SQL Saturday #215 – Jacksonville, FL:
I’d been looking forward to this event for a few months now and it had arrived at last — SQL Saturday Jacksonville!
Part of the reason I’d been looking forward to this event (in addition to the great lineup of speakers and sessions) is the pre-con session for which I attended: “Building a SQL Server 2012 BI Platform” by Brian Knight (B | T) and Devin Knight (B | T).
Now, a day long session which goes through the entire SQL Server 2012 / Sharepoint 2013 Business Intelligence stack in a whirlwind is a great thing, but when its taught by both Brian and Devin Knight? Sign me up!
The pre-conference session on Friday started with a discussion of source data — an OLTP data source. From there, we covered the basics of data warehouse design and then dove into designing a traditional business intelligence solution — a data warehouse fed by an ETL process. With our data in place, we followed a traditional BI approach and built a multi-dimensional SSAS cube. To contrast, we also built a new SSAS tabular model based on a PowerPivot Excel workbook. With our data models in place, we finished out the BI stack by exploring them with SSRS, PowerPivot, PerformancePoint, Power View, and a little bit of Geoflow. An enormous amount of material, it was great going through the entire stack from start to finish with such knowledgeable teachers.
The next morning, after a quiet evening to rest my brain, the main SQL Saturday event was held on the University of North Florida campus. The venue for the event provided ample space, with a couple of larger auditoriums as well as a number of standard classrooms. The weather for the event was a sunny and beautiful spring Florida day — which was important as lunch (which was provided free for the event) as well as mid-session breaks were spent outside.
