Did you know Atlanta has a B/I User Group? This new group is a special extension to Atlanta MDF that focuses on providing monthly BI content and discussions for the hard working people of Atlanta. The first meeting of the B/I SIG of the Atlanta MDF is tonight, 6:30 pm at Matrix Resources in Perimeter. (Did I mention that Matrix is a wonderful sponsor of us SQL folks here in Atlanta?) The topic is going to be something I keep meaning to try out: PowerPivot. Come on ouy and help get this new group off to a great start.
Here are all the vital details for you:
Topic: Self-service B/I with PowerPivot Date: Monday, August 23, 2010 Speaker: Teo Lachev
Because simply helping organize the event isn’t enough Stuart ( blog | twitter ) decided that I should speak at SQL Saturday #41 in Atlanta too. I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that not only is he not speaking at this SQL Saturday but he scheduled me for 2 sessions! OK, enough smack-talk.
This year we will be hosting over 30 speakers including 6 MVPs, and around a half-dozen speakers from Microsoft. We’re lucky enough to have planned on having David Rodriguez present 3 session on SQL Server 2008 R2 right after it launched earlier this week (yep we planned the whole thing out that way ). We’ve got 250 registered and 65 people on the wait list so the next time we do this “we’re gonna need a bigger boat”. If you’re one of those people on the wait list we’ll be glad to have you join us if we have room after 9 am.
If you’re not anywhere near Atlanta there are SQL Saturdays happening in New York and Southern California this weekend as well. My sessions are going to be on Virtualization using Hyper-V and SCVMM (Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager) and Windows PowerShell.
We’ve decided to try a different approach to SQL Saturday and get attendees to vote on what sessions they would like to see so that we can use that as a guide to figure out which size room to put sessions in. You can find the schedule as we currently have it configured here. Once we get the results of the survey we will redo the schedule based on that. I’d give you the link to the survey but unless you registered for the event you don’t get to vote so check your email if you registered.
We’re also trying something else different with our schedule, we’re going with 7 sessions in a day. If you think this is a bad idea please tell us (comment box below). We just got so many good sessions from so many good speakers that we didn’t want to leave people out.
Boxes of swag are continuing to arrive so we should have plenty to giveaway at the end. My goal is for 20% of the attendees to leave with a book. I’m half way to achieving that goal, no idea if I’ll succeed but I figured I needed something to shoot for. Currently searching for where to hold the after-party, we’re definitely open to suggestions on that.
_____________________________________________________________________ Adding SSRS Report Bells and Whistles
March 9th at 12:00 PM Eastern (GMT -5) Presenter: Jessica M. Moss Add to Calendar
Producing a good looking report will wow your business users even if your data isn’t all that impressive. If you’ve ever had trouble finding the best way to display that data or how to show trends appropriately, this is the session for you. We will review grouping logic, graphs, gauges, and more in Reporting Services 2008. With the knowledge in this session, you won’t ever need to show a plain, boring report again.
Jessica M. Moss
Jessica M. Moss, an architect with Ironworks Consulting and a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, is a well-known practitioner, author, and speaker in Microsoft SQL Server business intelligence. Jessica has created numerous data warehousing solutions for companies in the retail, internet, health services, finance, and energy industries and authored technical content for multiple magazines, websites, and the book “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Problem-Design-Solution. Jessica enjoys working with the central Virginia community and speaks regularly at user groups, code camps, and conferences. You can read about her work on her blog,http://www.jessicammoss.com.
_____________________________________________________________________ Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Application and Multi-Server Management
March 10, Noon Mountain Time (GMT-7) Presenter: Clifford Dibble
Are you missing critical utilization insights into your growing database environment? Attend this session to learn how the application and multi-server management capabilities shipping with SQL Server 2008 R2 will expose resource utilization data and help streamline consolidation management. New extensions in SQL Server Management Studio allow DBAs to quickly create SQL Server control point and enroll instances them into multi-server management. Once enrolled, DBAs can define utilization policies across applications and Database Engine instances and view resource utilization to maximize investments. Meanwhile, the introduction of a single unit of deployment helps accelerate deployments, moves and upgrades associated with consolidation management.
Clifford Dibble:
Clifford Dibble has been a program manager in SQL Server since 2002. Among other things, he was the active PM for “system views”, “DMVs”, “DDL triggers”, and “resource database” during the 9.0 release. During the 10.0 release, Clifford was off working on an incubation project. For the 10.5 and 11.0 releases, he is focused on multi-instance manageability and SQL management packs.
_____________________________________________________________ Microsoft Hyper-V
March 16th at 12:00 PM Eastern (GMT -5) Presenter: Sylvia Vargas
Overview of how Microsoft IT uses, configures, and manages their virtualization environment. Learn how Microsoft leverages Virtualization for their SQL Server environments using System Center VMM.
Sylvia is a Microsoft certified SQL Server professional and Senior Systems Engineer in Microsoft IT’s Virtualization Engineering group. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2006, Sylvia spent 24 years in various management and technical roles specializing in the architecting, development and deployment of data based solutions for companies including Areva, Boeing, ORACLE, Merrill Lynch, Nestle and Texaco. Sylvia has been a contributing author on The Real MCTS SQL Server 2008 Exam 70-432 Prep Kit by Syngress and an instructor at the University of Washington SQL Server Certificate program.
Mark Pohto is the Principal Service Engineer responsible for the IT Cloud organization which provides virtual server engineering and delivery in Microsoft data centers. Previous to his current role, Mark was instrumental in architecting corporate monitoring systems, database administration automation solutions and IT SQL Server consolidation. As the Group Manager for the Microsoft SQL Server Center of Excellence, Mark managed the team responsible for the Microsoft Certified Architect program and the SQL Risk Assessment program.
the hard working people of Atlanta. The first meeting of the B/I SIG of the Atlanta MDF is tonight, 6:30 pm at Matrix Resources in Perimeter. (Did I mention that Matrix is a wonderful sponsor of us SQL folks here in Atlanta?) The topic is going to be something I keep meaning to try out: PowerPivot. Come on ouy and help get this new group off to a great start.
). We’ve got 250 registered and 65 people on the wait list so the next time we do this “we’re gonna need a bigger boat”. If you’re one of those people on the wait list we’ll be glad to have you join us 
