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Sponsor
Meeting Details
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Geographic Visualizations Using Maps in SSRS
Brian Larson, Superior Consulting Services
This session will explore the many and varied uses of the map report item in Reporting Services. From providing geographic analytics to diagramming locations on a warehouse floorplan, the map report item – when combined with SQL Server spatial data types – can be used in a variety of ways to create spatial representations of your data. We may even look at a game or two created using the map report item.
Brian Larson, as a contract member of the Reporting Services development team, contributed to the original code base. Brian is the Vice President of Technology for Superior Consulting Services. Brian has presented at national conferences and events and is the author of “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services: 3rd Edition” and “Delivering Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2008: 2nd Edition” both from McGraw-Hill Professional.
Sponsor
Meeting Details
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SQL Server and SSRS to Address Business Cases
Srinivasan Prasanna, CSM – North America
Leveraging the power of SQL Server and SSRS to address our business case, CSM – North America implemented a WMS (Warehouse Management System) to address the following:
- Compliant – We want to be compliant of the (Bio Terrorism Act of 2002) for food manufacturers and distributors.
- Improve inventory accuracy
- Improve productivity
- Improve Customer satisfaction and increase our service levels.
By mining the data from SQL Server and with the use of SSRS we have streamlined our requirements and achieved some of these objectives and created reports to address the business needs. The use of SQL Server, SSRS have helped to achieve these in an efficient manner.
Meeting Details
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Writing Better Queries
Joe Webb (B/T), WebbTech Solutions
Transact-SQL is not a very difficult language to learn. As long as the syntax is correct, it can be quite forgiving. However to truly get the best performance from your SQL Server, careful consideration should be given to the structure and logic of the queries. In this session, we’ll discuss some Transact-SQL tips and tricks that can be employed to help you write better queries, allowing your server to perform better.
Since its inception, Joe Webb has served as Chief Operating Manager for WebbTech Solutions, a Nashville-based consulting company. He has over 15 years of industry experience and has consulted extensively with companies in the areas of business process analysis and improvements, database design and architecture, software development, and technical training.
In addition to helping his consulting clients, Joe enjoys writing and speaking at technical conferences. He has spoken at conferences in Europe and the North America and has authored or co-authored four books including “SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, Volume 2”, “SQL Server MVP Deep Dives”, “The Rational Guide To: SQL Server Notification Services”, and “The Rational Guide To: IT Consulting”.
Joe is an eight-time recipient of the prestigious Microsoft MVP Award for demonstrating a willingness to share his expertise with the SQL Server Community.
Reminder December PASSMN Meeting
SQL Server 2012 Feature Panel Discussion
- December 20th, 3:00 – 5:00 PM
- 3601 West 76th Street, Suite 600 Edina, MN 55437
All the info is located here:
Vote for the DBA in Space!
I can’t include this on other sites, but here I can! Please vote for a co-worker/friend/all around good guy to as the DBA in Space – Mark Johnson is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. He’s a hard working, smart guy who has his values in the right order.
Red Gate Software has teamed up with Space Adventures to offer one lucky DBA a ticket into space. There are 15 finalists and the lucky DBA is decided by vote, so vote on the DBA you think should go to space. Polls are open through Tuesday, December 13th.
All the info is located here:
2011 PASS Board of Directors elections – Vote!
The future of PASS is in your hands. Voting and candidate campaigning for the 2011 PASS Board of Directors elections are now open and runs through Dec. 20. It only takes a few clicks, so please vote.
All the info is located here:
SQL Server 2012 Special Ops Tour (kind of a vote)
CALLING ALL SQL Server PROFESSIONALS:
SQL Server 2012 is the most important release ever of SQL Server with its’ mission critical, breakthrough insight and cloud on your terms features. Do your part to bring the SQL Server 2012 roadshows to your city and get on stage with Microsoft! This March, Microsoft is teaming with PASS to bring you the SQL Server 2012 Special Ops Tour – a cross-country roadshow that will take us to 12 cities across America. This is your tour, and we want to highlight you –the SQL Server operative, your company, and the great work you are doing through opportunities to be featured on our media channels, stage time at roadshow events, and exclusive networking session.
Take our survey at www.specialopstour.com today, and help shape our course of action. Familiarize yourself with CTP3 to prep for the Solutions Contest and check back in December for details and how to submit!
ACTION REQUIRED:
- Visit the preview site (www.specialopstour.com) and cast your votes for your city
- Download and get to know CTP3 in preparation for upcoming solutions contest
- Check back for details on how to be featured!
Coming in December: Special Ops Contest
In the coming weeks, you’ll have the opportunity to enter a high-profile contest where we’ll identify 12 SQL Professionals with the best IT solutions on SQL Server 2012. So get ready to share your killer SQL Server 2012 skills.
PASSMN board members for 2012 Results:
- Chair – Steve Hughes (B/T)
- Director of Program Development – Tim Plas
- Director of Membership/Treasurer – Joshuha Owen (T)
- Director of Corporate Development – Bill Preachuk (T)
- Director of Technology – Andy Lohn – Me!
- Director of SQL Saturday – Paul Timmerman (T)
- Microsoft Liaison - Ajay Nangia
SQL Saturdays and Twitter go together like peas and carrots. I’ve found the networking page of any SQL Saturday site is very valuable to not only get in contact with people about the event, but also to stay in contact and build long term relationships. Helping plan, organize and speak at SQLSaturday #99, I didn’t want to loose the conncections I had made, so I decided to check out all the twitter accounts of the people who had registered for for it.
What’s the easiest way to do this? POWERSHELL!!!
I stumbled a few times (one time I opened 83 tabs in Chrome and had to stop using twitter for an hour), but here is the script I came up with.
Notes on the script:
- This script will open a chrome tab for each twitter account from any (at least all I’ve tested so far) SQL Saturday Networking page.
- If Chome isn’t running, the script will open it for you, but it may open multiple instances of it.
- You can change the $url for a different SQL Saturday Networking Page
- You can set the number of tabs to open at a time – note it’s 0 relative, so 4 is actually 5
- This script creates 4 txt files in the “c:\temp” directory, but it doesn’t check for it’s existence.
- This script stores a count locally, so you will need to run it multiple times to get all the twitter users
- i.e. if there are 83 users, the script is set to open 5 tabs, you will need to run this 17 times.
- To restart or to change the SQLSaturday URL delete the file SQLSatCounter.txt file
- Powershell Programming Examples:
#--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#Open a tab in Chrome for each twitter account on a SQLSaturday Networking Page
#Created by Andy Lohn - http://www.sqlfeatherandquill.com/
#--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$url = "http://www.sqlsaturday.com/99/networking.aspx" #Change this for any SQLSaturday Networking Page
[int]$StartCount = 0
[int]$PageCount = 4 #note this is 0 relative, so this plus 1 for number of tabs to be opened
$chrome = (gi ~\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe ).FullName
#This didn’t work on one of my machines, so I just set it to the full path of chrome and it worked.
$webclient = New-Object system.net.webclient
$file1="c:\temp\SQLSatDownload.txt"
$file2="c:\temp\SQLSatList.txt"
$file3="c:\temp\SQLSatListwithAddress.txt"
$TURL = "www.twitter.com/"
$file4="c:\temp\SQLSatCounter.txt"
#Create the files if they don't exist
If (!(Test-Path $file1) )
{New-Item $file1 -Type file}
If (!(Test-Path $file2) )
{New-Item $file2 -Type file}
If (!(Test-Path $file3) )
{New-Item $file3 -Type file}
#Set the counter to keep track for multiple runs - 0 if new
If (Test-Path $file4)
{$SCWork = (get-content $file4)
[int]$StartCount = $SCWork.ToString()}
Else
{New-Item $file4 -Type file
add-content $file4 1
[int]$StartCount = 0}
If ($StartCount -eq 0) #Populate the local file.
{Clear-Content $file1
$webclient.DownloadFile($url,$file1)
$test = get-content $file1
Clear-Content $file2
Clear-Content $file3
$Tester = $test | Select-String -pattern "<a href=""<a href="http://www.twitter.com/"">http://www.twitter.com/"</a> |
% {$_ -replace "<span id=""ContentPlaceHolder1.*<a href="http://www.twitter.com/"">http://www.twitter.com/"</a>, ""} |
% {$_ -replace """ class=""noarrrow"">.*</span>", ""} |
% {$_ -replace "<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/"">http://twitter.com/#!/"</a>, ""} |
% {$_ -replace " ", ""} |
where {$_ -ne ""}
foreach ($T in $Tester)
{Add-content $file3 ($TURL + $T)}
}
$TestMethod = (Get-Content $file3)[$StartCount .. ($StartCount + $PageCount)] $TestMethod | % { & $chrome $_ }
Clear-Content $file4
Add-Content $file4 ($StartCount + $PageCount + 1)
#To restart or change url, run this:
#remove-item $file4
This has to be real easy to change for linkedin – I’m more a twitter guy at this point. If you do alter it, to work for linkedin, let me know!
Date: December 20th, 2011
Time: 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Location: 3601 West 76th Street, Suite 600 Edina, MN 55437 – Note new location!
Live Meeting:
Agenda:
- 3:00-3:15 : Registration / hospitality / networking
- 3:15-3:30 : Announcements etc.
- 3:30-4:45 : SQL Server 2012 Feature Panel Discussion
- 4:45-5:00 : Closing comments/prize giveaways
Panel Discussion:
SQL Server 2012 Feature Panel Discussion
Steve Hughes, Magenic Technologies (B\T)
Steve Hughes is Principal Consultant at Magenic Technologies. His area of expertise is in data and business intelligence architecture on the Microsoft SQL Server platform. He was also the data architect for a SaaS company which delivered a transportation management solution for fleets across the United States. Steve has co-authored two books and regularly presents on SQL Server and data architecture.
Ajay Nangia, Microsoft
Ajay Nangia is a Data Platform Technology Specialist at Microsoft. In this role, Ajay enables customers and partners to develop, deploy, and support solutions based on Microsoft’s Database Technologies. Ajay has a long history of working with SQL Server – from its internals to application and BI development on the platform.
Others
We are currently looking to add a couple of more panel members – for updates, check PASSMN’s twitter feed at http://twitter.com/passmn
Planning
SQLSaturday #99 was last Friday (11/11/11) and man it was really great to be a part of it. I told many people that, for the preparation, I did very little work and spent most of my time learning from Jason Strate and Dan English on what needs to be done for an event such as this. Dan and I were in charge of the sponsors – I sent a few emails to a few people. What really happened was I’d get an email that would have a question that I thought I could answer, by the time I actually started to type a respond, Dan had sent at least one very good response. He would answer the original question, ask a follow up question and make a few suggestions to help the sponsor/potential sponsor – I couldn’t add much value to most of them. It was great to learn from him. Tim Plas, Steve Hughes and Bill Preachuk did a great job on all the other details as well.
My Sessions:
SQL Community and Social Networking –Roundtable
I had the privilege of being on a panel with Dan English (T), Jason Strate (T), and Steve Hughes (T) for the “SQL Community and Social Networking –Roundtable” Session. The moderator was Ted Krueger (T), so it was a very fun group. Jason’s videos were a hit. Unfortunately Ted was not wearing his sun glasses, so not many people recognized him – joking of course.
Here are some useful links from the session:
TSQL Tips and Tricks
This was my first full fledged technical session – and I thought it went well – no major issues with the demos, I did forget to mention the drag and drop features of SSMS (drag and drop columns from the object browser rather than use select * For that matter drag and drop object names of all types to prevent mistyping), but I did cover the material and I didn’t run out of stuff.
Here are the links I mentioned during the session that I would post:
One more thing…the guy who asked me about turning off a trigger for a transaction, I came up with a potential solution…you have to alter the trigger and add a table to the database, so if you can’t do that, you don’t have to read the rest of this. If you can do that…you may be able to add a new table, and in the trigger you that you want to turn off, add some logic checking for the existence in of the ID in the new table – if the record doesn’t exist, execute the trigger, if it does, skip the trigger. That way you could just insert records to table when you don’t want to execute the trigger and remove them when you are done. You also keep transactional consistency by not turning off the trigger for the entire table. Just a thought, hope it helps.
Dan English (B/T) sums up the recent updates best with his post here:
Other good links from around the information superhighway are:
SQL Saturday #99 is coming up on Friday – 11/11/11 the last binary date of our lives (thanks to Lara Rubbelke (B/T) for pointing that out last January).
 SQLSaturday#99 is a free one day training event for SQL Server professionals and those interested in SQL Server. The event will be held Nov 11, 2011 at Grace Church Eden Prairie, 9301 Eden Prairie Road, Eden Prairie, MN, 55347 (use door 4 on the east side of the building, check in will be inside that door). Note the event is full, but register and get on the waiting list if you would still like to attend. For more information about SQL Saturdays please visit SQLSaturday.com. Follow this event on Twitter with hashtag #sqlsat99, and get news on all our events with #sqlsaturday.
Check these details out:
Remember – A lot can go on between Thursday and Saturday…
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– You get the blue glass cheers!
