GSA Technology Council

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.
—–

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.
—–

Want to know more about the SQL Innovators Group? Listen as Paul Waters is interviewed about their April meeting on Podcast42. (www.podcast42.com)
—–

The SQL Innoventors Group meets April 5th to dicuss the notification services in SQL Server 2005. The presentation will be lead by Bill Ryan of TiBA Solutions. Notification Services enables businesses to build rich notification applications that deliver personalized and timely information, such as stock market alerts, news subscriptions, package delivery alerts, and airline ticket prices, to any device. With SQL Server 2005, Notification Services is more tightly integrated with technologies such as Analysis Services and SQL Server Management Studio. 6:00 PM at ECPI, RSVP to pswaters@neurocomm.net. More at www.sqlig.org

—–

Despite the hype surrounding XML and web services, the death of the relational database has been greatly exaggerated. Oddly enough, a new data markup language doesn’t magically provide its users with good information design skills. Luckily, all of the skills and best practices you learned while designing relational databases can be quickly applied to XML document design. Join Scott Means (co-author of O’Reilly’s XML in a Nutshell) as he shows how existing database designs can be translated to new XML applications.  For more information please visit the SQL Innovators Group Site.