GSA Technology Council

The February 1st SQL Server Innovators Guild meeting features a discussion on “Consolidated SQL Server Architectures” with Ben DeBow.

Consolidated SQL Server Architectures
There is more than one way to approach a consolidation effort, and you must understand the pros and cons of each. Consolidate on physical hardware? Use virtualization? Multiple instance per server or VM? How will availability be achieved for a consolidated environment? These topics and more will be addressed in this session.

About Ben DeBow
Ben DeBow is a MDCBA and MCSE focused on SQL Server consolidations, data architecture and performance tuning for organizations both large and small. Involvement in the SQL community has included 6 years of SQLPass committee member, webcasts for SQLMag and other groups, co-author or reviewer for several Microsoft whitepapers, delivered training and past SQLPass presenter. Besides his work as a consultant, Ben is a volunteer firefighter, avid traveler and photographer.

via SSIG

The August 3, 2010 meeting of the SQL Servers Innovator’s Guild will present ’Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects: Top 7 features to make database development a breeze!’

In this session Rafael explains how you can use Visual Studio database projects  (aka data dude) to have better control over your database schema and reduce the risk and complexity related to the database development cycle. He will talk about the pros and cons he has experienced when using the tool in his  projects and will highlight improvements made since the last version. This is a demo packed session where you will learn about  schema versioning, testing, refactoring,  deployment and more.

Most the content of this session remains relevant to the previous version of the tool- VSDB 2008 GDR2 – and, no, you don’t need prior knowledge of Visual Studio to get the most out of this presentation!

Rafael Salas is a MCITP and MCTS with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a Masters in Information Technology . Currently, he is a Manager of Professional Services Consulting at Quaero, a CSG Solution where he provides technical  leadership and helps organizations improve performance through Customer Intelligence strategy and solutions.

Rafael is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP with more than 12 years of experience in data warehousing and business intelligence. He is a blog and article author, and is very active in SQL Server MSDN  forums. His specialties include Business Intelligence and data warehousing architecture, ETL, OLAP  and Dimensional Modeling. Rafael is a frequent speaker at community events such as  PASS SQL Saturdays, local users groups and code camps. You can find more about  Rafael on his blog:  www.rafael-salas.com

Please register here

6:00 – 6:30 Meal and Networking

6:30 – 6:40 Announcements

6:40 – 8:15 Rafael Salas: Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects: Top 7 features to make database development a breeze!

8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways

via SQL Server Innovators Guild

Tuesday, March 2

6:00pm SQL Server Innovators Guild
The SQL Server Guild will be talking about flat files. When doing data integration, a common requirement is to work with flat files, whether for importing data into a system from an external source, or to export it to provide to other systems. Learn more at the SQL Server Guild in March.

6:00pm Palmetto PMI Study Group
The Palmetto Chapter of PMI, the Project Management Institute, offers a study group for those preparing to sit for the PMP exam. Each session will be on Tuesday evening from 6:00 – 8:00 at the Michelin Headquarters, located off Pelham Rd. The group is a free service to members of PMI.

Friday, March 5

8:30am – 4pm TEDx Greenville
TEDx Greenville is creating an event that uniquely brings forth ideas worth spreading in our community. The event will feature a whole day of speakers, musicians, and programs designed to get the audience thinking about ideas worth spreading. More information at TEDxGreenville.com

See more great events on the GSATC Event Calendar.

The March 2, 2010 Meeting of the SQL Servers Innovator’s Guild will feature Processing Flat Files with SSIS as the feature presentation. When doing data integration, a common requirement is to work with flat files, whether for importing data into a system from an external source, or to export it to provide to other systems. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) supports flat files, but there can be a number of challenges when working with them. This is particularly true if your flat files have multiple data formats contained in a single file, the data has complex formatting, or the files have inconsistent formatting. This session will help you to be more efficient when working with these types of files. You’ll learn to handle missing delimiters in the files, and parsing files that have multiple data formats. You’ll also see how to produce complex output formats, like headers and footers that contain summary information.

Takeaways:
1. Learn to handle complex formatting in flat files
2. See the techniques to deal with poorly formatted input files
3. See the available open source components for processing flat files

via: SSIG

Tuesday Feb 2, 2010

6pm – 8:30pm SQL Server Innovators Guild

At the February meeting the group will cover SQL Server Reporting Services. SSRS is a powerful reporting system, yet some things are not has intuitive and straight forward as report designers would like them to be. The group will specifically discuss four SSRS report design challenges.

• Drill Through for a Multi-Level Matrix Report
• How to create Sparklines with SSRS 2008
• Creating a Calendar Report
• Updating Data Within a Report

The SQL Server Innovators Guild is a Microsoft SQL Users group serving SQL Server developers, project managers, DBAs and network administrators. The Guild strives to educate, inform and inspire their members to use SQL Server more effectively to overcome business and other information challenges.

The SQL Server Innovators Guild Meets Tonight!

This session is intended to introduce database developers to Analysis Services 2008, with a focus on being able to quickly construct usable OLAP cubes. This presentation will be light on slides, and heavy on demonstrating how to perform the steps to create the cubes. During this session, we will cover the creation of a new cube from an existing database step by step. We will also highlight the reasons for using Analysis Services, and applicable scenarios for using it.

The session will be led by John Welch, Chief Architect with Mariner, a consulting firm specializing in enterprise reporting & analytics, data warehousing and performance management solutions.

> Learn more

The SQL Server Innovator’s Guild Meets Tuesday to discuss “Doing More (ETL) with Less (Effort) by Automating SSIS.”

SSIS is a great tool for transferring data from one data source to another, and for implementing complex ETL processes. However, for simple, straightforward data transfer tasks, creating SSIS packages by hand can be time-consuming and repetitious. By attending this session, you’ll learn how to automate data transfers from a source to a target using SSIS. You’ll see the steps necessary to create both the control flow and the data flow portions of an SSIS package using the API and C# code. You’ll also learn about altering existing packages programmatically. Specific attention will be given to the generation of data flows with the proper source and destination components. We’ll take a look at some of the open source solutions available for this, plus some “roll your own” options.

more: SSIG May Meeting

The SQL Server Innovators Group will be having a dinner meeting for November. They meet on November 7th to discuss all things SQL Server. Looking for an easy way to get to knwo some of the other databasers in town? This dinner meeting may be your meal ticket. Contact Paul Waters at pswaters@neurocomm.net to get the details.
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The SQL Innovators Group meets 2 August 2005 at ECPI. The presentation, by Will Sweeney of Microsoft will review the .NET Common Language Runtime in SQL Server 2005. His presentation covers the pros and cons of embedding 3GL code in the SQL Server Engine, how to choose which code to run and where, and how to debug in both worlds. The presentation also include information on monitoring and defending your code performance with performance analysis. For an agenda or contact information see http://www.gsatc.org/sqlig.
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Want to know more about the SQL Innovators Group? Listen as Paul Waters is interviewed about their April meeting on Podcast42. (www.podcast42.com)
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