Building a Data Mart with Integration Services (Free Webcast)

September 8, 2010 @ 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EDT

Understanding current trends in business conditions often requires asking a lot of questions, but allowing users to run query after query against your operations databases causes more problems than it solves. By creating a data mart, you can maintain a separate data store that can withstand the heavy query load that business analysis demands. In this webcast, you’ll learn why you need a dimensional data model for your data mart, how to quickly build a dimensional model, and how to use control flow and data flow components in Integration Services to build simple packages that populate the dimensional model with data.

Intro to MDX – 24 Hours of Pass (Free Webcast)

September 15, 2010 @ 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

“Everyone” says MDX is hard-so what’s the point of learning it? Quite simply, some answers are easier to get from your data by using multidimensional queries instead of relational queries. Sure, it’s possible to write pages of T-SQL code to do things like period-over-period analysis, cumulative results such as month-to-date and year-to-date comparisons, or trending calculations for Key Performance Indicators. But in this session, you’ll learn how much easier you can perform these calculations by using MDX (after you put your data into a cube, of course!), not to mention how much faster MDX queries execute compared to their relational counterparts.

To help you get started with MDX, I’ll explain how to think about multidimensional space, how to create basic queries, which functions to learn first, and how to construct simple, but useful, calculations. In my PASS Summit 2010 session, “Demystifying MDX in Reporting Services,” I’ll then show you how to apply these concepts to queries in Reporting Services and how to adapt queries that return multidimensional results to the two-dimensional dataset structure required by Reporting Services.

Strategies to Fast Track Your BI Implementation (Free Webcast)

September 23, 2010 @ 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT

One of the secrets to a successful BI implementation is quick delivery of a solution that delivers valuable information to your business users. Quick delivery does not require you to take shortcuts to reduce the length of the project, but instead demands that you implement strategies that enable you to leverage technology, people, and process effectively. Before you can begin implementing these strategies, you must have a clear understanding of the opportunity areas for information delivery and assess both the level of complexity and value of information for each opportunity. Rather than build a comprehensive solution, you can manage each opportunity as a separate project while keeping the big picture in mind. Then by following a simple set of strategies while remaining mindful of critical success factors for each project, you can progressively deliver an integrated and flexible solution that meets the needs of business users sooner rather than later.

Attend this webinar and learn:

• How to quickly deliver a BI solution without taking shortcuts that sacrifice vital components
• Critical success factors for managing a new BI implementation
• How to deliver a scalable BI solution in manageable stages

Advanced SQL Server Reporting Services (Online training – details to come)

September 28-29-30, 2010 @ 12:00 – 1:30 PM and 2:00 – 3:30 PM EDT

Accelerating Answers with Analysis Services (Free Webcast – details to come)

October 12, 2010 @ 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EDT

A relational data mart is a great way to improve query performance for business analysis, but having that data available in an Analysis Services cube can provide an even better experience. A cube can not only deliver queries faster, but can simplify the queries needed to compare one time period to another or to work with cumulative values, like month-to-date and quarter-to-date. Join us for this webcast to learn how a cube can deliver high-performance queries, how to build a basic cube, and how to share the cube with your user community.

BI Immersion Event (Event details and link to registration w/early bird rate for registrations by September 17)

October 25 – 29, 2010 M-Th 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM, Fri 9:00 – 3:30 PM in Bellevue, WA

Even with little to no knowledge of BI, this course will provide you with immediately-usable, production-level knowledge of BI. The course has been designed to take you from installation to configuration to application and integration – for all facets of the BI stack (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, PowerPivot, and SharePoint) – it is meant for anyone who wants to get involved in BI. Our first thought was to create a class for DBAs who want to better understand their environment, but the course content is just as valuable whether you’re new to BI or ready to expand your skills. This class might be the perfect way to advance your career and dig deeper into topics that don’t typically get covered in most BI classes.

Maybe you accomplish quite a bit with Excel – but how do you get the data there? Quite a few folks use cut-and-paste, or import from a CSV – but of course there’s a much better, and much more scalable and robust way using SSIS! Relational data warehousing – with lots of aggregate tables – helps you keep your data organized for Excel or any other type of reporting or analysis tool that you might want to use, but some types of business questions are answered more easily when you move your data from the data warehouse into SSAS cubes. Whether you store data in tables or cubes, you have a variety of options in the BI stack to access and analyze the data, but which is best? Learn how to choose the right tool for the task and how to manage a secure and scalable environment for reporting and analysis.

The course starts out in the 100-200 range on Day 1 but moves into the 200-300 range for the remainder of the week. For each technology in the BI stack, you’ll learn basic usage and design principles, followed by more coverage of configuration, performance tuning, and other management tasks than you’ll find in most BI end-to-end classes. The course will not only bridge the gap in your BI knowledge, but will continue on to take you a lot further. If you’ve always wanted to immerse yourself into BI, figure out the end-to-end story, and go behind-the-scenes to learn how to install, configure, and deploy BI solutions, this is the place to be!

PASS Summit 2010 (Conference details)

November 8 – 11, 2010, Seattle, WA

Real World Analysis Services Stored Procedures Analysis Services stored procedures (ASSP) are nothing like the stored procedures you create for your SQL Server databases. Not much is written about this feature, so you might wonder whether you need to bother with them at all. Put simply, you can simplify your MDX queries, combine cube data with relational data, or personalize calculations for specific users-just to name a few possibilities with a little C# (or VB) code and MDX. Come to this session to learn some practical ways you can take advantage of Analysis Services stored procedures.

Demystifying MDX in Reporting Services As an enterprise reporting solution, Reporting Services can consume many different types of data sources, including Analysis Services cubes and PowerPivot workbooks. You can build simple reports using a graphical design interface in Reporting Services without learning the Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) language, but to fully leverage multidimensional data in your reports, you should develop a solid understanding of this language and how to structure your query to facilitate the report design process. In this session, we’ll review how the graphic designer constructs an MDX query, explore ways that you might want to change the generated query, and demonstrate how to work with parameterized MDX queries. We’ll also explore how to use T-SQL stored procedures to call MDX queries.

Recruiting, Retaining & Advancing Women in Technology: Why does it matter? WIT Luncheon and Panel Discussion at PASS

November 10, 2010 – 11:30 am – 1:30 pm

Increasing the role of women in technology has a direct impact on the women working in hi-tech, but the effects can go far beyond that. How do female tech workers influence innovation and product development? How do men benefit from having more women working in technology? Can the presence of women in tech affect a company’s bottom line? What does it mean for women and their families when they have access to hi-tech jobs?

Delivering Information with Reporting Services (Free Webcast – details to come)

November 17, 2010 @ 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EDT

Whether your data source is an operations database, a data mart, or an Analysis Services cube, you can use Reporting Services to deliver information on demand or on a scheduled basis in a variety of formats. With Reporting Services in place, report developers can quickly produce static or interactive reports, system administrators can effectively manage security and performance, and decision makers can easily find, use, and share information. If you’re never used Reporting Services, join us for this webcast to learn about the report controls available to satisfy a variety of reporting requirements, the reporting features that create an interactive user experience, and the steps to publish, secure, and manage content on the report server.

Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don’t care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while.

Self-Service BI

Self-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when “every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively” and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI.

From the Microsoft BI Conference Keynote delivered by Ted Kummert

This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves–from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me:

• PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It’s important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it’s impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they’re thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.)
• Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It’s confusing enough. I haven’t seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.)
• One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.)
• Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days–Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven’t seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I’m skeptical about its practicality. However, I’m looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.)
• Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough–overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.)

This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI – a phrase I’ve heard repeated from time to time over the last decade – but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users.

It’s one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it’s another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled “PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?” I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie’s observations.

Collaborative BI

I have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest – as they say – is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time.

Fast forward to 2010, and I’m still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session “Collaborative Decision Making.” As I suspected, the tools aren’t quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, “People don’t trust data, they trust people.”

The Microsoft BI Stack in General

A question I hear all the time from students when I’m teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I’ve never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, “So Many BI Tools, So Little Time.” I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio’s Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren’t there yet. Maybe in another 5 years.

Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors’ offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, “How Does the Microsoft BI Stack…Stack Up?”

Expo Hall

I had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn’t manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I’ll share here.

Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you’ve seen what this product can do, you won’t want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions.

Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O’Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O’Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O’Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O’Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it’s hard to lug my reference library with me. Today’s e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don’t have to worry about keeping track of where I’ve stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I’m compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That’s a winning combination in my mind!

Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn’t attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below.

• IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project
• Sales Analysis workbook

Here’s a recap of the business intelligence chapters and the samples I used to generate the screen shots by chapter:

Chapter 6: Scalable Data Warehousing covers a new edition of SQL Server, Parallel Data Warehouse. Understandably, Microsoft did not ship me the software and hardware to set up my own Parallel Data Warehouse environment for testing purposes and consequently you won’t see any screenshots in this chapter. I received a lot of information and a lot of help from the product team during the development of this chapter to ensure its technical accuracy.

Chapter 7: Master Data Services is a new component in SQL Server. After you install Master Data Services (MDS), which is a separate installation from SQL Server although it’s found on the same media, you can install sample models to explore (which is what I did to create screenshots for the book). To do this, you deploying packages found at \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\Master Data Services\Samples\Packages. You will first need to use the Configuration Manager (in the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2\Master Data Services program group) to create a database and a Web application for MDS. Then when you launch the application, you’ll see a Getting Started page which has a Deploy Sample Data link that you can use to deploy any of the sample packages.

Chapter 8: Complex Event Processing is an introduction to another new component, StreamInsight. This topic was way too large to cover in-depth in a single chapter, so I focused on information such as architecture, development models, and an overview of the key sections of code you’ll need to develop for your own applications. StreamInsight is an engine that operates on data in-flight and as such has no user interface that I could include in the book as screenshots. The November CTP version of SQL Server 2008 R2 included code samples as part of the installation, but these are not the official samples that will eventually be available in Codeplex. At the time of this writing, the samples are not yet published.

Chapter 9: Reporting Services Enhancements provides an overview of all the changes to Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 R2, and there are many! In previous posts, I shared more details than you’ll find in the book about new functions (Lookup, MultiLookup, and LookupSet), properties for page numbering, and the new global variable RenderFormat. I will confess that I didn’t use actual data in the book for my discussion on the Lookup functions, but I did create real reports for the blog posts and will upload those separately. For the other screenshots and examples in the book, I have created the IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project for you to download. To preview these reports in Business Intelligence Development Studio, you must have the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database installed, and you must download and install SQL Server 2008 R2. For the map report, you must execute the PopulationData.sql script that I included in the samples file to add a table to the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database. The IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project includes the following files:

• 01_AggregateOfAggregates.rdl to illustrate the use of embedded aggregate functions
• 02_RenderFormatAndPaging.rdl to illustrate the use of page break properties (Disabled, ResetPageNumber), the PageName property, and the RenderFormat global variable
• 03_DataSynchronization.rdl to illustrate the use of the DomainScope property
• 04_TextboxOrientation.rdl to illustrate the use of the WritingMode property
• 05_DataBar.rdl
• 06_Sparklines.rdl
• 07_Indicators.rdl
• 08_Map.rdl to illustrate a simple analytical map that uses color to show population counts by state
• PopulationData.sql to provide the data necessary for the map report

Chapter 10: Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot introduces two new components to the Microsoft BI stack, PowerPivot for Excel  and PowerPivot for SharePoint, which you can learn more about at the PowerPivot site. To produce the screenshots for this chapter, I created the Sales Analysis workbook which you can download (although you must have Excel 2010 and the PowerPivot for Excel add-in installed to explore it fully). It’s a rather simple workbook because space in the book did not permit a complete exploration of all the wonderful things you can do with PowerPivot. I used a tutorial that was available with the CTP version as a basis for the report so it might look familiar if you’ve already started learning about PowerPivot.

In future posts, I’ll continue exploring the new features in greater detail. If there’s any special requests, please let me know!