SQLPASS

SqlSaturday Cambridge, #SqlSat411, re-cap

Posted by Jens Vestergaard on in Community, Programming 0 Comment

Early Friday morning, I left Copenhagen for my second SQL Saturday in Cambridge. Two years ago I had a blast at same event, as documented here. My expectations were high, but I was completely blown away by the work and preparation that had gone into the event. I apologize in advance to those who are attending the SQL Saturday in Copenhagen next weekend, we cannot provide the same level of experience I am afraid. A huge effort was made by the team, so hat tip to them!

After arriving at the DoubleTree, down town Cambridge I hooked up with Johan L. Brattås (b|l|t) and Boris Hristov (b|l|t) to walk the streets and see the impressive sights (mostly colleges). Spending the afternoon in good company was topped of with the most amazing dinner settings at the Gonville & Caius College, where a team of servants had a dinner lined up, with millimeter precision.

Up early on Saturday  morning, to get to the venue, I even had to wait for the hotel to have breakfast ready – I knew I had to have something to eat, because normally the lunch bags at these events are…erhh…scanty, to last for a whole day at least. Speaking of the venue, I also need to mention that it was absolutely fabulous for events such as this – kudos to the team for snagging this. On another note, it was not until I saw the picture on the wall, that I made the connection – it has Maersk written all over it 🙂

I didn’t get to see much of the other sessions, as I was preparing for my own. Introduction to MDX was executed way better than Scaling out Analysis Services, but I guess you learn as you go – apologies to the two (2) attendees for the latter one – I hope you enjoyed the ten minute early break 😉

After the almost unbearable exitement at the raffle – volunteers, organisers and speakers went punting, as depicted below:

If ever in Cambridge, you should definately do this – get a guided tour, as they know all kinds of odd stories that add to the image of Cambridge. Cambridge, where I certainly hope I have not set foot for the last time. Well done Mark and Team.

PASS Summit 2015 Session Catalog

Posted by Jens Vestergaard on in Programming 0 Comment

PASS 2015

And so it came to be the day, when the Session Election Committee publicly announced this years speaker selection for the PASS Summit 2015 in Seattle, US.

I see a long list of veterans, like Aaron Bertrand, Thomas LeBlanc, Argenis Fernandez, Bill Anton, Bob Ward, Chris Webb, Dejan Sarka, Glenn Berry, Itzik Ben-Gan, the list is endless, almost. I know there are a lot of first time speakers selected this year as well, so a big part of the presenter team will, no doubt, benefit from scrutinizing David Peter Hansen’s (b|t|l) advice:

Actually, regardless of the event, the above recommendations will apply across many tech conventions.

Getting my head around all of the 180 sessions available will take some time. Luckily I don’t have to schedule which sessions I want to attend right away – And usually the process of eliminating the least interesting of all almost equally attractive sessions will go through some iterations. Once I am at two to three sessions per slot, I fix the schedule and let game day decide which of the sessions I will attend. Some game changing factors has to do with company on the day, as I am sometimes swayed into attending sessions that I dismissed. Some with topic, presenter and finally curiosity.
Sure, I could just get the recordings and watch them afterwards – But, I always find myself de-prioritizing this over apparent and urgent stuff at work. I shouldn’t do that, I know…

This year however, could very well be a significantly different experience. I woke up this very morning to the news, that my abstract was accepted into the Lightning Talk track. “My session was accepted for PASS Summit!” was actually uttered before “Good morning” – I was very exited.

My session will be on Custom Assemblies in Analysis Services Multi Dimensional (SSAS MD) – this is a topic that I have worked a lot with, just not lately. There are some scenarios where this approach is very powerful and has no equal on SSAS MD.
I terms of preparation, I will be double working the topic, as I am preparing this as my audition to become a Pluralsight author.

Leading up to the PASS Summit, I will be speaking at both SQLSaturday Cambridge, on Introduction to MDX and Scaling out Analysis Services, as well as our local SQLSaturday Denmark speaking on Introduction to MDX. This fall will be the most busy speaking schedule so far 🙂

Thank you so much #SQLFamily for allowing these opportunities

PASS Summit 2014 Pre Cons + Wednesday

Posted by Jens Vestergaard on in Programming 0 Comment

This year I finally got to say “I am attending PASS Summit”. I have been envious of those who got to attend previous years, and now finally I got to put on the PASS badge.

pass-summit-2014

I have been attending two pre cons, Predictive Analytics in The Enterprise and Agile Data Warehousing : Start to Finish. Both did not, unfortunately, live up to my expectations. Maybe I was just hyping myself, being first timer and all, but I have attended pre cons before, and they were all on a completely different level. Sadly very little take away on both topics.

On Wednesday the Summit really kicked off, and I went to some very good sessions, including Building Hybrid Power BI solutions w/ Rod Colledge [b|l|t], Interactive Data Visualization with Power View w/ Will Thompson neding the day of with Continuous Delivery for Data Warehouses and Marts w/ John Welch [b|l|t]. All of the session were very well executed and obviously hosted by great professionals.

Regarding the community, I have had the pleasure of meeting up with some old acquaintances and meeting new people – always a pleasure and very interesting to hear about problems and solutions that other have solved or are currently facing. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to get much spare time to really go sight seing in Seattle, hopefully I’ll get a chance next year, as the Summit is announced to be hosted here in Seattle again.

 

Selected to speak at #SQLSat275

Posted by Jens Vestergaard on in Programming 0 Comment

If you haven’t already heard about the concept of SQL Saturday, I suggest you rush of to www.sqlsaturday.com and dive into the numerous opportunities to attend free Microsoft SQL Server training sessions.

One such SQL Saturday is comming to Copenhagen, Denmark, on March 29th 2014 where I have been so Lucky as to get selected to speak in one of the slots. My session is going to be about Security in Analysis Services, a session I have done a couple of times before, so now it should have matured and hopefully improved 🙂

The Friday before the Free event, there is a Pre-Con held at the same location, where you at a bargain can attend one of the following session:

Scaling SQL Server 2014 – Glenn Berry (MVP)    
Blog: www.sqlskills.com/blogs/glenn
Twitter: @GlennAlanBerry

Level : 300

Description
SQL Server implementations can quickly evolve and become more complex, forcing DBAs and developers to think about how they can scale their solution quickly and effectively. Scaling up is relatively easy (but can be expensive), while scaling out requires significant engineering time and effort. If you suggest hardware upgrades you may be accused of simply “throwing hardware at the problem”, and if you try to scale out, you may be thwarted by a lack of development resources or 3rd party software restrictions. As your database server nears its load capacity, what can you do? This session gives you concrete, practical advice on how to deal with this situation. Starting with your present workload, configuration and hardware, we will explore how to find and alleviate bottlenecks, whether they are workload related, configuration related, or hardware related. Next, we will cover how you can decide whether you should scale up or scale out your data tier. Once that decision is made, you will learn how to scale up properly, with nearly zero down-time. If you decide to scale out, you will learn about practical, production-ready techniques such as vertical partitioning, horizontal partitioning, and data dependent routing. We will also cover how to use middle-tier caching and other application techniques to increase your overall scalability.

Create Solutions with Power BI – Marco Russo (MVP) 
Blog: sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo
Twitter: @marcorus

Level : 300

Description
Microsoft Power BI is a self-service business intelligence (BI) solution that provides data analysis and visualization capabilities. It contains a set of add-in that you can use in Excel (Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View and Power Map), plus a set of services integrated in Office 365 to share, collaborate, get answers and insights (such us publishing data, Power View visualization in HTML5 and Q&A) and a mobile app that improves access on any device.

In this full-day seminar, Marco Russo guides you in creating a complete solution step-by-step, using all the features of Power BI. Starting from scratch, you see how to leverage on Power Query to import and integrate data from many different sources, with a particular attention on leveraging existing data in the company, transforming data in order to improve the resulting model and sharing the results of the queries created, so that they will be easy to reuse. Then you see how to create a Power Pivot model following the best practices and using the resources available on the web in order to accelerate the creation of tables and formulas that are shared in many models. The reference data model will improve over the day, adding metadata to improve the usability of other Power BI features.

Once the data model is ready, you see how to create dashboards in Excel, leveraging pivot tables, Power View and regular Excel formatting. After publishing the result on Office 365, you see how to refresh the data on the cloud using the Data Management Gateway, including all the details about correct configuration and best practices for moving on premise data to the cloud in a secure way.

Once the model is published, more analytics are available: you see how to use Power View and Q&A, learning how to optimize the data model for a better user experience during data exploration with these tools. Q&A enables queries written in natural language, and it might require some information in the data model in order to disambiguate similar names or similar relationships.

Finally, you see how to display data on maps using both Power View and Power Map, which offers visualizations that are more advanced and enables the production of a video, useful for a high impact presentation. At the end of the day, you will be ready to start using the entire Power BI stack in your company, choosing the right feature for each requirement and applying the best practices in each step.

Understanding Execution Plans – Hugo Kornelis (MVP)   
Blog: sqlblog.com/blogs/hugo_kornelis
Twitter: @Hugo_Kornelis

Level : 300

Description
For troubleshooting long running queries, looking at the execution plan is often a good starting point. Once you know how the query is executed, you know why it’s slow and what you can do to speed it up. But what if the execution plan is just beyond your understanding? What if it uses operators you have seen before, but do not really understand? What if you look at the execution plan, but just don’t see the problem?

In this full-day workshop, you will learn everything you need to be able to read and understand any execution plan. We’ll start with an overview of execution plans as a whole, and then dive in and look at all the components, and how they fit together. This will increase your understanding on why the optimizer picks a plan, and what you can do to make it pick a better plan.

Whether you have read your share of execution plans or whether you wouldn’t know where to find them, this workshop will teach you everything you need to know about execution plans. Attend this workshop if you want to hone your tuning skills!

Throughout the day, we will have several exercises to help you get an even better understanding of the theory. In order to get the most out of the day, attendees are advised to bring a laptop, with SQL Server (any version, but if you use SQL Server Express, you will need the advanced tools as well) and the AdventureWorks sample database pre-installed.

Price: 800 DKK (early-bird price: 600 DKK, if you register before 31 January 2014)

Register for the pre-con at : https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sqlsaturday-275-denmark-pre-conference-registration-9776266075?ref=ebtn

Register for the Free event at: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/275/eventhome.aspx

But be quick as seats fill up quickly 🙂

SqlSaturday Cambridge, #SqlSat228, re-cap

Posted by Jens Vestergaard on in Mixed, Programming 2 Comments

SQL Saturday

This past weekend, was one of the most exciting weekends so far this year. In case my wife is reading, this is of course in a different league, and nothing like when you gave birth to our third child just four months ago 🙂

In the summer of 2013, it was annouced that The Minnesota Vikings would host The Pittsburgh Steelers at Wembley Stadium, London UK. I was really exited about the opportunity, to actually see the team I root for live, would be within reach, them playing a venue this close. I quickly realised, that there was to be held a SQL Saturday in Cambridge, just the day before. As I described in my post here on getting the mail from Mark Broadbent (b|t), it would require all of my chaneled into a single burst, to be able to attend both events.

But here I am, having just had an amazing weekend in both Cambridge and London. Flew from Malmö in Sweden to Stansted, took the train from there, arriving just in time for the speaker dinner. The venue was amazing and I think everyone was a bit humbled by the surroundings in the great dining hall. That feeling faded, as more wine was served and the chatter started getting louder 🙂

Speaker Dinner

Got up first thing Saturday morning, to get ready for the first session on InMemory OLTP Introduction by Anthony Saxby (t). I didn’t get up as early as some of the other attendants, Rob Sewell (b|t) reporting he got up at 04:00, but it still felt early. After the first session, I just wanted to run through my session, which wasn’t until the afternoon. But better safe than sorry. So when I tried to plug my laptop into the adapter I brought, I found out it didn’t fit. Since I bought the adapter, I’ve gotten a new laptop, with a new plug, that didn’t match. “Ok, you’ve got time” i thought, and went through my bags to find some kind of pliers, to make room for the new plug. Of course I didn’t bring any pliers! I am flying Ryanair, where you are only allowed to carry 10Kg of hand luggage. After thinking it through, I went to the reception at the Queens College, and asked for any Tool that would make adapter and plug fit. The guy behind the counter brought the full toolkit, so I finally got it fixed and went back to my room to prepare. I had enough time to get one test-run done.

My presentation went really well, at least I myself think so 🙂 Except for the guy snoring in the front row, people seemed to listen to what I was trying to bring forward. Front-row guy was excused, as this was the second to last session of the day. And after the session a couple of attendees approached with some questions and shared their own experience with AMO. Always nice to chat on a subject, where you get the distinct feeling, that the other party has put heart and soul into it.

Around 17:00 all the attendees, speakers and volunteers gathered in the big auditorium for some prizes 🙂
There were actually some really great prizes among the lot. A Nokia Lumia 1020, All PASS Summit 2012 sessions on disc, great books and other really cool stuff. last but not least, I should mention Buck Woody, who did a fantastic job on bringing a game show atmosphere into the room. Apparently the trip was worth it for Rob, since he left with one of the prizes!

Buck Woody - Buck

The evening offered a really late night snack at Zizzi (French people giggle every time they go by) in the company of several of the volunteers, speakers and attendees. Here’s a shot from the end of the table.

Dinner Saturday Night

And by that final note, a great event ended. A shet load of work invested by Mark and the rest of the team. Cudos on a job well done!

NFL

Next morning, it was off to London, to get ready for the game at Wembley. Great game, not the result I’d hoped for and an appalling display of fan-care by the players. I went straight to the hotel, then off to Wembley Stadium. I had bought a ticket on eBay, and was kinda nervous that it could turn out to be fake. It wasn’t 😀 Wembley Stadium

Since Minnesota Viking got the better of the Steelers, and you could imagine some sort of disappointment would show of off the players. But the way both Big Ben, Coach Tomlin and Brett Keisel went right past all the fans, without even looking in their direction was way below the professional level I would have expected. Troy Polamalu was the only player I saw, who actually engaged with the fans. Big thumps up for that 🙂
Troy Polamalu #43
So, all in all the Sunday ended well. I got to see some of the top players of the league and last but not least, a great statdium
Wembley by Night