SQL Server, Power BI, and other Business Intelligence and data technologies
What better way to celebrate one of the mot fun holidays of the year than with a few office shenanigans? This year, we decided to go big and built a giant haunted cemetery, complete with crypt, sound effects, and fog machine in the office. It was pretty incredible!
It took us around 2 weeks from start to finish, with one very long weekend piecing everything together, but it came out pretty well. The best and most haunted Office Cemetery I’ve ever seen! Check out the full album below.
Lunch and learns are a great way for a team to learn new things, share that knowledge with each other, and practice presentation skills. We typically do casual 30 minute sessions in a group of IT developers which range from .NET to SQL Database to Business Intelligence.
For our October, Halloween-themed presentation, I chose to give an introductory presentation on data visualization, titled “Avoiding the Horrors of Scary Visualizations: An Introduction to Data Visualization.” The presentation was targeted toward people with no background in data visualization and started with a quick history and some of the key players (Tufte and Few), bridged into some tips and best practices, and closed with a number of examples of “scary” visualization examples.
Overall, the presentation went very well and seemed to be well received. The full presentation is available here.
SQL Saturday Roundup: #521 – Atlanta, GA
This past Saturday marked the annual event that many of us look forward to all year long. Called by some to be the “Summit of the South,” SQL Saturday Atlanta is always a large and very professionally run event which draws hordes of SQL Server Professionals nationwide. Again, this year, the event did not disappoint. Despite the initial overcast and rainy weather which opened up the day, a record number of 590 attendees attended this awesome event!
For the second year in a row, I volunteered my time to help make the event as great as it could be. For the first time in the past few years, I was did not attend any of the event’s preconference sessions, which typically run all day on Friday. That being said, the sessions that were being given were excellent topics which were presented by some truly great speakers. I’m sure everyone who attended learned a ton and had a great time.
While I didn’t attend any preconference sessions on Friday, SQL Saturday Atlanta did still begin for me on Friday when I headed over to the site Friday afternoon to begin helping with prep. We had a great group of organizers and volunteers onsite to perform the bag stuffing and venue setup. Additionally, this year, the decision was made to pre-print all of the attendee admission tickets, name badges, and raffle tickets (rather than relying on attendees to pre-print their items at home prior to the event to bring them with). This allowed for nicer name badges and perforated raffle tickets to be used, but was a very laborious process collating and assembling the packets for the morning’s registration. I ended up spending all of my time Friday afternoon helping out with the registration packet assembly process.
SQL Saturday Roundup: #477 – Atlanta, GA (BI Edition)
This past Saturday marked a great landmark for Atlanta — the first “BI Edition” SQL Saturday, and, for many of us, our first SQL Saturday of 2016! Atlanta has been hosting a regular SQL Saturday event for many years now, always with tremendous attendance. Based on the amount of interest in the regular SQL Saturday (usually around May of each year), it was great to see a BI focused edition launched.
With the regular event in the Spring, having this event in January was a great way to space out the two Atlanta events probably about as equally as they could be. And, for a first event, it seemed to be a tremendous success with a registration wait list and around 300 in attendance.
The event was held at the local Microsoft facility in Alpharetta, GA, where the monthly Atlanta MDF user group meetings are held. All told, the facility was a pretty good choice of venue (and definitely a convenient location), but suffered from some overcrowding. The facility had about half the sessions in roughly classroom sized rooms and half the sessions in much smaller conference room sized rooms. While these smaller rooms made for an interesting and more intimate setting, they ultimately filled up very quickly.
Unlike many SQL Saturdays, the event kicked off with an opening keynote and presentation in the large room (multiple rooms joined together technically). I enjoy it when a SQL Saturday begins with some sort of all-attendee opening remarks, it provides nice symmetry to the event (which always has a final closing remarks session), so hopefully more events will adopt this.
Dandy Weyn presenting the opening remarks at SQL Saturday Atlanta 2016, BI Edition.
2016 is here at last, and it’s already shaping up to be an exciting year. Most notably, after 12 years, I decided to put the Professional Development skills that I’d been honing over the past few years into practice and start the year off with a bang — by interviewing for and accepting a Business Intelligence position with another organization.
I’m not going to pretend it was easy, leaving a stable job with an amazing organization after so many years, but it was a necessary one. And, I won’t say that more than once, I didn’t ask myself if I was being crazy. Personality types such as my own value and prioritize security and stability, sometimes to our detriment, to where we find ourselves in situations which are so stable and comfortable that it becomes difficult to challenge ourselves and grow and easy to fall into a routine. But challenge is crucial to continue growing, learning, and advancing. I’ll dearly miss the people at my previous organization, but I look forward to the adventures ahead of me.
So, here’s to a great, and definitely interesting, 2016. My challenge to you for 2016 — if you find yourself too comfortable and stable, find a way to challenge yourself in some new way, whatever it is. Make a plan, get out there, and do it! And don’t forget to document it in your Professional Development Plan!
SQL Saturday Roundup: #392 – Atlanta, GA
This past Saturday a time-honored event was held in Alpharetta, GA. That tradition, straight out of past — or is it future? was SQL Saturday Atlanta. Called by some the “PASS Summit of the South,” SQL Saturday Atlanta was the 392nd event in the SQL Saturday series and continues the yearly streak in Atlanta since SQL Saturday #13 in 2009.
It seems each year, the stakes are raised higher and higher as far as size, quality, and theme — and this year was no exception. With this summer marking the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future, it seems appropriate that the event was called Back to SQL Saturday and given a full, over-the-top Back to the Future theme. But, before we talk about Saturday, we first have to travel back in time — to Friday…
SQL Saturday #220 – Atlanta, GA:
This was my 8th SQL Saturday, yet somehow only the first one I’ve attended near my home, Atlanta. It’s pretty strange not having to drive for hours and stay in a hotel!
For anybody who has not yet had the pleasure of attending a SQL Saturday event in Atlanta, they’re known for being pretty popular events. As such, not one or two, but five pre-conference sessions were offered for Friday before the main event.
I had a tremendously difficult time choosing between Stacia Misner’s (B | T) “Languages of BI” pre-con session and Bill Pearson’s (B | T) “Practical Self Service BI with PowerPivot for Excel” pre-con. With both topics being interesting to me and both speakers being extremely knowledgeable it was a pretty tough decision!
Ultimately, I opted for Bill’s session, “Practical Self Service BI with PowerPivot for Excel” as I had yet to see Bill speak in person and the session was a little bit more applicable to a project I am currently about to undertake at work. Given the opportunity though, I’d still love to attend Stacia’s pre-con!
We had a great crowd for the pre-con session. The rooms provided by the Georgia State University Alpharetta building were very nice with plenty of space and great audio/video. Bill provided digital copies of the course material on some very sleek Atlanat MDF USB drives as well as printed booklets of the slides for following along.
The session began with an overview of PowerPivot with how to get it properly installed and configured and then it was off to the races. We went through an overview of the how PowerPivot works and when its useful in organizations and then proceeded through a number of scenarios building out a PowerPivot solution. I found the information on using linked date tables for proper “Time Intelligence” of particular use. After a great day of going through PowerPivot from top to bottom, it was time to head home and get some rest before the big event.
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