$99 gets you a full day of training from DevelopMentor (former home of Don Box and Chris Sells and our very own Doug Turnure).  It's at the Cobb Galleria and you're a sucker if you don't go.  Sign up via the banner on the SQL Server User Group - www.atlantamdf.com and you'll help earn the group a donation.  You'll also get a kickback of your very own.  If you sign up through AtlantaMDF, you'll get a $25 Amex cash card.  Of course, you don't have to tell the people reimbursing you that you'll be getting some cash back...

-- Matt Ranlett

PS - you won't see this even on the calendar b/c it's not free.

Bill Baker is visiting Atlanta this week for the Microsoft Global Business conference, and he graciously volunteered to come speak before the SQL Server User Group for the second year in a row, although this is the first time I’ve seen him speak.  Bill Baker is the program manager for the SQL Server Business Intelligence products, including Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Integration Services (DTS), and more. 

Bill is an extremely entertaining person to watch – complete with Steve Ballmer imitations.  We talked about SQL Server 2005 in general and how the new release is going to really help everyone out with some really cool new features.  We talked about the new licensing SKUs – Enterprise, Standard, WorkGroup (a new SKU), and Express (MSDN).  The cost has gone up a bit, from $20,000 to $25,000 for the Enterprise Edition.  Standard now costs $6000, Workgroup costs $3,500, and Express is free.  Special note – the Developer Edition, which is the Enterprise Edition with a single connection license, costs a mere $49!

I can’t really tell you what Bill talked about because he was all over the map – the presentation was entirely question and answer.  This was the first technology presentation I’ve been to in years where the speaker didn’t even use a computer.  Not even a projected My Name Is slide!  No props at all.  We did cover lots of cool ground.  For example, did you know that the most requested feature from the community (submitted through the Ladybug system) was a bell at the completion of a query?  Who thinks of that stuff?  Did you know that when Beta 1 of SQL 2005 came out, that the favorite feature of the community was the new SQL Management Console tool that replaces Enterprise Manager?  Can you guess what the least favorite feature was?  That’s right – the new SQL Management Console!  Talk about a schizophrenic user community!  We apparently will not be getting hashed indexes.  We ARE able to run SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 side by side.  Database mirroring is a great cool new technology that requires three computers – a primary, a mirror, and a monitor that votes which system is the primary and which is the mirror.  Did you know that you could potentially have all three systems in the same box?  Sure, why not?  Hardware is way more dependable these days than software.  That’s job security for us!  We covered so many topics – ETS, OLTP, building cubes as a background process, etc, that I can’t even remember everything we talked about.

We had some great sponsors – Microsoft, Unisys, ProClarity, and Doug McDowell himself (or whomever reimburses him) – who brought in some incredible barbeque for the meeting.  Thanks guys!

Quick note #1 – when you have SQL or technology questions, be sure to post them to the MSN groups.  Doug was telling me that before the meeting he was hit with 10 technical questions and he didn’t have the time to sit and really think about the answers.  By posting to the MSN groups, you have a much wider community than just Doug looking at the questions and suggesting answers.

Quick note #2 – There is a SQL Server Road show $99 one day training event occurring at the Cobb Galleria hosted by Windows IT Pro magazine and the SQL Pass organization.  There will be three tracks – DBA, Dev, and BI.  Register through the www.AtlantaMDF.com banner and you’ll get a free $25 AMEX gift card.  If 25 people register through the AtlantaMDF banner, the AtlantaMDF organization will receive a donation that will help us continue to provide pizza and beverages to the members.

-- Matt Ranlett

This is just an alert for those of you who are not keeping up with the calendar:

Tonight: the SPIN group is hosting Randy Miller from the VSTS team at the Microsoft offices

Tomorrow: the SQL Server UG is hosting Bill Baker from the SQL Server Business Intelligence team at the Microsoft offices

Monday: the main .Net UG looks into application platform migration with Mike Sorrentino from BrightStrategy Inc.

-- Matt Ranlett

Bill Baker, program manager of the SQL Server Business Intelligence team, is coming to town on July 21^st to speak to the SQL Server User Group.  To accommodate Mr. Baker’s busy schedule, the SQL Server group will be meeting in the Microsoft Offices off of Mansell Rd instead of their normal meeting location in the Concourse buildings.  Be sure to visit www.atlantamdf.com to register for the meeting.  Registration is used to calculate how much pizza should be purchased.

-- Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

SQL Integration Services
The night started off with Douglas McDowell telling me there were between 80-90 people signed up for the session!  Wow that is a lot of people to sign up for one user group.  Luckily we had a great sponsor who bought enough pizza for all of us.  I think there was only part of a veggie pizza left at the end.  We had to get creative with how to set up the seats because the room is getting close to capacity with the number of people getting interested in the new features of SQL Server.

Leslie Sistla, one of Microsoft’s Senior Database Technology Specialist, gave the AtlantaMDF group an introduction to the new SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).  She also showed mentioned the entire SQL platform with SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS.  It appears that they have created these products as solutions to common problems in the industry to make their database a more powerful tool.  She briefly touched on the new features of each of the three products such as there are 5 new algorithms for data mining and there is infinite drill down for Reporting Services.

You may be asking what SSIS solves in the new version.  One of the key points that SSIS tries to solve is to be fastest for greater volumes of data.  If you haven’t seen a demonstration yet on how much data SSIS can process on a laptop, ask a Microsoft person or one of the SQL UG leaders to show you.  SSIS can now process a ton of data in no time at all.  Another problem that SSIS tries to solve is to collect data from diverse data sources.  You may have many different locations and types of databases that your data comes from and you want to be able to still have access to those sources.  The last key problem is today there are more diverse destinations people are trying to send the data to.  SSIS tries to make data available to more people and with more destinations.  Performance was one of the primary goals and the way the get the performance is that everything is now in a pipeline.  She said that the processing is more ELT, but that it is still called ETL (extract, transform and load).  She also said SQL Server is driven for performance. 

We went on to see some demos and everyone enjoyed seeing the new BI Studio tool.  This is a one stop shop for creating, deploying, and maintaining your application during development.  Now if there is more than one window you would need to look at for a task there are multiple tabs for those windows.  The main tabs used for SSIS are workflow and dataflow.  Most of the talk was on workflow vs dataflow and there were many definitions that she covered.  We saw many demos and how to create a new project.  One of the demos was even put together during the meeting, the example only took about 10 minutes total to put together even while she was talking.  There were a ton of controls, but if you need to you can still extend the ones that are there.  The event handlers have been tremendously improved and all of the projects are now stored in XML so you can store them in Source control.  At the end she showed us how to deploy the project and how easy it is to create a deployment package.

--Brendon Schwartz

Bill Baker, the general manager for SQL Server Business Intelligence with Microsoft is coming to present to the SQL Server User Group.  To accomodate Bill's busy schedule, the SQL Server group will be meeting in the Microsoft Offices in Alpharetta on Thursday, July 21st.  The doors open at 6:30 and Microsoft will be providing some refreshments.

Come one, come all, learn the magic that is BI.  Be sure to register at the SQL Server group website

-- Matt Ranlett

Thank you to Unisys and Melanie Marks for providing the pizza and prizes for the evening.

Doug kicked off the meeting with a quick demo of the DTS Integration Services Data Flow interface in the new 2005 Reporting Services Reports Builder UI (part of Whidbey’s 2005 Visual Studio interface).  In Doug’s quick demo, he showed how easy it would be to take a flat file, pipe the input from the flat file to a pair of tables using Data Flow sources (flat file), transformations (to pipe the raw input to one table and the summarization of the raw input to another table), and destinations (database tables in this example).  One of the really neat things about the demo was how the drag and drop tool turned from the design environment to a graphic representation of the progress of the DTS program in the debugger.  During this quick preview of SSIS data integration, a question came up about the differences between SSIS and BizTalk.  The results of the discussion were that BizTalk is assured delivery across a heterogeneous environment where SSIS is called integration services but usually functions as a data movement engine.

The main presentation was an introduction to SQL Server 2005’s Reporting Services Report Builder.  The core changes to RS 2005 include some tighter integration with Sharepoint and the end to end BI.  Rich Client printing has been added to RS. The Expression editor has been enhanced with VB.Net functions complete with Intellisense.  Multi-Valued parameters have been added – the report processing will create SQL.  the ASP.Net date picker has been included.  Interactive sorting has been added so sorting can occur without requerying the data.  Floating header (like Excel) so you don’t have to build paged tables with header rows.  Custom report items allow the API to be exposed, so that 3rd party vendors can provide charts, maps, etc.  Analysis Services support now integrates MDX parameter support and data mining query builders.  Management Studio integration functions as a single point of management for all SQL Server components, a supersert of Report Manager functions.  SharePoint Web Parts have been added – now you can integrate your reports into Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint portal server.  Visual Studio’s integration is better.  The Report Controls in Visual Studio make it easier to embed reporting functionality into applications (both web and winform).

The Report Builder fills the need between the report manger (for report consumers) and the report designer (for power users and developers).  The business users would be using the report builder.  Caution – report builder requires SQL Server Enterprise Edition.  Report Builder is an ad-hoc report design tool for SQL Server RS.  This is targeted at business users who want to find and share answers.  This is not an analytical client or a replacement for pivot tables.  Report builder doesn’t query SQL objects, but rather queries a semantic model of the data making is so that the business users don’t need to know SQL to write the reports.  The report builder is a smart client application downloaded directly from the Report Manager web application.  To build a report, you pick a template (chart, matrix, table) and drag table fields onto the design surface.  When you build the report, you can page through the report and click on any detail to look in more detail (infinite drill).

Next we took a look at the semantic modeling tool.  We used Visual Studio to build a report model for the Northwind database.  You would use this to build a semantic model the business user would use to generate Report Builder reports.  You start out with a Data Source View – use the wizard to create one if one’s not already been created to meet your needs.  Once you have a data source view, the report modeling wizard makes some assumptions about the data (you can override these assumptions, but the wizard is pretty powerful) and generates a set of metadata in 2 passes.  Once your model is completely processed and you have an SMDL (semantic model definition language) file, you can publish it to the reports server, or you can add expressions and calculations to the report model.  Now that the SMDL file has been published, and you have your new report model, you can build new reports with the Report Builder tool.

My personal impression of the tool is this – this is a great tool which has great potential.  I can easily see savvy business users creating their own reports to explore details that are smaller and less sophisticated than full RS or Analysis Services reports.  I especially like the infinite drill capabilities and the ability to save any drilled down view to the report server as a stand-alone report.  However, currently you can’t reverse-engineer the data connections of a report builder report in Visual Studio, so you’ll have a hard time taking a report builder report (also RDL like Visual Studio’s Report Designer’s reports) and turning them into true Report Designer reports (with true SQL as the data source, rather than the semantic model of the SQL objects).  Another problem is the enterprise edition requirement – drastically increasing the price of the tool for small shops.

I asked a couple of people at the UG meeting what they thought of the presentation and our presenter.  Based on the questions I heard from the group during the presentation, there seemed to be a good deal of excitement around the possibility of granting the users the ability to generate their own reports via infinite drill, but there seemed to be several questions concerning the underlying technology.  I got the feeling that a lot of the developers/DBAs were uncomfortable with the semantic model’s removal of SQL – perhaps the feeling of a loss of control?  Otherwise, people were very positive about both the presenter and presentation.  Great job Doug!

— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet