PASS Business Analytics Virtual Chapter October Meeting–Incorporate “Big Data” in Analysis Services

The next PASS BA Virtual Chapter meeting is coming up this Thursday at 11 a.m. EDT (10 a.m. CDT).  This month the topic is covering how to incorporate unstructured data into Analysis Services.

October 16 – How to incorporate “Big Data” in Analysis Services cubes?

Abstract – Free form text is estimated to make up 70% to 80% of a company’s data assets and is considered significantly underutilized from an analytical perspective. There are numerous sources for this growing pool of unstructured data such as customer email, call center notes, chat logs, satisfaction surveys or claim forms to name a few. Is your company leveraging all of its data assets? Historically, it has been very difficult to analyze text records for trends or patterns due to the free-form nature of this data.

Recent advances in text mining have helped to distill and expose their content. The key to realizing the business value of text mining isn’t found in the sophistication of the clustering algorithms, but rather in the way those clusters are combined with structured data and then presented to the business analyst. Text clustering involves the logical grouping of text records based on the similarity of important terms in the documents. While some insights will likely surface through the examination of the text clusters themselves, the most significant value will occur when the text clusters are analyzed in combination with related structured data. Important facts reflected in thousands or millions of documents can be analyze along with structured data elements such as time, location or products to turn new business insights into a sustainable competitive advantage

Bio – Reid Karabush is President of Decision Systems Inc., based in Northbrook, IL. His expertise includes over twenty years specializing in the field of business performance management and analytics, and is recognized nationwide as an expert in these field. His experience includes architecting and designing systems for various organizations including ArcelorMittal, American Pharmaceutical Partners, APAC, AT&T, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chamberlain Group, Corning Inc., Fleet Bank, GMR Marketing, HSBC Bank, IPEX, J.D. Power & Assoc. and The Major League Baseball Players Association. Reid has published various articles related to business analytics and business performance management and has mentored and trained a number of software vendors including Hyperion, Pillar and Applix. His background includes working within the software product management groups of Comshare and Wang Laboratories, where he focused on multi-dimensional database, analytics, and executive information systems.

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Just a reminder if you want to stay in touch with the PASS BA Virtual Chapter here are some ways:

If you are interested in speaking we are always looking for speakers, please leave a comment or send me an email at denglishbi@gmail.com

PASS September 2014 Outstanding Volunteer

Just a couple of weeks ago I received an email notifying me that I had been nominated as one of the PASS Outstanding Volunteers for September 2014! The official email stated that Paras Doshi, the PASS Business Analytics Virtual Chapter co-lead were selected for our excellent work with the Business Analytics Virtual Chapter.

The official list for the PASS Outstanding Volunteer nominations is listed here –> Outstanding Volunteers

Dan English and Paras Doshi – Dan and Paras are model Virtual Chapter leaders. They have taken the BA VC to a new level in terms of activity and audience and have done wonderful, innovative work when it comes to posting session recordings on YouTube. Through their efforts they promote growth for PASS in terms of audience and the range of content offered – not just SQL server, but the holistic data platform. They have gone from being completely new VC leaders to innovative trailblazers in a short period of time and are shining examples of what is possible for VC leadership.

I just want to say thanks for the nomination and I greatly appreciate the kudos and recognition, it is an honor to be part of the #sqlfamily community and glad to be able to help out! Nice job and big shout out to Paras as well, really glad to have you as part of the leadership team for the PASS BA VC!!!

MN SQLSaturday #332–Oct 24, 25

The 5th Annual MN SQLSaturday event is coming in less than 4 weeks!  This year the pre-cons are back as well this year and there are 4 great pre-con events scheduled for Friday, October 24.

Choose from one of these expert sessions!! Reserve your spot now for only $99!  Hands down, these sessions are the best bang for your training dollars!!

DB1 – Argenis Fernandez
A Day of SQL Server Internals and Data Recovery

DB2 – David Klee
Virtualization for SQL Server DBAs 

BI1 – Jason Strate & Adam Jorgensen
Architecting the Modern Data Warehouse

BI2 – Mark Vaillancourt
Microsoft Excel: The Business Intelligence Platform For The Masses

The main event will be on Saturday, October 25.  The schedule is posted and there are 7 tracks with 35 presentations!

https://www.sqlsaturday.com/332/schedule.aspx

There will be 3 of us speaking from Superior Consulting Services:

Dan English
Getting Down with Power Query and Power Map

In this session you will learn about the self-service ETL capabilities that have been added into Excel. See how easy it is to pull in data from the web and integrate it and enhance your existing data to provide useful insights. We will also take a look at the new data visualization capabilities provided with Power Map and see how easy it is to interact with and explore geographic and temporal data. These are two new self-service capabilities that have been added and are part of Power BI, don’t miss out!

Brian Larson
Structured Ad Hoc Reporting-Case Study of an Oxymoronic Reality

The large franchise corporation in this case study was looking to provide franchisees with a mechanism to create their own custom reports from a PC, Android device, or iPad. In order to minimize training and support, the desired environment was to be highly structured while still providing reporting flexibility. Come see how SSRS and SSAS along with custom .NET code were used to fulfill these requirements and create a solution which franchisees called intuitive, revolutionary, and life changing.

Rick Bielawski
Mastering queries into XML data.

If you’ve never queried an XML column you definitely want to attend. After this hour there won’t exist an XML element whose value you won’t be able to retrieve. If you’ve been querying for years there is still a fair chance you’ll learn something new.

Be sure to stop by and visit the sponsors, lots of great sponsors have stepped up to make this event possible – https://www.sqlsaturday.com/332/sponsors.aspx

Hope to see you there!