day and over a beer. I am going to miss Seattle next year but I can’t wait for the next summit, and possibly even the new SQL BA (Business Analytics) conference in April 2013. I hope everyone who went to the Summit this year enjoyed it and learned as much as I did!

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
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
Business Intelligence

#sqlpass 2011 Summit Thoughts

Want to get a quick post out before I forget everything cool I have been thinking about the 2011 SQL Pass Summit in Seattle WA.

The conference started out great with a first timer reception (this was my second year), and I knew a few first timers so that would great.

The first day keynote was good, and then the sessions I hit were on a full range of things, new semantic search stuff with file table, and more.

I missed a couple of sessions on day 1 because I was in a Microsoft led focus group on “BI in the cloud” some very cool ideas thrown out and excited to see what is coming up in the future.

More good keynote on day two, a deeper dive into the stuff in SQL Server 2012 (formerly Denali). Went to some good sessions on Data Quality Services (DQS) and Vertipaq vs OLAP, and Power View (remember the space!) SharePoint and Power View integration, etc. Some very cool stuff coming soon with the 2012 release.

Tabular cubes vs Multidimensional cubes. OLAP vs Vertipaq, etc. Big debates and questions here, when to put things in Tabular vs MDX, etc. DAX solves some hard problems we run into with MDX.

Another thing I went to a couple sessions on was StreamInsight. This is some very cool technology for complex event processing, using .NET and LINQ. The StreamInsight guys are crazy smart. Also integrating StreamInsight with Azure, and doing some crazy processing and analysis of tons of data in near real time. I see this technology making a difference somewhere down the road.

Power View was another big winner from the summit. This integrates with SharePoint 2010 as a Silverlight (SL still isn’t dead?) report builder and viewer. Not even sure they are called “reports” anymore, but “views”. You create views and you can interact/edit them in real time. Export to PowerPoint too. These views work off “tabular” vertipaq BISM (BI semantic model) cubes. This technology is going to change how we deliver information to the business.

Being able to take a PowerPivot (no space!) and reverse engineer it into SQL Server Data Tools (formerly BIDS – in VS2010 shell) to create a BISM tabular cube and publish to SSAS Tabular instance looks great. Solving problems like crazy snapshotting and many to many and time analysis using DAX looks very useful.

Of course, GameWorks appreciation night was fun, and I found a Mcmenamins (Six Arms) up the road from the convention center, so I got get a taste of Ruby again. Good conversation and times at the Taphouse and around the Sheraton and Convention center was good too. Seattle is a nice city and the weather was pretty good I thought. Another great summit.

Categories
Business Intelligence

MADPASS (Madison Area SQL Server User Group) Kickoff Meeting Tonight!

We are kicking off the MADPASS SQL Server Users group tonight in Madison. I am in the initial “Director of Membership”, keeping track of minutes and members, etc. If you are available tonight, come check it out. Overview of BI from Dave DuVarney. Pizza and Beer provided, should be good info and networking event as well.

Chapter Kickoff & Microsoft BI Overview

Many of today’s organizations rely on SQL Server and SharePoint to run their businesses.  Included with these products is a tremendous ability to also derive valuable insight from an organizations data.  In this session, Dave will walk through where the Microsoft BI solutions have come from, where they are today and where Microsoft is headed in the future.  After leaving this session, you should have a better understanding of what Microsoft offers and how best to apply it in your environment.
 

Date:
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011  5:30 PM
 
Speaker:
Dave DuVarney is an independent BI consultant and trainer. He has broad technical knowledge and  has been involved in multiple software development projects ranging from contract management systems to human rights auditing.  He is proficient in numerous development languages as well as Microsoft Business Intelligence technologies.  Most recently he has been consulting and developing with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, Reporting Services and Integration Services. Dave is the co-author of Professional SQL Server Reporting Services 2000, Professional SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 and SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Step by Step.
 
Location:
2310 Crossroads Drive
Madison, WI 53718

Park behind the building and walk in main entrance.
Our room will be straight ahead on the first floor.
 

Please register for the event on EventBrite here: http://madpass.eventbrite.com/?ref=ebtn

Also, follow @MADPASS on twitter. http://twitter.com/madpass  and check out http://madpass.sqlpass.org/ for more information.

Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

#sqlpass Summit General Thoughts

Was at #sqlpass last week. Great conference/trainings, and people. Hopefully I will go next year (I am planning on it!) General thoughts/overview..

1. Should have done pre/post cons
2. Drink more water (funny thing is, no water during refreshment breaks? just juice/coffee/soda)
3. Leave room in your luggage for schwag
4. Bring more business cards.
5. Introduce yourself to more people
6. Realize that the level #’s on the courses aren’t always indicative of the content.
7. Go to sessions with ambiguous titles, they are usually the new stuff/undercover stuff
8. The Daily Grill (restaurant attached to the Sheraton) is the most expensive place in the world
9. Plan flights with more time in between if connecting. We missed our connecting flight because of delays.
10. Put the thing on your door from Sheraton to not upkeep your room, you get 5 $ coupon a day
11. Wifi sucks, use your 3G or EVFO/Mifi or whatever
12. They keynotes each day can be hit or miss, but still make sure to go to all of them.
13. Leave sessions 2 min early if you want to get a good seat at a highly anticipated next session
14. Take the back stairs from level 6 to level 4 instead of the escalator for a shortcut
15. “game” gameworks – my team knows what I mean 🙂
16. Bush Garden is small. But you can still rock #sqlkaraoke . Just don’t sit on the couch in the bathroom.
17. You can walk pretty much anywhere (Pike St, Space Needle, etc)
18. Go talk to vendors, but don’t let them suck you in. Stick mainly to the PASS area and Microsoft area (at least that is what I think)
19. Try to take advantage of the games and contests held throughout (Foursquare, Vendor check ins, Wheel of SQL) but don’t let it consume you.
20. If you go into a session that you find boring or not relevant, don’t feel afraid to leave and go to another – the sooner the better.
21. Order the DVD’s
22. Take advantage of BOF luncheon.
23. Follow the twitter stream .. #sqlpass
24. Tweet your encounters and info
25. Blog about it after 🙂

So much more to talk about, I will try to decompress it all and throw up a few posts, but yeah, well worth it, so much information and people and just thinking outside the box, and it just gets you to think and become motivated. Great time!