SQL Zaterdag october 23th

The Dutch version of SQL saturday was held on october 23th and had  BI track and a DBA track. I joined the BI track. The BI track consists of four sessions:

• Chris Webb about DAX
• André Kamman about automatingSSIS
• Martijn van Amstel about Datavault
• Vincent Wiering about SSAS best practice

Chris Webb about DAX
Chris did a wonderful job about telling about DAX and how its used in Powerpivot. He explained there a basically two sorts of calculations : colum based and measures based. The last one is the most interesting. He also explained that DAX in the future it's likely to have an important role in other corporate BI products from Microsoft, so it's something that all BI consultants need to learn now. Chris had the following conclusions:

• DAX does the easy stuff very easily;
• DAX does the medium stuff well too;
• DAX does not do the hard stuff well at all

André Kamman about automating SSIS 
SSIS is on of my favorite tools and i use it regularly and so i was interested in what Andre had to say about automating SSIS. I've looked into this stuff  myself and built some of dynamic SSIS packages. Andre showed some stuff about C# and SSIS. He told something about the pitfalls and debugging problems. He was able to create SSIS packages with derived columns, multicast, adapters, etc It was not an easy job but he was able to manage a import of 100 tables with this tool. Intersting sessions and this made me think about dynamic generating SSIS packages.



Martijn van Amstel about Data Vault
Marijn van Amster explained plain and simple the datavault methodology. He explained the differences between Datavault and Kimball. He explained why we need datavault and when it could be an aid in (enterprise) datawarehouses. He explained some problems he had in a project with datavaulting. It's was a introduction in Datavault but some things were interesting.

Vincent Wiering on SSAS Best practices

Vincent explained an example about  a project of a customer he visited a couple of weeks ago. He explained how he handled the project and how he developed a solution with Excel and SSAS.

Conclusion
So this was a interesting saturday with some learnful sessions about BI and SQL Server and it's advisable to join the next sessions of SQL saturday. 


Gr,
Hennie