MN SQLSaturday #796 Pre-Cons

We are just a few weeks out from #sqlsatmn and over 250 have registered! Don’t miss out on securing your spot, register today! 

http://www.sqlsaturday.com/796/eventhome.aspx

Checkout pre-con events and the earl-bird pricing while it lasts:)  Early-bird pricing on pre-cons ends 9/14, so sign-up today and save:)

We have paid, full-day pre-conference sessions on Friday, October 5th, 2018 (also at Saint Paul College).

These full day training sessions are a great value, current early-bird pricing of only $99 plus fees! (early-bird pricing is good through Friday, September 14 and then the price will increase to $125)

Click the links below to get more details about the pre-con training events:

• Joshuha Owen, Steve Hughes – The Modern Enterprise Data Warehouse in Azure
• Brian Larson – Powering Up with Power BI
• Rick Lowe – Keeping Your DBA Happy. Why Some Practices Drive Admins Crazy.
• Ed Leighton-Dick – Data Security for the Cloud

You must register and pay through Eventbrite for these pre-cons.

#sqlpass

MN SQLSaturday #796 Schedule Posted – Oct 6

The schedule has been posted for this year’s Minnesota SQLSaturday event which will be held on October 6 at Saint Paul College. 

I will be speaking in the afternoon on Power BI: Dashboard in an Hour Walk-Through.

This session will provide a walk-through example showcasing the Power BI tools including the Desktop, Service, and Mobile application. You will see how you can quickly access and explore data and gain insights from any device as well as collaborate and share the content with others. The content and examples will be provided after the session so that you can go through the walk-through examples on your own.

This session is perfect for anyone that is new to Power BI and is looking for an overview and a demonstration of what the toolset can do and provide for reporting and analytics.

 

Make sure you register today and secure your spot before it fills up – register now!

Hope to see you there!

MN SQLSaturday #682–Oct 7

The schedule has been posted for this year’s Minnesota SQLSaturday event which will be held on October 7 at Saint Paul College.

I will be speaking in the afternoon on Analyzing Healthcare Open Data with Power BI.

In this session we will explore and evaluate Healthcare data that is freely available to the public. You will see how easily we can consume and integrate the data to analyze and investigate. In the demos you will see some of the latest enhancements and features that have been included with Power BI such as ArcGIS (Esri) maps, forecasting, Top N filtering, grouping / binning, clustering, custom R visuals, and maybe a few more along the way. If you are interested in Open Data, Healthcare, or have to perform a lot of data manipulation in Excel or other tools to provide analysis for your job then this is the session for you. Leverage the free capabilities of Power BI, advanced analytics, and help simplify your everyday workload and wow your boss!

Hope to see you there!

SQLSaturday 453 Minnesota Follow Up

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking again at SQLSaturday Minnesota. This year it was at a new location in downtown Minneapolis at the St. Thomas Graduate Campus. Once again the planning team and volunteers did a wonderful job of organizing the event and having everything ready. Awesome job!

The session that I did this year was What’s new in Excel 2016 for Business Intelligence.  There were over 40 people in attendance at the session (first one of the morning) and everything went as planned, no demo issues:) I covered the new features in both Excel 2013 as well as 2016. No one in the room was using 2016 yet (not sure if anyone new it was even released yet – was released on Sept 22) and everyone was using 2013 (majority were not aware of the new features in 2013, so good thing I had that material readily available).

The new features I highlighted in Excel 2016 were the following:

• Tell Me – search for features (probably my favorite addition to Office – provides instant access to the feature as well)
• Sharing – much simpler
• Version History – needs to be in SharePoint or OneDrive
• One Click Forecasting – okay, takes more than one click, but very nice
• 6 new chart types – treemap, sunburst, waterfall, histogram, pareto, box and whisker
• PivotTable enhancements
• Multi-select Slicers
• Get & Transform Data (native Power Query in Data tab)
• 3D Map (native Power Map on Insert tab)
• Publish to Power BI
• Power View works with Multidimensional (but Power View is a hidden item because of Silverlight and a bit of a challenge to add back into Ribbon – wouldn’t recommend, use Power BI Desktop instead)

If you would like to check out my full presentation that also includes the new 2013 features download the material here – [Demo] – SQLSat453MN_Excel2016BI_denglishbi_20151010.zip

Thanks to everyone that attended and look forward to the next event!

SQLSaturday #387 Madison–April 11 #SQLSatMadison

“Hello Wisconsin” round 2:)  We are just two weeks out now and the next SQLSaturday #387 Madison is coming up (interested, last year it was #287) on April 11, my second trip out to Madison, WI.  The event officially kicks off on Friday, April 10 with three pro-conference events

• Ryan Adams: Planning a SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery Plan
• David Klee: SQL Server Virtualization for VM Admins
• Mark Vaillancourt & Leonard Murphy: Getting Started with Business Intelligence in Excel

Then on Saturday the main event will begin and the schedule is loaded with 8 tracks and 40 presentations!

I will be presenting at 10:30 in Room 309 (Track 5)

The "New" Power BI Self-Service Walkthrough

In this session, we will discuss the changes that are coming and the new features that are provided with the Power BI Designer as Microsoft continues its roadmap with self-service BI. If you haven’t seen this yet, Power BI features are now available in a standalone application outside of Excel! You will see with the new designer that you will be able to easily integrate data, create stunning and interactive visualizations, and even create cloud based Power BI dashboards to share and it is even Free!!

Heading out there with me from my team is Rick Bielawski and he will be in Room 220 (Track 2) at 9:00

Mastering queries into XML data.

If you’ve never queried an XML column you definitely want to attend. While targeted to beginners this isn’t a "Just do this" session. After this hour I’d like you to truly understand even subtle nuances of basic query syntax. Seasoned veterans stand a fair chance of learning something new.

So what are you waiting for, head over to the event site and checkout what is going on and follow the hashtag #sqlsatMadison – SQLSaturday Madison #387 event home.

Hope to see you there!

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!

SQLSaturday 287 Madison Follow Up

Last month I had the pleasure of attending my first SQLSaturday event outside of Minnesota, I went to Madison, Wisconsin.  Not only did I get to attend and present at the main SQLSaturday event, I was also fortunate to be able to put on an all-day pre-conference event the Friday before – Self-Service BI to the Max.

So Thursday afternoon I headed out on my four hour road trip into the neighboring state to visit Madison (for my first time).

It started out raining (only one accident being reported by TomTom) and eventually turned to snow as I got into Wisconsin.  The roads were not too bad, but the two lane 94 driving in was a tad fun with all of the semi drivers;)  The drive was a tad long and driving solo makes it a bit boring.  I tried to check out a few of the water parks along the road and eventually made it into Madison and found the hotel, which was right next to the pre-conference event (walking distance).

I did some final preparation for the pre-con and drove around town a bit (roads are crazy, need a GPS for sure) and got confused with the medians that divided the left turn lanes in the streets (found that a odd and confusing).  The next day was the all-day pre-con and I got spiffed up in the brand new Power BI shirt:)

The event went great, the location was nice and the 25 people in the room were great.  We went over the Power BI content (my pre-con was Self-Service BI to the Max), went over some demos, answered questions, and did some hands-on labs.  A fairly long day, but it was a great time meeting a new crowd and talking about Microsoft BI! (photo taken by Jes Borland – @grrl_geek)

After the long day I headed over to the main SQLSaturday event location to check it out as well as stuff a few event bags (350!).  I also met a bunch of new people as well as SQL family that I knew by name, just have never met in-person.  One of the new people I met was Pat Wright (@SQLAsylum, a.k.a. PASS photographer) who took a bunch of awesome photos and a few down below that I am including and linking back to with his permission, thanks!

Once we were done with the bags is was off to find something a cool to drink (thanks to Ted Krueger, @onpnt, he tracked down a Mt. Dew to tide me over for a bit).  We headed over to Erin’s Snug Irish Pub for a little ale.

Then it was over to the speaker’s dinner, non-stop action.

That was about all I could do on Friday, I was wiped out.  Time to get some shut eye and get ready for Saturday.  On Saturday morning I headed out with Dustin Mueller (@sqlcheesecake), Mike Donnelly (@sqlmd), and Tracy McKibben (@RealSQLGuy) for a little SQL run (just 4 miles).  It was a tad chilly on the first lap (remember, this was in March), but things were fine on the second one.  Unfortunately Jes Borland (@grrl_geek) was unable to join us because she was still recovering from an injury (she was with us in spirit and talk though).

Once I got back to the room after the run I got cleaned up and got a text from Ted inquiring if I could give a second BI presentation because they had a cancellation.  There were only a handful of BI sessions for the event, so they wanted to have another BI one to fill in.  I agreed and arranged another slide deck and demos for the second presentation (good thing I did an all-day pre-con the day before).

For the SQLSaturday event I did two presentations, fie the first one the room was a tad warm and it was standing room only, jam packed (awesome)!  I spoke on Delivering Self-Service BI with Power (new Excel 2013 features, Power Pivot, and Power View).  Then for my second presentation after lunch I spoke on “Getting Down with Power Query and Power Map”.

I was very pleased and glad to receive all of the evaluations and feedback.  On a scale of 1 to 5 I received good scores and the feedback was very helpful, lots of content to cover.

All-in-all I had a wonderful time, enjoyed my first out-of-state SQLSaturday event, looking forward to a few more.  I want to thank Ted and Jes for reaching out to me and Gina Meronek (@equerystrian) and the gang for putting on an awesome event, very well organized and an extremely helpful group over in WI.  Thanks for having me out and looking forward to returning next year:)

“Hello Wisconsin” SQLSaturday Madison #287

The time is ticking and we are just a week and a half away from the SQLSaturday Madison event which kicks off on Friday, March 28 with three pre-conference events – SQLSaturday Madison #287 Pre-Cons Registration Now Open.  Then on Saturday the main event and the schedule is rockin’ with a jam packed day with presentations from the SQL community, MVPs, and MCMs – SQLSaturday Madison #287 Schedule.  Just to name a few there is Jonathan Kehayias, Joseph Sack, Lara Rubbelke, Paul Timmerman, Jason Strate, Jes Borland, Ted Krueger, Steve Jones, Brent Ozar, Kalen Delaney, and many more!

I will be heading over to Madison Thursday and will be doing an all-day pre-con event Self-Service BI to the Max.  I am looking forward to going over the Power BI suite covering Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map, and more.  As of right now there are still a few seats remaining, so if you are attending the event or are in the general area get signed up and join us:)

On Saturday I will be continuing the adventure and doing my talk on Delivering Self-Service BI with Power.

Delivering Self-Service BI with Power

In this session, we will discuss the enhancements and new features that are provided with Excel 2013 as Microsoft continues its roadmap with self-service BI. First we will go over the changes that have been made in Excel 2013, covering the new features. From there we will show how Power Pivot models can be used to integrate and load data to be used for analysis. Lastly, we will look at using Power View inside Excel to provide self-service reporting capabilities that are highly interactive.

So what are you waiting for, head over to the event site and checkout what is going on and follow the hashtag #sqlsatMadison – SQLSaturday Madison #287 event home.

Hope to see you there!

SQLSaturday Madison #287 Pre-Cons Registration Now Open

Just announced this week, there will be three amazing pre-con events on Friday, March 28 at the SQLSaturday event in Madison.  Registration is now open and seating is limited, so sign up while you still have the opportunity.

The pre-con events are an all-day event with a small group, lunch is provided, and there is a nominal fee of $100.  These pre-con events are a great way to really dive into a particular area and have a really up-and-close interactive experience with the instructors and fellow classmates.  I will be doing a self-service Power BI course that will cover Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, and Power Maps all using Excel, very powerful and cool:)

Here is the list of three pre-cons:

Virtualization for SQL Server DBA’s with David Klee

VMware vExpert and SQL Server performance expert David Klee leads this full-day, hands-on introduction to enabling and managing a virtualized SQL Server environment. The focus of the course is to help those new to virtualization and/or infrastructure concepts to become familiar with the concept and purposes of virtualization and how it can benefit them as data professionals. Participants will gain exposure to all layers of virtualization underneath SQL Server, from storage to hypervisor to the SQL Server instance, and will learn how to construct the entire stack with the focus on SQL Server performance.

Upon completion of this course, attendees will be able to:

• Understand key virtualization and cloud concepts
• Determine the optimal infrastructure configuration for best performance
• Construct a SQL Server virtual machine template with best practices for agility and performance
• Understand how and what stack metrics to benchmark and baseline to ensure proper objective performance measurement
• Identify and remediate common virtualized SQL Server performance killers
• Understand proper virtualized capacity management techniques for long term management

Attendees with the following experiences will benefit the most from this course:

• Basic familiarity with the core components of a server
• SQL Server installation and configuration
• Exposure to SQL Server performance metric measurement and identification

A working set of the screens and configuration settings referenced in the session, together with the reference slides and documentation, will be provided to attendees, for prospective reference in working with virtualized SQL Server in their own environments.

Make Me a Tuning Believer w/Jes Borland & Ted Krueger

Are you an accidental DBA or developer that has been told to make a T-SQL query run faster? How many times have you heard complaints from the business about a report taking 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or longer to run? Have you found yourself lost in the mix of execution plan operations and indexing and scans?

Come to this class to build your query and execution plan tuning skills from beginning to end. We’ll focus on the everyday DBA’s and developer’s needs for tuning, and build up to more advanced methods which can be taken directly to work and bring immediate improvements in performance.

The workshop will show you skills and tools that revolve around what you will see most commonly in any business, such as:

• The life cycle of a transaction
• Preventing bad T-SQL coding practices
• Reading an Execution Plan
• Plan Cache and Monitoring
• Execution Plan Tuning
• Capturing bad execution plans that need to be tuned

You’ll also have plenty of time to ask your questions and get answers!

Self-Service BI to the Max with Dan English

Having the freedom and ability to easily explore and provide reporting and valuable insights within an organization has been a challenge for years. Well no more! The time to unlock and open up the doors to information is now. In this all-day pre-conference you will see that with the use of Excel you can be empowered to easily load and relate data, build business logic and calculations, enrich data with additional sources, and build highly visual and compelling reports.

We will explore Excel, Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Maps and show you how you can maximize the investment in the tools that Microsoft has provided. By the end of the day you will see how you will no longer be held back to waiting for a report request or being able to not ask the questions you have wanted to, take the next step and see what powers await you with Excel and unleash your data!

Don’t delay, to secure your spot register now!

Final Call for the MN SQL Saturday 238 Speakers

This is the final call to submit your sessions for the Minnesota SQL Saturday event coming up in October. The speaker abstracts can be submitted through Tuesday, September 13 and then the fun begins to start selecting the sessions and setting up the official schedule.

So far on 47 sessions have been submitted by 27 different speakers and 12 of those submitted more than one session.

If we do a breakdown of the current list that has been submitted it looks like the following so far:

Just a word of warning, if you have only submitted 1 session you might want to review the list that has already been submitted.  If your topic is a duplicate the chances of you making the final cut might be tough, particularly if the duplicate submission speaker only submitted 1 as well:)

So if you were holding out to submit a session to speak your time is up, time to submit.  If you already submitted, time to review the full list and re-evaluate your submission(s) to secure your spot.

Call for Speakers

Submitted Sessions

Good luck to all the speakers that submitted and can’t wait for the big event.