SQL Business Intelligence Professional

I am honored to be speaking at the second SQL Saturday event on the campus of Louisiana State University.  With 9 tracks, and over 300 registered attendees, this is a very worthwhile use of one of your last Saturdays of the summer.  The details for the August 14 event are at the SQL Saturday website.  I will be delivering two presentations at the event.

Breakfast Basics, SQL Server Analysis Services Cube Creation

The hub of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence platform is Analysis Services.  PerformancePoint Services, Office, and SQL Server Reporting Services all provide out-of-the-box connectivity and features to leverage SSAS data as a first-class data store.  This session is intended to share with participants the basics of creating an SSAS database.  We will cover the relationship between Business Intelligence Developer Studio and SQL Server Management Studio in the cube development and build process.  We will walk through the creation of data sources, to connect to the source of our cube’s data as well as creating data source views and their relationship with the final cube.  How measures, measure groups and partitions are related.  Finally, we will cover on-line editing of an SSAS database using Visual Studio in order to capture metadata that may not be readily available.

For myself, there is no better way to learn than by doing.  The intent of this session is to prepare attendees to build SSAS databases.

College Football and Microsoft Business Intelligence

This session will be a rapid-paced delivery of how Microsoft BI tools (PowerPivot, SQL Analysis Services and PerformancePoint Services) have been used to create a compelling Business Intelligence demonstration using a very non-traditional subject area.  We will tap into readily available NCAA data, conduct comparisons of teams, conferences and players, using the same tools available to business information workers.  All of the source code for the demos will be available for download after the presentation.

With SQL Saturday 28 scheduled only three weeks before the opening of the 2010 college football season, my intention for this session is to both demonstrate how the tools can be used and act as a catalyst in discovering non-traditional BI subject areas.