Chicago Technology Executives Club Webinar – August 26, 2009

This month I will be doing my Business Dashboard presentation again in collaboration with Chicago’s Technology Executives Club.

Wednesday, August 26th, 10:00 PT, 12:00 CT, 1:00 ET

In the current economic climate, it is more important than ever for business stakeholders to have a pulse on what is happening in their organization. Implementing an Executive Dashboard allows an organization to more effectively and efficiently execute on strategy, improve business processes and manage key company metrics proactively. This webinar is presented by Magenic’s Dan English in conjunction with the Chicago Technology Executives Club.

To register for the event and to read more about the webinar follow this link here – Business Dashboards Webinar Registration (or click on the image in the posting).

24 Hours of PASS Webinars – FREE

If you haven’t already heard, coming up next month there is going to be a pre-event to the National PASS 2009 Conference.  It is an all day free online event of SQL Server presentations.  How cool is that!

Check out the session list here – http://24hours.sqlpass.org/Sessions.aspx

Here is the list of BI sessions:

Session 04 (BI) – Start time 03:00 GMT
Delivering Good Performance Consistently with SSIS
Presenter: John Welch

Session 07 (BI) – Start time 06:00 GMT
Text Mining
Presenter: Dejan Sarka

Session 12 (BI) – Start time 11:00 GMT
Reporting Services inside out the things you should know
Presenter: Simon Sabin

Session 14 (BI) – Start time 13:00 GMT
Reporting from Analysis Services Cubes Using Excel 2007
Presenter: Peter Myers

Session 15 (BI) – Start time 14:00 GMT
Data Warehousing: Laying the Foundation to Success
Presenter: Erik Veerman

Session 20 (BI) – Start time 19:00 GMT
Loading a Data Warehouse in SSIS
Presenter: Brian Knight

Session 24 (BI): Start time 23:00 GMT
Embed Reporting Services into your Applications
Presenter: Jessica Moss

Mark your calendars, check it out, and enjoy the sessions

PASSMN August 18, 2009 Monthly Meeting

Update (8/11/2009): Meeting moved back to 9th Floor 8300 Building

 

The next PASSMN Minnesota SQL Server User Group meeting is coming up.  The meeting is on Tuesday, August 18 from 3:00 PM to 5:15 PM.  You can visit the local site to get registered at http://www.mnssug.org or click the link to Register Here.  This month the meeting is in a different location –> 2nd Floor Classroom – 8000 Building 8000 Norman Center Drive, Bloomington, MN.

This month the topics are:

Discover and Manage SQL Server in the Enterprise (Speaker: Lara Rubbelke, Microsoft) – Do you know where SQL Server is installed in your enterprise? Are you absolutely sure you know? Really? Are you looking for a free tool to help you learn where SQL Server is installed? Once you know, are you looking for a better way to manage all of the instances in your enterprise? Learn how to leverage SQL Server 2008 features and enhancements complemented with free tools to discover and centrally manage all of the SQL Server in your enterprise. This session will dive deep into the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit and the Central Management Server, with a special focus on configuring, securing and leveraging the CMS for multi-instance management and configuration.

Lara Rubbelke brings her passion for architecting, implementing and improving SQL Server solutions to the community as a Technology Specialist for Microsoft. Her expertise involves both OLTP and OLAP systems, data management, performance tuning, encryption, ETL, and the Business Intelligence lifecycle. She is an active board member of the local PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) chapter and regularly delivers technical presentations at local, regional and national conferences, user groups and webcasts. Lara authored the Microsoft whitepaper detailing SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition features and was a contributing author of "Expert SQL Server 2005 Development". Prior to joining Microsoft, Lara was a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).

Syntactic Sugar Sweetens the SQL Server Pot (Speaker: Mark Knutson, Hennepin Faculty Associates) – Among the many new features of SQL Server 2005 were some SQL additions that both improve performance as well as simplify complex queries. I have used these countless times and found them quite handy. These include Common Table Expressions, the analytical ranking functions, and aggregations. I will discuss how these work and provide some SQL examples.

Mark Knutson is the Senior Internet Architect at Hennepin Faculty Associates. In this capacity, he administers SQL Server and Oracle database servers, SharePoint Services, IIS, and Hyper-V virtualization server. He also leads a small development team which creates web applications using .NET and C#, and is working on the Cisco CCENT/CCNA certifications.

Got my Office 2010 Preview Invitation Today:)

I finally got my invite to download the Technology Preview of Office 2010 Professional this morning.  I am downloading now and will be installing the new release to take a look and do some postings about my experience and discuss any cool features.

One of the cool new features that I have been reading about on the Excel Team’s blog is sparklines:)  Cool stuff – read more Excel Team Blog Sparkline postings.

And MS Access is still around and there have been some more improvements made with that.  It has been awhile since I have taken a look at that application, so I might have to take some time and take a look at the changes that have been made.