SQL Community

Early arrival meant Erika and I were both “interviewed” about SQL Community, which was displayed at the opening of the first day’s keynote on Wednesday, October 12. Both of us were also in the Welcome to PASS Summit video.

Connect. Share. Learn.

That was the theme for this year’s Summit. And Erika and I did plenty of each. I connected with friends made at last year’s Summit, friends from my very first Summit in 2002, and of course friends made along the way. It was especially fun to connect with people whom I knew until now only through Twitter. Some people were taller than I imagined, and some were shorter – but I’m not confessing any further details here! One feature of this year’s Summit that I thought was executed quite well was the attention given to first timers. The blogging community provided help in advance, first timers were given special ribbons to wear, and a special reception was held to make first timers feel welcome and learn the ropes. Then they were turned loose into the Summit community! I spoke with many first timers throughout the week and there was much appreciation expressed for the extra effort to help them get acclimated.

For sharing – I participated in several events. First, there was my pre-conference session on Tuesday which had a lot more people than I expected frankly for the somewhat niche topics of MDX, DAX, and DMX. If you were in my class (and even if you weren’t), you can download the demonstration files here, plus in the MDXPrecon.zip file I included the queries that I managed to save off from our detour discussions:

Then on Thursday, Denny Cherry (Blog | Twitter) and I co-presented “So How does the BI Workload Impact the Database Engine?”. We had some great questions from the audience and still managed to get through our content. Originally, we had thought this was a 4-hour session, but discovered a few weeks prior to the Summit that it was only a 3-hour session. I think we did a decent overview and certainly could have talked at least another hour, if not an entire day drilling into the details. Denny put up  a Web page containing links to resources to get background information on the topics we covered in this session.

On Friday, I was super busy with my Connect and Share parts of the program. I hosted a Birds of a Feather table where we discussed Collaborative and Mobile BI. I was surprised how many people chose to be at the table rather than land there by default, considering this topic is still somewhat futuristic! Mostly the conversation centered around Mobile BI. No one here is actively using it yet, although there is interest. We discussed the current offerings in the marketplace, the announcement of Microsoft’s mobile BI strategy, and the challenges everyone has in delivering mobile BI to their users.

After lunch, I dashed off to Starbuck’s for a mini-reunion with my Aspirity colleagues with whom I worked since 2000 (well,  most of them!). Some of us have moved on to independent consulting careers, while others remain with Hitachi Consulting, which acquired Aspirity in 2004. From left to right, Dave DuVarney (Twitter), Dan Reh, me, Hilary Feier, Susan O’Connell, Scott Cameron (we started working together pre-Aspirity in 1997), and Paul Turley (Blog | Twitter) (who joined us after the photo shoot!).

Another connecting/sharing activity on Friday was the panel session, Are You a Linchpin? I was on the panel with Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter), Jeremiah Peschka (Blog | Twitter), Louis Davidson (Blog | Twitter), Kevin Kline (Blog | Twitter), Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter), and Thomas LaRock (Blog | Twitter). The session was moderated by Andy Leonard (Blog | Twitter). We had a very interesting, interactive discussion about professional development and how one becomes indispensable in today’s fast-paced world. The jumping off point for the discussion was a book by Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Afterwards, Erika reminded me about a tweet I had shared recently. She was just waiting for me to bring it up during the panel discussion, but it had long ago fluttered out of my mind! However, I agree that it was pertinent to the discussion, and am including the link here for those interested. The article, Why Do Some People Learn Faster?, discussed failure as a learning tool. It makes me feel better about all those mistakes I make. I’m just learning faster that way! And you’ll hear this as a common refrain in my classes. I don’t think we learn anything when software, processes, technology, (fill in the blank) just works. It’s only when something breaks that we have the opportunity to investigate to see why it broke and how to keep it from breaking again. That’s true learning.

What else did I learn? Lots of new stuff coming from Microsoft next year, although that’s not huge news to me as I’ve already started writing about SQL Server 2012 (Denali). You can download a draft of the eBook that Ross Mistry and I are co-authoring, Introducing Microsoft SQL Server Code Name Denali. The final book is due out next year.

But I also learned a few new things at the keynotes as well. You can catch my highlights of the keynotes in my previous posts:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

There was so much else going on during the week that I can’t possibly capture it all here. I’m looking forward to catching the replay of many sessions as I didn’t get a chance to attend as many as I would have liked. Apparently, my plan to clone myself (via Erika) didn’t enable me to absorb more knowledge. On to Plan B…

Here are links to videos:

• Keynote Intro with the performance (excluding lyrics)
• Keynote Intro with ”I Should Have Looked the Other Way” Lyrics

Thanks go also to Wayne Snyder (@SQLWayne) who, as immediate past president of PASS, rolls off the board. Rick Heiges introduced the new roles on the board.

Nov 6-9 2012 is the next PASS Summit in Seattle, and Charlotte will be the host city for 2013. Early registration rate is available for PASS Summit 2012.

Dr. Dave DeWitt, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, is today’s keynote speaker. Subject:Big Data. He explained where big data comes from: sensors, web clicks, twitter, and it’s deemed too important to go away. “This is the golden age” for database professionals, made possible by cheap storage. Old guard: eBay has 10PB on 256 nodes. New guard: Facebook 20PB on 2700 nodes, Bing 150PB on 40k nodes.

NoSQL – what is it? It really means not only SQL. Some data is not worth storing in SQL. jSON provides greater flexibility in data model. Trade consistency for availability (opposite of traditional data management).Provides faster time to insight.

Update: Quite frankly, all of this information was coming at me so fast and furiously that I gave up trying to live blog. It was, however, quite fascinating. Prior to the keynote, I wondered how relevant the topic would be for me, but given announcements by Microsoft earlier in the week regarding Hadoop support and also some statements made by Dr. DeWitt, I can see now that developing BI skills for Big Data and BI is going to be a requirement. Dr. DeWitt makes the case for why we as data professionals should care about Big Data, even if it’s not directly part of our job focus today. Here are some links that you might find useful:

• Dr. DeWitt’s slide deck
• When available, I’ll provide a link to the keynote itself – it’s well worth making the time for it! I certainly plan to watch it again.

Opening the keynote is PASS Executive Vice President, Bill Graziano, in his kilt and explaining that Day 2 of the conference is kilt day. In honor of kilt day, Bill is wearing a kilt himself. He explained over 1,000 people from 53 countries watched yesterday’s keynote. (For those of you who can’t be here in person, we wish you were here, and I would like to say that you are with us in spirit and I hope we cross paths at a future event!)

Bill is recognizing outstanding volunteers today:

• Tim Radney
• Jack Corbett
• 2011 PASSion Award: Lori Edwards

Today’s keynote speaker is Quentin Clark, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, SQL Server. Now of course SQL Server 2012 (the product formerly known as Denali) is the topic du jour, presumably with a focus on the database engine which is not really my area of expertise. Yesterday was the BI focus which was of high interest to me, but as I hear things that are interesting to the BI professional, I’ll post my thoughts here.

Quentin says there are too many features to discuss in the time allotted, therefore he will focus on his favorites, dubbed the Fantastic 12 of SQL Server 2012:

1. Always On availability which includes a dashboard, a nice example of using business intelligence to manage IT operations.
2. Blazing-fast performance in the database engine, SSAS, and SSIS.
3. Rapid data exploration: Power View + PowerPivot. Yes, Power View has a space between the words and PowerPivot has no space. These are not typos.
4. Self-Service BI: Both of these tools (the power tools listed above) are available from SharePoint to empower users while IT continues to maintain control over what they’re doing.
5. Credible consistent data – BI Semantic Model, Data Quality Services, Master Data Services. Lara Rubbelke performed demonstrations. She emphasized that DQS is a continually learning system. Changes that you make are “remembered” in the knowledge base and recommendations are made to correct data that arrives later. She also explained ColumnStore Index.
6. Organizational compliance – expanded audit capabilities (user defines what to audit and filtering to help users locate audited information), user-defined server roles.
7. Peace of mind – production-simulated application testing, System Center Advisor & management Packs. Expanded Support – Premier Mission Critical.
8. Scalable data warehousing – SQL Server appliances (optimized & pre-tuned), HW _ SW _ Support – just add power. You get to choose hardware. Appliances mean you can start working within hours – less focus on installation and configuration, more focus on using the appliance. On stage we see the appliances and Britt Johnston explains each one:
   • Dell Parallel Data Warehouse spreads queries out over 480 cores.
   • HP Enterprise Data Warehouse – full size is 4 data racks that can handle up to 700 TB of data.
   • HP Business Data Warehouse – 1 to 5 TB data, 20 minutes after power up to start loading data. Can be used in conjunction with PDW as part of hub and spoke architecture.
   • HP Business Decision Appliance. Download my whitepaper on this appliance (after registering): Introduction to the HP Business Decision Appliance.
   • New – HP Data Consolidation Appliance. First private-cloud appliance on the market. Designed for extreme availability. If drive fails, no worries. Supports 60,000 simultaneous I/Os. Designed for scale-out so that you don’t have to buy all at once. It can  handle any type of database workload.
9. Fast time to solution – This is really tied into the appliance story.
10. Extend any data anywhere – ODBC for Linux, greater interoperability – dew drivers for PHP, Java, Hadoop. Change Data Capture for SSIS & Oracle. Beyond relational: File table, 2D spatial, semantic search.
    • Demonstration of statistical semantic search by Michael Rys, Principal Progam Manager, SQL Server using book collection. Select a book and get recommendations of similar types of books, also keyword visualization. Click on a keyword to see documents (books) that contain the similar keyword. Semantic search identifies important terms whereas full text search is very limited linguistically. You put data into file table and run semantic indexing, then run queries to find semantic similarity. Demo shows that semantic search recognizes the difference between classical works collection and technical collection.
    • As Mark Tabladillo points out, this is really text mining.
    • It’s extending past what we had before in SSIS to do text mining and making the technology usable.
11. Optimized Productivity – SQL Server Data Tools (formerly known as Juneau), unified across database and BI, deployment and targeting freedom. Single projects can span both types of projects.
12. Scale on Demand –Always on, deployment across public & private. Focus on SQL Azure. Some buzz in the community about the improvements coming, but it’s hard for me to get excited. There’s not a good BI message for SQL Azure right now. It’s just a source for BI at this point. But SQL Azure size limit increasing to 150GB. I can see why that’s good news! Hey – some BI: SQL Azure Reporting CTP available and SQL Azure Data Sync CTP. I guess I’ll have to scope out this latest CTP.

Today’s keynote will be delivered by Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President, Business Platform Division of Microsoft. Undoubtedly the topic is the upcoming release of the the next version of SQL Server, code name Denali. Rumor has it that the official product name will be announced today. I’ll be live-blogging the event, so keep coming back to see my running commentary on the keynote. Of course, my focus will be on the business intelligence aspects of the keynote, but there will be other live bloggers to monitor as well. Seated at the bloggers table in my immediate vicinity are Brent Ozar, Allen White, Aaron Bertrand, Mark Broadbent, Wes Brown, Sean and Jen McCown, Andy Leonard, Denny Cherry, Rob Farley, Andy Warren, Grant Fitchey, Mike Walsh, Paul Turley, Jorge Segerra, Tim Mitchell, Wendy Pastrick, and several others. Seated next to me is Bradley Ball and nearby is Jes Borland-Shulz, Erin Stellato, Kendra Little, and Jeremiah Peschka. And more to come no doubt! So there will be plenty of opinions to draw from!

Update: While we wait, we got to see a series of video commentary on what SQL Server community means. Yours truly was included in that roundup as well as Erika, and other familiar faces and newcomers. Rushabh Mehta opened the presentation with a warm welcome and lets us know that Twitter is over-capacity! I suspect this will be a recurring theme all week! Next Rushabh reviewed the progress towards goals. HIghlights:

• Technical training hours – Goal: 1 million. So far: 430K
• Members – Goal: 250k. So far: 80K
• Regions – Goal: 5. So far: 1

The solution to the problem of trying to decide which sessions to attend? All general sessions will be available via streaming later.

Now for Ted Kummert…a review of the strategy introduced last year—appliances, cloud, and new features for SQL Server. Key theme – choice. Hardware options, location of data (on-premise or cloud), vendors. “We believe the cloud world is a hybrid world.” It’s not either/or. Microsoft intends to offer a consistent experience for tools and product behavior across this hybrid world. Obviously, Microsoft is very focused on Denali and considers it the most significant release in SQL Sever history: high-scale mission critical application support, “breakthrough insight”, “cloud on your terms”. Quality data (Master Data Services), Data Quality Services, reference data from Azure marketplace, new BI semantic model, pervasive BI expanding with project Crescent – to be released as Power View as part of SQL Sever 2012 (the official name for the next version). The product platform will release in first half of 2012.

Big data is key to future strategy. Microsoft will support Hadoop. Partnering with Hortonworks, Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO, joins Ted on stage. Background with Yahoo: using Hadoop to store pedabytes of data: mail, spam processing, target advertisement, etc. Hadoop is best solution for big data problems- volume of data, variety of data, velocity of data overwhelms traditional tools. Hortonworks has mission of growing Hadoop ecosystem (training, support), and envisions Hadoop will be storing half of world’s data in 5 years.

My friend Denny Lee demonstrating big data. (Can you believe that Denny and I shared an office once upon a time? He’s always been the way he is – seriously!) Scenario: needs to look at terabytes of data daily (pedabytes monthly) obtained from web logs to determine where people come from to view web site. Looking for country and language. HiveQL is a query language to query the log. 310 separate files distributed across cluster. Using PowerPivot for Excel – using HiveODBC driver. Joining the downloaded data with SQL Server and Azure marketplace data. Comparing user profile data with IP data from web log. Moves to PowerPivot for SharePoint (hour to process) to show final comparison which of course can be shared with multiple users.

Back to Ted and Microsoft’s vision: enriching data with the world’s data, build on the work of others (aggregations and transformations), a place to store and provide private data. Code name Data Explorer – going live end of year. Demonstration: Contoso Frozen Yogurt. Searching for “killer” location, using Azure data. Starting with existing locations and normalized performance scores to see how stores are performing relative to one another. Extraction of nouns  from data to suggest data that would enrich the data. Mashup – transition to enrichment phase to overlaying “our” data to data from marketplace. What is world data? Demographics data is traditional data. New reference data gathered from Bing from crawling Web. This will be in Azure labs at end of year.

Devices-smartphones have a lot of computational power. Amir Netz comes to the stage. Amir was recently made Technical Fellow at Microsoft. It’s a very big promotion and we all wish him congratulations! Amir will use movie industry data in Power View. He also demonstrated Power View on a smartphone, iPad2, and Windows 7 tablet.

Preconference: MDX, DAX, and DMX: An Introduction to the Languages of BI (Tuesday, Oct 11, 8:30 am – 4:30 pm)

Half-day session: So How Does the BI Workload Impact the Database Engine? (Thursday, Oct 13, 1:30 pm – 4:30 pm). Denny Cherry and I are co-presenting this session and provided a sneak preview for 24 Hours of Pass Fall 2011 which you can view here (see Session 9).

Panel session: Are You a Linchpin? Career management lessons to help you become indispensable (Friday, Oct 14, 2:30 pm – 3:45 pm)

Of course, I’d love for you to come to all of my sessions, but there are plenty of other speakers to see, too! If you’re a business intelligence beginner, I recommend you try to see these sessions:

• Wednesday
• Reporting Services 201: From Basic to WOW! (BID-202) Jes Schultz Borland
• Zero to Cube – Fast Track to SSAS Development (BIA-202) Adam Jorgensen
• Introduction to Data Mining in SQL Server Analysis Services (BIA-310-S) Brian Knight
• Thursday
• SSIS vs T-SQL: Loading a Data Warehouse (BIA-312) Adam Jorgensen and Mike Davis
• Creating Business Intelligence Dashboards with PerformancePoint Services 2010 (BID-303) Rod Colledge
• Friday
• Delivering KPIs with Analysis Services (BIA-308) Peter Myers
• Multidimensional Reporting: MDX Essentials for Report Design (BID-302) Paul Turley

If you’ve already got some BI experience, the following sessions are must-see:

• Wednesday
• Advanced Components in SSIS (BIA-405) Tim Mitchell
• Thursday
• Anger Management: Overcoming SSIS Deployment and Configuration Challenges (BIA-306) Erik Veerman
• SQLCAT: Tier-1 BI in world of Big Data (BIA-408-A) Denny Lee and Thomas Kejser
• See the Future with Visual Predictive Analytics (BID-201) Carlos Bossy
• Friday
• VertiPaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach (BIA-307) Marco Russo
• Data Visualization: Chaos, or Patterns you haven’t recognized yet? (BID-209) Jen Stirrup

Then, of course, the big news at PASS this year is the upcoming Denali release. There are plenty of Denali-focused BI sessions to see, but I’ll leave it to you to find the sessions that are right for you!

Overlap? Unfortunately, yes – so we’re all going to have to make some hard choices. But if your budget permits, then the best way out of this conundrum is to buy the conference DVD! Then you have the benefit of reviewing presentations later and don’t have to worry about trying to remember everything that was discussed during Summit, because I guarantee it’s going to be an information overload kind of week!

So for me, the word rally has very positive connotations and fond memories of being with my dad. And I get to add to those warm and fuzzies by attending the very first PASS SQLRally 2011 in Orlando this May! I feel very honored to be part of the speaker line-up because the SQL Server community decided who the speakers would be, and there was quite an exceptional field of contenders. The session I’ll be presenting is Data Visualizations in SSRS 2008 R2. While using data visualizations in reports can be an effective way to communicate information, there are good ways to do that and bad ways to do that which I’ll be sharing with attendees. My focus will be on Reporting Services 2008 R2, but even attendees who haven’t migrated to the latest version will learn some useful tips in this session.

Now I won’t just be presenting my session and hiding out in my hotel room the rest of the time. I’ll be checking out other speakers’ sessions, hanging out with people that I usually only get to see at PASS, and meeting new people, too! The “people” part of conferences is just as much fun and invaluable as the learning opportunity.

I’m going to rev up my SQL Rally experience by attending a pre-conference session by Grant Fitchey (blog | twitter). I’m a business intelligence kinda gal so normally I throw data into a cube to get really good performance, but sometimes that’s not an option. And I didn’t get into business intelligence by starting out as a DBA, so my relational performance tuning skills for SQL Server are pretty basic. I’m looking forward to adding some new skills to my repertoire.

Although I’d like to be able to sit in on everyone’s session – I’m also a learning kinda gal – not everything is applicable to what I do, and some things I already know how to do. But there are still a few sessions that I really want to see:

• Aaron Nelson (blog | twitter)
  • The Dirty Dozen: PowerShell Scripts for the Busy DBA. I really need to spend more time understanding the potential for PowerShell in my day-to-day work. Aaron’s really passionate about PowerShell, as he made so clear when I first met him in Tampa for SQLSaturday #62 and continues to evangelize on Twitter, so who better to show me the light?
• Scott Weinstein (blog | twitter)
  • Using PowerShell to simplify your ETL – because here is an obvious first application for what I learn from Aaron Nelson.
• Jennifer McCown (blog | twitter)
  • T-SQL Code Sins: The Worst Things We Do to Code, and Why. Jen is a kick. I’ve watched her present online for 24 Hours of Pass, but I haven’t been in the room with her in front of a live audience, so I’d like to take this opportunity to do so. At PASS Summit 2010, she was presenting at the same time as I was, so I couldn’t go heckle…er, watch politely. Plus I write enough SQL that I want to make sure I don’t disappoint Jen if she should ever have to look at my code.
• Aaron Bertrand (blog | twitter)
  • What’s new in SQL Server 2011 (“Denali”)? Although I’m already familiar with Denali, I find it useful to see how someone else – not from Microsoft – explains it and to see how people respond.
• Karen Lopez – (blog | twitter)
  • Career Success in the Data Profession during Turbulent Times. No, I’m not looking for a new job, but I get asked for advice all the time, so I’d love to hear Karen’s perspective.
• Julie Smith (blog | twitter)
  • Cool Tricks to Pull from your SSIS Hat. I saw Julie present this in Tampa but I was sitting at the back of a very crowded room at a very odd angle, so I didn’t get a good view of the rabbit in her slides, or her really great demos. So I’m going back for more!
• Mark Tabladillo (blog | twitter)-
  • Enterprise Data Mining for SQL Server Professionals. Number one, I’d really like to meet Mark because he helped me fine-tune my data mining chapter in my book Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 & Office 2010. Number two, he really knows his stuff about data mining and I’d really like to hear what he’s got to say!
• Randy Dyess (blog)
  • The BI DBA – because, not having been a DBA myself, I want to make sure that I’m properly communicating the concepts that Randy covers in this session to my clients.

I’m really looking forward to this event. If you’re going to be there too, please be sure to look for me and say hi!

As an independent consultant, I don’t get to interact regularly with my peers, so I love the reunion aspect of PASS. And now that I’ve started following people on Twitter, my universe of colleagues has expanded even more, and I was delighted to meet the people behind the avatars.

The joy of PASS is not limited to those of us who have attended for many years. As I was sitting in the airport last Friday, I recognized an attendee who was a first-timer and asked about his experience. He replied that it exceeded expectations. He was so anxious to get back to work to put what he learned into practice. He felt that the value of the knowledge that he is bringing back to the office from PASS was so much greater than the price of the conference. Now that’s a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one.

There is so much more that could be said about PASS, and many in the community have already posted their thoughts on Twitter and on their blogs. There has been quite a stir in the business intelligence community this past week about the future of Analysis Services, about which I will comment in a future post. Today, however, I will focus on a few follow-up comments and links to resources related to activities in which I participated last week.

Getting Started In Blogging And Technical Speaking

Kendal Van Dyke (blog| twitter) presented a session with tips for getting started in either of blogging or speaking. He invited a panel of experts to join him, including myself, Rob Farley (not pictured below) (blog| twitter), Aaron Bertrand (blog | twitter), Buck Woody (blog | twitter), Todd McDermid (blog| twitter), Mike Walsh (blog | twitter), Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter), Ted Krueger (blog | twitter), Patrick LeBlanc (blog | twitter), Andy Warren (blog | twitter), and Brent Ozar (blog | twitter).

Photo courtesy of Brent Ozar

Who had control of this very interactive session? You’ll have to buy the PASS Summit DVD to find out!

I waited patiently for my turn to speak. With a room full of speakers, getting your own turn can be a challenge! I heard a few attendees express concern that they didn’t know what to write about, or that someone else has covered the topic. My response to this concern is that everyone has a unique take on a topic, and that’s why T-SQL Tuesday is such a great way both to learn and to contribute. T-SQL Tuesday was started by Adam Mechanic (blog | twitter) and gives everyone with an opinion (and who doesn’t have one?) or a specific experience to add to the topic. You can see the first invitation to T-SQL Tuesday here to see how it all started and the most recent T-SQL Tuesday posts hosted by Paul Randal (blog | twitter). The best way to keep tabs on who’s hosting the next round is to follow the #TSQL2sDay hash tag on Twitter.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to hang out for the entire presentation, because I had to move on to the…

Women in Technology Panel

I was honored to participate as a panelist for this year’s Women in Technology luncheon. It was well attended, and I heard so many positive comments after the event from both men and women. I drew inspiration from my fellow panelists as well as the stories shared with me by other women attending PASS this year. You can view a recording of the event here if you’re a registered member of PASS (which is free to join).

It’s so difficult to say what the right answer is for increasing the numbers of women in technology. The numbers are diminishing at a deplorable rate (as I discussed in a previous post). It seems to me that to foster change we need to start laying the groundwork with our children. By “our children”, I mean society in general, not me specifically, although I have tried do my part! On the one hand, I don’t recommend forcing children into a career path that they can’t embrace enthusiastically. On the other hand, I believe that one reason that girls don’t pursue technology as an option is lack of exposure to the possibilities. Lynn Langit (blog | twitter) is a role model for showing kids (not just girls!) how to explore these possibilities through www.teachingkidsprogramming.org. Check it out!

Along these lines, I proposed that maybe – as great a community as PASS is – we should collectively think about what we can do for our kids. Someone tweeted that I suggested we should bring our daughters to SQLSaturday, but actually I wondered aloud if we could do something similar to SQLSaturday that focused on the kids (and not just girls). Maybe we could get some sponsors to help, too?

Demystifying MDX in Reporting Services

In this session, I explained some of the nuances of working with MDX in Reporting Services. I have posted my demo reports here.

In addition, you might want to refer back to some of my recent posts about using dynamic MDX in Reporting Services: Part 1 and Part 2.

If you’re not familiar with MDX, I presented Session 07: Intro to MDX for 24 Hours of Pass: Summit Preview which you can view if you have a free PASS membership. MDX is not going away any time soon, contrary to recent rumors, so invest some time learning it if you plan to work with real Analysis Services cubes, which will continue to have their place in the BI stack for several years to come.

Real World Analysis Services Stored Procedures

This topic drew a larger audience than I expected as it’s a fairly specialized topic. For years, I never needed to use Analysis Services Stored Procedures (ASSP), avoiding it because folklore said so due to performance hits. However, some things just can’t be done any other way and I ran into such things this past year. To date, I haven’t found much written about ASSP other than BOL, but you can find some excellent examples to download at CodePlex. Plus I’ve uploaded the very simple (non-production-ready) C# example that I used in my session demonstration for you to peruse.

What’s Next?

So now that I’ve completed all the training and Webcasts and conference sessions that I’ve been focused on the last couple of months (with one exception – Delivering Information with Reporting Services, a free Webcast at 12 pm Pacific on Wednesday, November 17), I plan to get back to a more regular blogging schedule. There are certainly plenty of topics on my “to do” list!

I’m presenting the following two topics –

BI316, Optimizing Your MDX Queries

Retrieving data from an Analysis Services cube is supposed to be fast, right? Then why are your queries running so slowly? Many factors can contribute to poor query performance. If you have applied best practices design principles to cube and dimension design, the next step is to evaluate the design of your MDX queries. In this session, you first learn how to know whether your query or the cube needs to be optimized. Then you learn the principles of optimal MDX query design in Analysis Services 2005 and Analysis Services 2008, and how to modify your queries to deliver data faster.

BI337, Designing Analysis Services Cubes for Performance

Building a cube is simple. After all, you have a lot of wizards at your disposal to do the development work. But building a cube that delivers data quickly requires you to make additional changes to the database design. Come to this session to learn what steps you need to take in the development process to ensure the cube is designed for optimal performance, whether you’re using Analysis Services 2005 or Analysis Services 2008. You learn not only how to properly design dimensions, aggregates, and partitions, but why these design principles improve performance.

If you’re planning to be there, be sure to stop by and say hello!