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

BI Education - Master's Degree Business Intelligence

I was contacted by dozens of people about information’s on Master's Degree in Business Intelligence and for that reason I share with you a research in this area. The world is currently in recession and nothing is more important to be on the top and improve each day your skills and keep in touch with new technologies and new concepts.

In my case, the master degree on BI started on September/07 changed my life and created a rhythm of work that I was not prepared before it. I’m now prepared to attack on several fronts: on my daily work and several projects in my free time (experts-Exchange, MSDN, my blog, and 2 other projects that I will share with you later)

Many of us are tools oriented but there’s nothing more important than understanding the theory and the work which is already done by others (because we don’t want to invent the wheel again). Everything that arises, arises from something and is where I focus my goals.

Samuel Quintanilla Galvez is from Peru, and he did a research about masters in Business Intelligence and decided to share it with us. We hope this information could be usefully for all who loves BI like me and Samuel.

Samuel on first person: “I did a research about BI and DWH courses too (courses not related to any particular tool or provider), courses that I could take from here, Peru. Some of them are in-classroom, but others are online, and could be very useful for you or maybe your friends. Attach the result of my research. I'll probably take the "Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Specialized Studies Program" in the University of California, Irvine

(http://unex.uci.edu/certificates/it/data_warehousing).

The program can be taken online or on campus, and cost $2,270. I think it's a very attractive program, but I might be wrong, that is why I'm looking for opinions from experts or from people with much more experience than me, before enroll to the program..."

Alex Whittles is currently attending the master BI degree at Sheffield Hallam University (UK), and I hope he could give us some feedback about. No Alex?! ehehe
For whom that wants to see the excel file (I don’t know how to attach here) please send me an email.
Regards,

Pedro

Data Mining and Neural Networks (NN)

Dear Friends,

This is my first post of 2009... happy new year!

I have been absent this month because I’m writing the second chapter of my master's thesis. Anyway, today I’ll write a bit of neural networks, which are on of the most important and useful Data Mining techniques.

But what is a neural network? A Neural Network (NN) is a system composed of many simple processing elements operating in parallel which can acquire, store, and utilize experiential knowledge. As I told you before, I’m very fascinated with Data Mining and the intelligence we can get from it. You can use it in Financial Markets (is the theme of my master dissertation), on insurance, or medicine, on retail, on all activities!!! The topics below explain better where you can apply NN, the learning methods, types and an Arquitecture that a NN could has.

NN Applications
-Classification
-Clustering
-Function approximation
-Prediction

NN Type
- Static (feed forward)
- Dynamic / Back-Propagation (feedback)

NN Arquitecture
- Single layer
- Multilayer
- Recurrent
- Self-organized

NN Learning Methods
- Supervised (network has inputs and their corresponding outputs)
- Unsupervised

In Data Mining classes directed by Professor Dr. Duarte Trigueiros, I did a practical excel exercise (homework) in order to better understand NN functionalities. I’ll share it with you today and feel free to contact me to get a copy of excel file. The excel files has the formulas behind and could be interesting if you think to improve your knowledge on this.


Initially, weights are random and the output of neural network will be compared to desired output. If same, reinforce patterns and if different, NN will adjust weights.

The dataset should be divided for training and testing, which in this case, because the NN is a supervised with back-propagation, the training dataset has the output classified and a better model will be created. After the model is created, the test dataset is considered as the input and the model could be evaluated.
Regards,
Pedro

Hotel Atlantis The Palm, Dubai Holidays

After almost two months, I finally have time to describe my holidays in Dubai and in one of the better hotels in the world, Atlantis the palm ... I was staying in this hotel before the official opening, and I must tell you that is really a dream while a little illusion. Check the video of the grand opening at the official website:

Dubai is one of the seven United Arab Emirates and is investing heavily in tourism since it is expected that the main source of wealth, oil, runs out in about 5 years ... Everything that is done in Dubai is done to be always the best in the world ... the world's tallest building, the largest artificial island in the world, the best hotel in the world, the best instance of SKI of the world ... everything! They are building the world map in the islands where the connection to earth will be made only by boat, airplane or helicopter. And it is no coincidence ... because in this way is to boost the aviation industry and boating industry ... because as you can see below, the cars industry in Dubai is well positioned...

Visit the website of company that is responsible for all this amazing constructions, which the owner is the shake, to better understand the greatness of what is being created. Where Vision Inspires Humanity http://www.nakheel.com/en

I will not comment further because the images speak for themselves.

The Atlantis by night

The Atlantis friends

The Atlantis from room

The Atlantis Room

The Atlantis Beach

The Atlantis Oceanarium

The Atlantis swiming pool

The Dubai Burj Al Arab

The other world in Dubai - The construction workers

The Ski Dubai
http://www.skidxb.com/

The Desert, the Safari and the Dinner


The Dubai Old Castle

The Dubai Cars

The Abu Dhabi

The Abu Dhabi Muslim Church

The Hotel also has Dolphin Bay, Aquaventure, Lost Chambers…
Today Tom Cruise reserved the entire Hotel for him and his friends to the new year party… uuaahh…

Happy new year!!!

SQL2008 - Free Hosted Trial Offer

Dell, MaximumASP and the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) have partnered together to offer a free SQL Server 2008 account on a securely hosted environment. This offer allows anyone to try SQL Server 2008 today without downloading and installing the software.

Thanks to Ella, I knew this news and immediately made my registration.

This feedback, participantion and the free hosted environment, it'll be important for me because I will focus my BI dissertation using Microsoft tools, mainly SQL 2008.

For further details visit Ella’s blog.

Regards!

Merry Christmas

It is time to relax with the family and take care of those who truly love us and be forever on our side!

Merry christmas to you all.

SSIS - Script Component as Source From SQL

I’m not writing about technical issues for a long time ... but I’ll start to diversify more the content of this blog. Today I’m writing about script component in SSIS that people ask frequently in Microsoft forums and in http://www.experts-exchange.com/.

To access the SQL Server or other sources, there are some standard components provided with the SSIS that I always suggest for almost the cases, but for some complex issues that require some customization, this post could be useful. If you understand the script component logic, and know some .net programming, you can get data from any source.

1. Open Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), and create a new package.

2. Add a dataflow to your controlflow (There is a script task in the controlflow, but I’ll write about Script Component inside dataflow)

3. Create the table Contry for this example

4.Create and configure ADO.NET connection with the name “cmSQL_ADONET”

5. Configure the script component setting the script connection to the connection created in the previous step, and add the columns you need to the SSIS pipeline

6. Open the design script to add the customized code and try to understand the logic of the component. You have five main procedures: AcquireConnections, CreateNewOutputRows and ReleaseConnections, preExecute and postExecute. In this example, I only use the first three procedures but you are free to use the procedures you want.

7. You can see the results from the pipeline grid view.

This example is not dificult, but its the first step to give you more complex packages that I'll try to show you in a future post. If you want the code of this package, let me know and I send you by email instantly.

Regars,

Pedro