Part of the Pragmatic Works core culture is to be a bit odd and comical. Well went back to the drawing board around all of our marketing and asked how we could be that way with each ad. Hopefully you enjoy the below new comical infomercial around BI xPress. Even more so, I hope you have a good sense of humor before watching it. Expect quite a few other re-inventions of traditional marketing in the next few weeks. Prevent SSIS Stress with BI xPress BI xPress reduces your SSIS ...
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Come join us for an epic battle for who will be kinged the alpha male of Pragmatic Works tech jungle in this BI Smack Down. In the September sessions, myself and Adam (the guy in the dumpster) will be competing for who can entertain more people in our hour webinar. You decide who wins our inside bet (and subsequent lunch at a restaurant where I can?t wear my sandals) by simply attending one of our educational webinars. Each webinar caps at the first 1,000 attendees so first come first serve. Ada...
Offline Posting in Communifire Offline posting allows community members to create and update blog posts and articles in Communifire through offline tools like Microsoft Word, Windows Live Writer etc. This essentially means that the members can create and edit blog posts using desktop tools like MS Word, and then publish it when they are done. They do not even need to open the Communifire website to add/edit content. This gives them the added flexiblity of adding rich content with the comfort and...
While I’ve been on the Expedition Denali roadshow, a portion of the event is about SQL Azure, Microsoft’s new cloud database computing platform. I always enjoy watching and surveying the DBAs in the audience during and after the session about how they feel this is going to affect their jobs. Microsoft has been pitching Azure as a fundamental shift in the way we manage and store data, pushing the onus of managing the database, patches and operating systems to Microsoft. Reading between the lines,...
The PASS 2011 Summit has had more than 600 sessions submitted this year. With that massive list of fantastic sessions, PASS is leaving it in your hands to vote on your favorite sessions that you want to see in. You have until Friday, May 20th to do this! My sessions include: Building a Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform [200] Implementing Business Intelligence in SharePoint [200] Introduction to Data Mining in SQL Server Analysis Services [300] Managing SSIS in Denali [200] BI Party Hour -...
Like many other companies, Pragmatic Works has the culture of email communication. I often had made the joke that I need to change the tones and chimes in Outlook to be my wife’s voice since I typically due what Outlook tells me to do. Email has made us much more productive but has had its downsides. There are some days that make me less than friendly to be around where I do nothing but answer emails for four hours after being out of the office for a few days. I’m not the only one with the volum...
I, like many of you have been active in the SQL Server and business intelligence communities for many years. I frankly owe my career to the community at large and wouldn’t be remotely in the position I am without the community. That debt to the community is a debt that I feel I can never properly pay off so I strive to pay little pieces where I can. When I started Pragmatic Works , I wanted to bake that same goal into the fabric of our company culture and build a different type of company. I bel...
I'm excited to announce the launch of BI xPress 3.0 with new features including: an MDX Calculation Builder, encrypted configurations and deeper auditing framework. If you'd like to see the launch party video, you can see the recording here: http://www.fliqz.com/aspx/permalinkblank.aspx?at=3bcb600c-b18a-470b-a0f2-cbbed59492ff&a=e4af6c7e-40c2-43b2-9b2c-f4546fe57056 I'm also happy to announce our contest around MDX calculations, which you can find here: http://www.tinyurl.com/mdxcontest . You ...
Thanks for all who attended the session today at 11am. You can find the session PowerPoint (and code in the notes) at the attached URL. You'll also be able to see the recording later today on PragmaticWorks.com under Webinars. http://www.bidn.com/Assets/Uploaded-CMS-Files/7bd13499-8855-4999-8166-7569bafd5370Data Cleansing with SSIS.pptx
Head over to Pragmatic Works site and take a look at some training that is available this month. This month you can listen to some more great business intelligence content presented by Chris Webb, Brian Knight, Mike Davis, and Tim Moolic. The topics covered with be Analysis Services, Data Mining, SSIS, and BI careers. December 21, Chris Webb – Introduction to Performance Tuning Analysis Services 2008 December 23, Brian Knight – Introduction to Data Mining in SQL Server Analysis Services December...
Microsoft and Pragmatic Works would like to invite you to a special, two-day workshop on SQL Server Analysis Services taught by SQL Server MVP Brian Knight . Houston, TX November 16 & 17 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (Lunch included) Microsoft Office One Briar Lake Plaza 2000 W. Sam Houston Pkwy, Suite 350 Houston, TX 73609 Register Here! Dallas, TX November 18 & 19 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (Lunch included) Microsoft Office 7000 Highway 161 Irving, TX 75039 Register Here! SSAS Topics Covered: Dim...
Occasionally in SQL Server 2005 and 2008 Analysis Services, you'll build a cacluation and set the formatting to be a value like a currency and are surprised that in Excel 2007 and 2010 the formatting does not carry over. The "randomness" of this actually does have a bit of a method behind it. The formatting issue that you see in browsers like Excel is because Excel is looking for the type of language that you want to display the currency format. In other words, should Excel show GB Pounds or US ...
As an author, nothing professionally beats the excitement you receive when you receive the box of pre-release books from the publisher. It's the cap on many months of late nights writing and editing chapters and in this case creating videos. Then, there's silence for months where you hear nothing.....until the box arrives. Last week, I finally received the fabled box of my latest book that I co-wrote with Devin Knight , Adam Jorgensen , Patrick LeBlanc , and Mike Davis called Knight's Microsoft ...
I'm getting very excited about PASS in November. I started to work on my pre-conference session ETL and SSIS BootCamp and got especially jazzed this week. We got permission to use some pretty amazing data to really show some real-world scalability tricks and data warehousing tricks using NFL statistics data. I hope to see you there! If you haven't registered for PASS, it's the main conference for BI and SQL Server professionals that I would go to each year. I'll be doing a number of sessions wit...
evin and I just wrapped up an all day session that was filmed live called Knight's BI Summer School . While the session was only 6 hours on camera after you take out lunches and breaks, I thought it'd be an interesting blog post to talk about the 60 hours that were spent preparing for it. While I've been public speaking for well over a dozen years on technical topics, it never ceases to amaze me how I'm still trying to master it. It feels a bit like a finish line that constantly moves as you try...
When developing reports in SSRS, you will often want to click on a given value and go to a URL on the Internet. This is an easy concept in SSRS with Actions with the "Go to URL" option as shown in the below screenshot. The challenge comes in where most people want to open a new browser window when a user clicks on this row so the user doesn't navigate away from the report. To do this isn't especially obvious in SSRS but involves a single line of code with some JavaScript as shown in the below li...
Congratulations to Brian McDonald who has triumphed as the winner of this month's Zune contest. Brian achieved more than 700 points on BIDN over the past 30 days and was also promoted to Jedi Knight status because of that :).
Microsoft Business Intelligence Summer School Upgrade Your Resume in 1 Day In this full-day virtual workshop, you'll learn from author team Brian Knight and Devin Knight how to build a data warehouse for your company and support it with the Microsoft business intelligence platform. What you'll learn in this online workshop : How to design a data warehouse How to load a data warehouse with Integration Services How to create slice-and-dice reports with Analysis Services How to create beautiful das...
The contest for the ZuneHD is about half way over ( http://www.bidn.com/blogs/BrianKnight/ssis/784/zune-contest-for-community-participation-in-july). So far, you can see the contest is a close one with the numbers showing a rolling 30 days. PatrickLeBlanc 329 Padawan briankmcdonald 305 Padawan SMcDonald 245 Padawan DustinRyan 216 Jedi Knight AdamJorgensen 200 Jedi Knight indupriya 160 Padawan BrianKnight 136 Padawan DevinKnight 130 Jedi Knight MarkGStacey 125 Padawan MikeMollenhour 100 Padawan
It's always funny when I go 12 years in this industry and don't know some basic trick about writing T-SQL until weeks ago. So, in today's installment of Doh' that's Cool, I wanted to share with you a trick I learned from watching another DBA (Patrick LeBlanc) recently and then said, "How'd you do that?!". This trick will help you write queries much faster and hopefully get you out of the bad habit of typing SELECT *. To do the trick, simply open your query window in Management Studio. Then, when...
Thanks to all who attended the Implementing the SQL Server Fast Track presentation this week. If you missed it, you can see the recordings here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/933664848 or download the slides her: http://www.bidn.com/Assets/Uploaded-CMS-Files/9888faa4-bbf7-40e8-958b-9835a2fb30a5BIE402-BRK-Bknight.pdf Resources Here are some of the resources you can find about the Fast Track: Fast Track Homepage: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/fasttrack.aspx Fast Track Datas...
I was looking through the event bags from TechEd and it looks like we bought an extra Zune HD (16GB). So, I need to find an interesting way to give it away! I decided a great way to give it away is to the biggest community supporter. So, on July 29th, I'm going to the homepage and click Last 30 Days under Top Contributors and will give the Zune HD to the top name. Keep in mind that the Last 30 Days is a rolling 30 days so names that are active right now may drop off as the month goes on but on J...
Most of us have used SSIS to load a flat file into a destination. A little known fact about the Flat File Source which is used to do this is that as it loads data into a destination it validates any numeric and date values to ensure they're indeed those data types. This validation adds overhead to the tune of about 8% extra per column of these data types. This is especially felt in fact table loads where you have loads of numeric or DateTime columns. Of course, this validation is done for a reas...
It's been a great month of free education from Pragmatic Works. The recordings from the previous ones are now posted and I have one on Tuesday on SQL Server Data Warehousing Fast Tracks. Check out all the information below: June 22, 2010 View Recording Powershell for complete beginners Featuring: Sean McCown , InfoWorld Editor and SQL Server MVP Topic Summary: Have you been wanting to learn powershell but don’t know where to get started, or even why you should bother? This is where you start. In...