Each year I participate in a variety of public events, including conferences, user groups, SQL Saturdays, and webinars of all kinds. (This year, indeed next week, I’m going to an event that is part of a cruise – SQLCruise!) Through these events, I am able to meet and interact with people from all over the world and I feel very privileged to  have these opportunities. The one event that started it all for me was PASS Summit, an annual gathering of SQL Server professionals from all over the world. My first year of attendance was 2002, I believe, and I knew no one. Well, maybe one person…who heckled me at my one and only presentation there. Some friend… Fast forward to the present, I can hardly walk 50 feet without running into someone I know. It’s gone from just another event to a family reunion…A SQLFamily reunion!

In fact, last year, I had a reunion with Scott Cameron, author of SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Step by Step. He and I built our first data warehouse together, back in 1999. We’ve come a long way since then, working together at two other companies meanwhile, before we eventually parting company when I started Data Inspirations back in 2006. But fortunately our paths cross from time to time.

In most years, “Summit” (as my peers commonly refer to it) is held in Seattle to facilitate the inclusion of Microsoft personnel, but from time to time Summit strays from the homebase. This year, PASS Summit 2013 will be held in Charlotte, NC. I was delighted to receive an email last week that announced not only had I been selected to speak, but that I would presenting a preconference session, a spotlight session, and a regular session!

Two out of the three of these sessions focus on Reporting Services. In case, you missed it – I totally revamped my prior Reporting Services books with a new release available May 1, 2013, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services (catchy name, eh?) and have encapsulated key topics from that book into workshop and presentation formats.

My third session – the spotlight – focuses on some techniques I developed and applied during a recent client engagement. There are a few frameworks out there for developing packages and Analysis Services databases that we explored, and wound up adapting to better suit the needs of the project. Furthermore, the challenge of the project was to efficiently reproduce the results for a multi-tenant business intelligence solution. And thus began my journey into BIML. This session is about possibilities and lessons learned that I am so looking forward to sharing!

Something (or Two or Three Things…) to Talk About at PASS Summit 2013

For the curious, here’s an overview of my Summit 2013 sessions.

The holy grail these days seems to be to get all the data into a unifying database – with relational and NoSQL camps each trying to come out the winner. Meanwhile, you’ve got data to gather, manage, and analyze, and that typically means you’ve got to use different types of storage. To get the most of the presentation layer tools in the Microsoft BI stack when data sources include cubes, PowerPivot workbooks, and data mining models, you can’t rely solely on your T-SQL skills. To produce high-performing reports and analytical tools, you’ll need to use other query languages like MDX, DAX, or DMX.

It can be a bit daunting to get started with these other languages, especially when your T-SQL mindset keeps getting in the way. Never fear. I’m here to help! There’s still time to register for my SQLSaturday #220 Preconference Workshop, Languages of BI, this week in Atlanta on Friday, May 17.

In my workshop, you’ll learn which languages each presentation layer tool supports and the basic syntax used by each language. You’ll also learn how take advantage of query builder tools to help you produce queries until you’ve developed the proficiency to create more complex queries on your own. In addition, you’ll learn how to work with expressions to add calculations to cubes and PowerPivot workbook, and how to use expressions to customize the appearance of reports, scorecards, and dashboards.

And if you come out to the workshop, you might as well stay for SQLSaturday, too. This will be my second year for this event in Atlanta, and I’m looking forward to seeing longtime friends in the SQL community and making some new ones. There are a whopping 11 tracks on the schedule, with 3 devoted to BI topics. I’ll be presenting Troubleshooting MDX Query Performance, which is a nice complement to the Friday workshop. Hope to see you there!

Big Data. Surely you’ve heard or read something about it by now. Maybe you even have an opinion. Some people I know think it’s much ado about nothing. Nothing more than hype, which dictionary.com defines as “exaggerated publicity” at one end of the spectrum or “a swindle, deception, or trick” at the other. Others think it’s hyperbole, defined as “an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally.”

Although I think there are certainly some claims made out there about Big Data that fall into these categories, I lean towards describing the current rising interest in the topic as hyperopia, a form of farsightedness that our data management industry is experiencing. In this sense, hyperopia refers to temporal rather than spatial distance. I think we can see something happening with Big Data now but it’s rather fuzzy still, whereas the future implications are more clear.

Put another way (if the vision analogy doesn’t work for you), Big Data is no longer in its infancy. But it’s not fully mature yet either. Toddler? Preteen? Teen? I’m not sure where it is in this cycle, except certainly not at the teen stage. Of course, we can expect each stage in this maturity cycle to have its ups and downs. It’s a normal part of the process of technological change. Let’s not expect too much where it’s not appropriate and give it full support where and when it’s ready.

As I mentioned in my New Year’s musings, I felt this was the year to start paying more attention to Big Data. Accordingly, I have begun working with some of the technologies in the Big Data ecosystem and started speaking about it. Of course, I’ve been reading as much as I can, too. As a regular conference speaker, I highly value the educational and networking opportunities unique to conference attendance, so was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend GigaOM’s Structure:Data 2013 in New York City this week.

The Structure:Data conference used a different format than I’ve ever seen at a conference. Each session lasted 15 minutes with the attendees primarily positioned in one spot for the day. The speakers were rotated on and off the stage throughout the day with an emcee making introductions to the next session. The session styles varied also, from moderated panel to a speaker at a podium with slides to a speaker center stage without slides. I recall only one demo and even that was pre recorded.

The frequency with which speakers and formats changed meant that I didn’t get too antsy sitting in one spot for an extended period. There were also longer 45-60 minute workshops that allowed us a) to get up and move to a different place for a while, and b) to get exposed to a topic in a bit more depth than the main stage topics. Overall, I liked the format for its ability to introduce me to a lot of ideas in a compressed timeframe. The irony did not escape me though….Big Data in small bites.

Hands down, my favorite session was The CIA’s “grand challenge” with big data delivered by Ira “Gus” Hunt, CTO for the Central Intelligence Agency. His talk (online here) was fascinating and even a bit scary. Did you know your smartphone can identify you by your gait? That’s just one of many tidbits Hunt shared. Others that struck me most in this session:

• Big Data allows us to grow the haystack and magnify the needles.
• information no longer flows from the few to the many, but from the many to the many, thereby generating more and more data. Sure, there’s a lot of noise there, but there’s also a signal to be discovered lying within.
• Sensors in everything results in explosive growth in data volumes. It’s not just Big, but Really Big. Sensors monitor location, health and even identity (through gait, for example).
• Through analysis of sensor data, the inanimate can become sentient. (Oh, dear…)

• We don’t know the future value of data.
• We cannot connect the dots that we don’t have.
• Traditional requirements analysis don’t work in the world of Big Data.

Of particular interest to me, and a theme I heard many times over at the conference, was Hunt’s contention that the power of Big Data can be achieved only when the end user can interact it. We cannot expect users to be data scientists, nor can we expect them to be dependent on data scientists either. Yet, he says, analytical tools for Big Data are hard to use. (I stopped at some vendor booths to see what they had to show, but in fairness to all need more time to digest their offerings before I can comment.) He cited Wikipedia’s definition of data science, and in particular the following quote, “There is probably no living person who is an expert in all of these disciplines – if so they would be extremely rare.”

So are our academic institutions going to miraculously churn out hordes of data scientists to place in every business? I don’t think so. I don’t have anything against data scientists in general, but I think the mission of accomplishing Big Things with Big Data is better served if their skills are used to develop the next generation(s) of software that empower the business user, rather than having them become yet another barrier between regular people and data just because the data gets “bigger.” Or is this just wishful thinking on my part?

To gear up for the PASS Business Analytics Conference, the newly launched PASS Business Analytics Virtual Chapter asked me to do a presentation last week, “A Big Data Primer”. Many of us in the SQL Server community have been hearing the use of this term increase, and Microsoft has released HDInsight, both as an Azure service and as a Windows service. HDInsight is built on top of Hadoop, a technology often (but not always) encountered in Big Data projects. I thought I’d take this opportunity to add to the Big Data discussion in the community by starting with the basics.

The goal of this presentation was to provide an introduction to terms and technologies. The term “Big Data” dominates the headlines in technology news these days, but what is the fuss really all about? I’ve seen hype come and I’ve seen hype go in my career, and waited to see what would come of it. In my presentation, I try to paint a picture for you that gives you a better idea of the many ways that the Big Data movement is impacting the use of data. Then I spend some time discussing some of the technologies that you could use to manage Big Data. And last I delve into approaches you can take to manage a Big Data project. Along the way, I compare and contrast Big Data with traditional data warehousing and BI.

You can find a copy of my presentation here.

My friend Jes Borland (blog | twitter) invited me to contribute to her Making Data Tell a Story with SSRS Properties series, so I decided to introduce a property that doesn’t get much attention, the RepeatWith property.

Allow me to set the stage properly for this property. You have a table in a multiple page report. Of course, you set the RepeatOnNewPage property to display the table header row(s) on each page. But did you know you can also repeat other items alongside the table when using the HTML or PDF format?

To do this, set the RepeatWith property of the item to repeat. The item will repeat alongside the table on every page that contains the table. You can use the RepeatWith property of three types of report items: text box, rectangle, and line. To set the property value, you select the name of a data region—table, matrix, list, or chart—having the same parent as the item to be repeated. In my example above, both the table and the text box have the same parent: Body.

In SQL Server 2005 and earlier, you don’t see the text box repeated with the table in Preview mode within BIDS, but you can confirm the results by deploying the report to the report server. I haven’t tested in SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2, but it definitely is visible in preview mode in SQL  Server 2012 in SSDT as you can see in the images above.

Incidentally, if you specify the RepeatWith property for a rectangle that contains a data region, you cannot render the report.