BI Conference – SQL Saturdays #115 Portugal 2012

Dear Friends,
Next Saturday I’ll present a session on SQL Saturdays Portugal! On this session I’ll show the first look to the SQL Integration Services 2012 based on my last 6 months experiences writing a book about it with my friend Reza Rad. We are currently writing the latest chapters and very excited with the updates made to this version. Some of those, are highlighted below:

Legacy and Project deployment Models
The deployment approach used in the previous version of SSIS is called Legacy Deployment Model and the new one is the Project Deployment Model. If the new approach (Project Deployment Model) is used, almost custom logging made in the legacy deployment mode (previous versions) doesn’t make more sense now. This new approach has an important new SSIS Catalog that automatically logs all package execution activity along with some built-in reports that provide a more intuitive perspective over log activity and performance

Change Data Capture (CDC) tasks and components
Change Data Capture (CDC) feature was included in SQL 2008 version and provides other possibility to detect change on data under a database. This version include a new CDC task and components to make the life easier for those persons that choose this approach to deal with changed data

SQL Server Data Tools
The old Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) does not exist anymore. Now is the SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and has a very intuitive layout with new tasks and components design and is under the very interesting Visual Studio 2010 environment

Simple and important improvements
Several simple and important improvements were made. Some examples are the improvement on the variables toolbar, Undo & Redo capabilities, easier way to zoom and several other improvements

More new features
In addition to CDC task and components, I should highlight some other new features like: data flow column mapper, the expression task, package parameters, data quality services and several other very interesting features that I’ll highlight on the next weeks!

I hope to see you next Saturday on my session! More details about the conference could be shown here!
I’ll add the slide presentation soon here
Just to remember that the book I wrote with Reza is not on Pre-Order here! I hope to get feedback from you soon! :-)

BI Conference - Microsoft Portugal 2011 (day after)

Yesterday I attended the Microsoft BI Conference that took place here in Portugal. It was the first time that Microsoft organize a big and vertical conference focus specifically only in Business Intelligence. The advantage of this kind of focused event is that the attendees know exactly where they go and also is more easy to get support from Microsoft BI partners that could implement some interesting initiatives like show what they has being done in BI, but also to get the contacts of potential future customers and also employees. 700 attendees are a signal that Microsoft BI Tools and “BI world” have been gaining more confidence and support from the community. A special reference for my BI students from ISCTE (Lisbon) and also from UPT (Porto 300 kms distance) that were attending the event! This is just one more step on their interest on BI World… I hope they enjoyed it!

But because this is the first big BI event with 3 parallel tracks, naturally that has some contents that not fit at all in some group of attendees. Almost the sessions was too soft for Microsoft BI professionals, but was amazing for those people that were seeing Microsoft BI capabilities for the first time. Naturally this kind of event has a commercial purpose that allowed being a free event. So… a free event with a very good speakers and also with an amazing organization from Microsoft staff… what we can expect more?! I believe these kind of vertical/focused events are here to stay. And I hope to finally see an academic track where the BI students around Portugal could show their projects based on Microsoft amazing BI tools. And also we want to see more Portuguese speakers like Bruno Cortes that was planned to present at the beginning, but for some reason his session was canceled. There are huge potential in BI here in Portugal that Microsoft in my perspective should invest. What about the several conference partners? Just one Portuguese partner presents a session? This makes any sense? For me naturally not!

It was amazing to speak personally with Albert Ferrari that is one of my references since some many years. If you want to follow one of the discussions I had with him in SQL BI methodology click here. I confess that I don’t believe too much in Microsoft Power Pivot Excel Add-in (One of the main key areas of Albert Ferrari and also Marco Russo), but after speak for a while with Albert, he convinced me with some new features that I didn’t know. I am an advocate of a single repository of data, and create more “islands” of information scares me! I know that Power Pivot has huge performance, I know that could be amazing for a prototype, but I also know, Microsoft is interested in these islands (Office is a key area) and in a more realistic scenarios cannot be created by end-users, because they need to know a new query language (DAX)… If Integrated with Sharepoint I truly believe that could resolve some issues, even because the amazing Sharepoint design/layout could easily create a new end users habits that in spite of going to file system looking for their excel files, maybe start looking in Sharepoint that centralize them… Congratulations for all your sessions! Nice so see you here!


The Facilities and organization
Relating to the facilities and all organization, I just need to thank to João Bilhim e Miguel Vicente for all the amazing work they done on this event. They always give 200% to make these initiatives come true. On my side as a BI passionate I want to thank all the efforts done.


The Tagetik Session
In spite of their very good speaker’s performance, I was expecting a bit more about Tagetik tools. It was more a Sharepoint integration than a Tagetik session… for those that saw Sharepoint for the first time I imagine that it was amazing… but for those not, I think they was little disappointed because they have not seen the huge promise of Tagetik capabilities. Maybe in a next opportunity… but thanks for the speakers that made a very good session!


One day in a decision maker life session
The session was promising a lot… and despite almost attendees not having learned anything new, it was a funny and cool session… Basically, Sergio Ferreira (Microsoft) was telling us a history about BI (in Sergio BI perspective) and about how he deal with 400 new email messages every day and about the 1.200 meetings he has per month! He showed a power pivot excel file that reads data from outlook… It was a different session more focused on convinces business users, that they can do more with less effort. I think he made it well!


The Maciej Pilecki Sessions
Usually the speaker that comes from Project Botticelli Company is Rafal… See here my posts about this amazing speaker. Unfortunately he didn't come this time and Maciej Pilecki replaced him. Maciej is also a huge speaker, but the topics was very simple and generic and already included in previous Rafal events on Portugal. But for those who never had the opportunity to see Rafal sessions and are beginning a BI career, I don’t have any doubt they were convinced about Microsoft BI tools capabilities. Congratulations to Maciej!


The Alejandro Leguizamo session
Alejandro is Spanish and my MVP colleague. It was the first time I saw a session presented by him, and truly loved! He made a very good job in his session about “Designing scalable and complex Analysis Service Cubes”… it was for more advanced and tech users, and fits more in those people that already work with SSAS. Unfortunately I didn’t speak in person with Alejandro, because I left his session before the end, and I never found him again around the conference location. Congratulations Alejandro! Nice to see you here in Portugal!


More conferences like this one is desirable for sure!

BI Conference - Microsoft Portugal 2011

Microsoft is organizing a conference only about BI here in Portugal… I have no doubts that will be an amazing conference! It's a big surprise a Microsoft conference focused only in BI…

There are 3 tracks…
Track 01 – IT Decision makers
Track 02 – Deep Dive em Microsoft BI
Track 03 – Microsoft BI Ramp-Up

If you are in Portugal you cannot miss this conference next 25 March!!
It’s a free conference! Registration can be done here

BI Guest Corner - Oracle and SAP Events

Dear friends,
Today I have the honor to publish some feedback about SAP and ORACLE realized last month in Portugal and submitted by Maria João Gama to the blog.

SAP Conference Day
The SAP Conference Day - Business Intelligence held at the Museu do Oriente (Lisbon) on 23rd September 2010, and it was probably the biggest Business Intelligence event this year in Portugal, with the presence of about 400 guests. The whole event was very oriented to the pressing need to "mobile" BI solutions.

With a very interesting agenda, the event began with an excellent presentation of Timo Elliott (No. 8 of official Business Objects), entitled "The Clear Future Intelligence." This presentation, which I strongly recommend, is available on YouTube:


The following agenda items were completed by case studies presentations based on SAP Business Objects platform. These presentations were all realized in partnership between the customer and the provider of the BI solution (SAP partner)

Highlight the presentation of Ricardo Guerra Volkswagen AutoEuropa, for being the only one that showed benefits with financial translation, quantifiable and measurable on implementing a BI solution - Business Objects Dashboard. This project, implemented by Novabase, the main goal was to monitor the daily operations of the various IT systems. The success of this project has brought Volkswagen adopt this solution as standard within the Group

The event ended on a high note with a presentation provided by an economist and university Professor, João César das Neves

Oracle Conference
15 September 2011, at Sana Lisboa Park Hotel, Oracle held an event where they made the official release of Oracle Business Intelligence 11g.

This event was very diversified, because although it has focused on the slope of the end user, exploring the platform provided by Oracle Business Intelligence, also covered technical solutions for integrating real-time data for BI and Data Warehousing and Extreme Performance Data Warehousing

The first presentation was entitled, Integrated Solutions for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, where it has been a demonstration of Business Intelligence platform - Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, which is positioned as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, Gartner

It was then addressed the integration of real-time data for BI and Data Warehousing, through Oracle Golden Gate that provides a data integration in real time without affecting system performance

The event ended with a brilliant presentation of Extreme Performance Data Warehousing with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, which promises to increase the performance of Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) Databases and Data Warehousing (DW) in more than 10 times. Impressive!!!

It was also scheduled a presentation from Oracle Essbase, which was cancelled due to delays

Bio: Maria João Gama is a project manager at EDP and more details can be found at her LinkedIn profile.

BI Conference - SQL Bits VII

Today I want to inform you about an amazing conference that will take place from September 30th to Saturday October 2nd in York (UK). It will be the 7th edition and for sure is an event that you could not miss. I don’t know yet if I’ll attend, but I’ll try! I attended two times in the past… check here and here to read my experiences at SQL Bits II Birmingham and SQL Bits III London

"Just as a reminder, SQLBits 7 will take place over three days from Thursday September 30th to Saturday October 2nd in York. Day one will be a training day, featuring in-depth full day seminars by leading SQL Server professionals such as Chris Testa-O’Neill and Chris Webb; day two will be a deep-dive conference day with advanced sessions delivered by the best speakers from the SQL Server community; and day three will be the traditional SQLBits community conference day, with a wide range of sessions covered all aspects of SQL Server at all levels of ability. There will be a charge to attend days one and two, but day three, Saturday October 2nd, will as usual be completely free to attend allowing everyone to attend and experience a great day of training even if they have no training budget"

If you think to register let me know.

Pedro

BI Conference - European TDWI Conference

Today I want to advise you for a big and very interesting conference that will take place at Germany between 14th and 16th June... The 10th European TDWI conference! This conference will provide both business and technology professionals significant opportunities to learn and understand best practices across a wide variety of BI topics.

I can assure you that the conference will be very interesting as well as the country itself that is fantastic! I was there last November 2009 to take the CBIP exams and it was amazing. If you are near Germany or even in Europe don’t waste this opportunity. I hope someday organize CBIP/TDWI exams here in Portugal for all the BI Portuguese professionals interested on this certification. Regards, Pedro.

Yes we can!...see Donald Farmer in Portugal!

For many years I have been following Donald Farmer work in Business Intelligence, mainly in Data Mining. Now and thanks to Microsoft Portugal we can see and make some questions to him in the first person.

"What do medieval archaeology, fish farming, Southwestern University of Chongqing and Microsoft Business Intelligence have in common? If you know, you should tell Donald Farmer, because he has been deeply involved in all of them at various times. Donald has worked in the Microsoft Business Intelligence team for 8 years covering many subject areas: data integration, information quality, metadata intelligence, master data management, OLAP, predictive analytics and self-service BI. He is a well-known speaker at Microsoft and other industry events, and the author of several books and articles" [Source: SQLBits]

In the scope of the Business Intelligence community (www.BIResort.net) Donald Farmer will come to Portugal for a meeting/session at Microsoft Auditorium on April 16, 2010 from 18h to 20h.

The session topic will be focused on Self-Service BI (Power Pivot) followed by some questions and answers. It’ll be a mix between public/private and all the attendees should have an invitation.

If you want to be on this FREE event, just send an email to BIResort@gmail.com

(Limited seats)

BI Conference - TechDays 2010 Portugal

Sorry for not writing for so many weeks, but last month was very hard to me… not only the weekly work as BI Consultant but also the work as invited teacher at Universidade Portucalense on a Business Intelligence pos-graduation. Additionally I was working on the event preparation which brings me to blog today: the TechDays 2010

Microsoft Portugal will organize the TechDays 2010 event next April (20/21/22) at Lisbon (Oeiras). For the first time, in spite of attending the event, I’ll be presenting a session on Data Mining with SQL 2008 R2… that I’m sure that will be a huge challenge for me.

My session description:
“The volume of business data grows exponentially and the technology made the world evolve rapidly. Bad decisions may be the result of the world be evolving more rapidly than the decision maker’s capability to analyze these data.

This session is intended to establish a first contact with multidimensional data structures (OLAP) and to recognize and to derive the exponential importance of knowledge discovery in databases through the data mining models in SQL Server 2008 R2”

Check my session link here

There is still a month for the event and there are more than 1200 participants confirmed. If you are near Portugal you cannot miss this!

Regards, Pedro.

BI Conference - Predictive Analytics World

Business Analytics is a subset of a Business Intelligence framework, even if some players like SAS, started changing their strategy killing Business Intelligence term and starting a new one: Business Analytics… Why companies like SAS with a flag of Innovations are always creating new concepts and creating more confusion on adding new buzzwords!? Are they creating new way to resolve problems? Are they creating new products!? Of course not… I’ll publish soon an article about this subject and about all the controversy this position has created on the web.

The main purpose of this post it’s to write about the Predictive analytic world conference. This conference will take place on February 16-17 at San Francisco and unfortunately, and again, I’ll not be present on the event because once again it’ll be held in USA and I’m little far in Portugal… maybe during this year I’ll go to other event for my PhD research.

“Predictive Analytics World is the business-focused event for predictive analytics professionals, managers and commercial practitioners. This conference delivers case studies, expertise and resources to achieve.

Predictive Analytics World focuses on concrete examples of deployed predictive analytics. Hear from the horse's mouth precisely how Fortune 500 analytics competitors and other top practitioners deploy predictive modelling, and what kind of business impact it delivers”

But never forget one thing… the future will never be like the past. Although of course it’s worth trying, and planning should be done based on facts and less on intuition. Read the Black Swan book, a good overview of how successful predictive models can be.

Use the following discount code to get 15% off a two day Conference pass:

Code: PEDRO010
(workshops are not included)

BI Conference - Business Analytics Summit

Next November 2009 (12-13) will take place a promising conference about business analytics. Unfortunately, and mainly because I’m in Europe, I won’t be there, although I must share the event with you. The organization, the speakers the content promises and if you are in USA or be there in these dates you cannot miss it…

The Business Analytics Summit focuses on the key issues involved in the implementation of Business Analytics such as data integration, KPIs, reporting and more. There are an increasing amount of companies investing in Business Analytics for improved decision making, organizational performance and a competitive edge. In a time of economic downturn the key to growth (or survival) is making the right decisions. Adequate decisions will be found wanting in 2009.

Ben Satchwell, Conference Director at Business Analytics News, says “The current economy has made businesses realize that business analytics is no longer a project they can continue to look at from afar. We are very excited about working with Information Builders Inc on the Business Analytics Summit as our goal is to have leading players from each set of stakeholders in the industry involved – and Information Builders very much fit the mold of the high end companies that will have a presence at the conference.”

Take a look at the official websites:

http://social.businessanalyticsnews.com/

http://www.businessanalyticsnews.com/usa/

The total amount for the summit is $1595, but Ben Satchwell (Conference Director) offer $400 discount for all the visitors of this blog, so…

Contact me to get a $400 discount code

BI Conference - SQL Bits & Tech-Ed Europe 2009

Just to let you all know that some interesting events are coming… and the dates for the two events that I’m currently writing are... next November 2009.

SQLBits (19-21 November 2009)

Thursday 19th Pre-conference Training Day

Friday 20th SQL 2008 & R2 Conference Day

Saturday 21st Free Community Conference

“This is the biggest event yet, with 3 days of top quality SQL Server content. It starts with the pre-conference training day on Thursday 19th, more details coming soon. We have had a lot of feedback about weekday versus weekend during previous events so this time we have added a paid conference day on the Friday 20th, with a SQL 2008 and R2 theme. Finally we have the free Saturday community day, with speakers from around the world covering all manner of SQL Server topics.” By SQLBits

Tech-Ed 2009 Europe/Berlin (9-13 November 2009)

Business Intelligence Track

“Now more than ever, your business needs a quick means of getting the right information to the right people so that they can make smarter, more informed decisions. Microsoft’s Business Intelligence solutions enable you to do just this. The Business Intelligence track offers sessions covering how to integrate, analyse, and report on all of your corporate data easily using the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, end-user tools, and analytics applications. Learn how to build custom, robust Business Intelligence solutions using Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 and 2008 (Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services), Microsoft® Office PerformancePoint™ Server 2007 (Monitoring, Analysis, and Planning) and the 2007 Microsoft® Office system (Microsoft® Office Excel®, Excel Services, and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server technologies) and how to easily manage them” by Microsoft

I’ll try to be in the both events. If you are thinking to attend one of these events, let me know to organize the trip or to meet you there!

BI Conference - Tech Ed 2009, SQL Server 2008 R2

Last year Microsoft shared information about Kilimanjaro at the company’s second annual Business Intelligence Conference, which kicked off on October 6 in Seattle. Kilimanjaro is set to include self-service analysis tools (codenamed “Gemini”) that Microsoft is saying will allow information workers to better “slice and dice data and create their own BI (business intelligence) applications and assets to share and collaborate on from within the familiar, everyday Microsoft Office productivity tools they already use.”

But last week at TechEd 2009 conferences, Microsoft announced SQL Server 2008 R2, which you might recall as previous code of Kilimanjaro. What? You thought Kilimanjaro was SQL Server 2010? Well, if you Google it, you'll see that many others think the same, and in fact there are announcements from very significant sources over the last few months talking about SQL Server 2010. So the information now is that there is no SQL Server 2010. "Never was." That the BI and self-service tools that were part of the release were actually the R2 release. That "Kilimanjaro" always referred to R2. The next full release of SQL Server will follow the R2 release by about 24-36 months. You can expect to see full release of R2 in the first half of next year - CTPs should follow later this year for testing.

I understand that Microsoft, like any company has to adapt its strategy when the world is currently in a big financial problem. In my opinion, Microsoft will be easier to convince customers to upgrade a SQL 2008 to SQL 2008 R2 than convince SQL 2008 to SQL 2010... well ... but starting to be many products, many names, many service packs, many cumulative packages, many functionalities ... truly begin to create confusion in people, that usually have great difficulty accept the change. I hope at least, that Microsoft does not change the format and design of the next version of Excel which is expected to have many more capabilities than Excel 2007. We shall see ... I am very curious about the improvements on the analytical tools and on the "Master Data Services"

Also, their advertising video is pretty funny (the introduction part). You can also sign up to receive notifications of the CTP. You can see it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/r2.aspx
Regards, Pedro

BI Conference - Self-Service BI with Rafal

Finally I found some time to describe the session that Rafal, following Microsoft invitation, held here in Portugal. As I already wrote in previous posts, Rafal in their specialty is the best in the world. A simple and objective way to show the concepts of Business Intelligence reconciled with several practical demonstrations are fantastic. Of course I attend these moments with great intensity, because they contribute, not only to continue learning, but also to mark and remember these moments. I will describe, in my opinion, the more relevant key points of the presentation.

The first point was approaching the concept of BI as a tool for self-service, where users are rewarded by a high level of autonomy for their daily needs for information.

The second point was the interesting and comical suggestion to be followed by consultants, when they want to sell their Data Warehousing solutions... they should not try to sell a Data Warehouse, but try to sell KPI's... this advise should be follow because the managers do not understand much of these technologies and are more attracted by KPI for making a mapping between their business and technology

The third point was the OLAP off-line functionality, which although this functionality already exists since Excel 2003, only now is beginning to gain more strength with the increasing importance that Excel is having nowadays. (These offline/Local cubes can be browsed by most OLAP client tools)

The fourth point is on the increasing quality of data mining Microsoft products. The feeling is that there is still a little more to move on this matter to “fight” against some competitors such as SAS (Enterprise Miner)... But it promises ... and in my BI thesis I'll show until where

The fifth and final point to highlight is the explanation of the strategy for Microsoft Performance Point Server product... especially on the discontinuation of the Planning module and the inclusion of the monitoring module through SharePoint product... soon will be called the Performance SharePoint Services.

I hope you have left with the feeling of having been present

Regards,
Pedro

BI Conference - SQL Bits IV and Rafal Lukawiecki

SQL Bits IV

SQL Bits IV is coming… and this time it will be in Manchester, 28 of March…Unfortunately, I will not go to Manchester because I will have to expose my master BI dissertation on the day before (27th of March), but I will attend to it on-line!

My friend Tomislav Piasevoli will be responsible for the session “Universal calculated measures in MDX queries”… I will try to purpose one session in the next event... maybe about my master BI dissertation.

Rafal Lukawiecki

Microsoft are hosting a one-day seminar presented by Rafal Lukawiecki for IT Managers and BI practitioners wanting to improve decision making and getting the valuable business insight by using Microsoft solutions at the Microsoft Offices in London and Lisbon. As I told before in this blog, Rafal is the best communicator of the world, if you are near Lisbon or London, you cannot miss it.

In Lisbon (Portugal), March 24th

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032402504&Culture=pt-PT

In London (UK), March 26th

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032403569&Culture=en-GB

Regards,

Pedro