First, find out how you can win an Alaskan Cruise.

Please register for our March 2nd meeting. It helps with the food order. 

When doing data integration, a common requirement is to work with flat files, whether for importing data into a system from an external source, or to export it to provide to other systems. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) supports flat files, but there can be a number of challenges when working with them. This is particularly true if your flat files have multiple data formats contained in a single file, the data has complex formatting, or the files have inconsistent formatting. This session will help you to be more efficient when working with these types of files. You'll learn to handle missing delimiters in the files, and parsing files that have multiple data formats. You'll also see how to produce complex output formats, like headers and footers that contain summary information.

Takeaways:

1.      Learn to handle complex formatting in flat files

2.      See the techniques to deal with poorly formatted input files

3.      See the available open source components for processing flat files

John Welch is BI Architect with Varigence. Varigence builds tools and frameworks that enable the creation and management of end-to-end business intelligence solutions with unprecedented ease and speed. John has been working with business intelligence and data warehousing technologies for 9 years, with a focus on Microsoft products in heterogeneous environments. He is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP), an award given due to his commitment to sharing his knowledge with the IT community.  John is an experienced speaker, having given presentations at Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conferences, the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference, Software Development West (SD West), Software Management Conference (ASM/SM), and others. He has also contributed to three recent books on SQL Server 2008, "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration", "Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008", and "SQL Server MVP Deep Dives".

John writes a blog on business intelligence topics athttp://agilebi.com/cs/blogs/bipartisan. He also writes one focused on SSIS topics athttp://agilebi.com/CS/blogs/jwelch/. He is also active in open source projects that help ease the development process for Microsoft BI developers, including BIDS Helper (http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper), an add-in for Business Intelligence Development Studio that adds commonly needed functionality to the environment. He is also the lead developer on ssisUnit (http://www.codeplex.com/ssisUnit), a unit testing framework for SSIS.

Please register at http://ssig201002.eventbrite.com/

6:00 – 6:30 Pizza and Networking sponsored by Intellectual Capitol
6:30 – 6:40 Announcements
6:40 – 8:15 Paul S. Waters: SQL Server Reporting Services Recipes
8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways (We have Windows 7 to give)

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a powerful reporting system, yet some things are not has intuitive and straight forward as report designers would like them to be.  In this presentation we will cover four SSRS report design challenges.

Drill Through for a Multi-Level Matrix Report - We will learn how to get around the challenges of getting a drill-through to a report in a multi-level matrix report to work in SSRS 2005 and how to take advantage of improvements in SSRS 2008 to achieve the same results.

Sparklines - How to create Sparklines with SSRS 2008.  The principals covered in the recipe can also be applied to SSRS 2005 but the implementation is different.

Creating a Calendar Report - SSRS does not ship with a calendar report item, but this is not a problem since it is pretty easy to create one using a matrix in all versions of SSRS. 

Updating Data Within a Report - What?  That is just silly.  Reports display data; they do not update data.  Well, there are times this might be useful, and this section will show you how it can be done.

These solutions, and many more like them, can be found in the upcoming book from WROX, "Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Recipes: for Designing Expert Reports" 

Paul S. Waters, Business Intelligence Architect, AMECO (www.paulswaters.com )
During Paul’s 16 years of working in IT, he has held a variety of positions including help desk manager, application developer, network administrator and Director of IT. For the past several years, he has been focused on business intelligence and data warehouse design and development.  Currently he designs, develops and implements business intelligence solutions using the Microsoft BI stack.
 
Paul is the Founder and President of the SQL Server Innovators Guild (www.ssig.org), a founding board member of the GSA Technology Council (www.gsatc.org), holds a position on Greenville Tech’s Program Advisory Council, and was Co-Chairman of the South Carolina Code Camp 2.0 (www.sccodecamp.com).  He is also a presenter at local user groups and conferences.  Paul was also the Technical Editor for the book "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Problem-Design-Solution" and contributed to the forth coming Wrox book "Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Recipes: for Designing Expert Reports"

6:00 – 6:30 Pizza and Networking sponsored by FGP
6:30 – 6:40 Announcements
6:40 – 8:15 John Welch : Introduction to Analysis Services 2008
8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways

Introduction to Analysis Services 2008
 
This session is intended to introduce database developers to Analysis Services 2008, with a focus on being able to quickly construct usable OLAP cubes. This presentation will be light on slides, and heavy on demonstrating how to perform the steps to create the cubes. During this session, we will cover the creation of a new cube from an existing database step by step. We will also highlight the reasons for using Analysis Services, and applicable scenarios for using it.

John Welch is Chief Architect with Mariner, a consulting firm specializing in enterprise reporting & analytics, data warehousing and performance management solutions. John has been working with business intelligence and data warehousing technologies for 7 years, with a focus on Microsoft products in heterogeneous environments. He is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP), an award given due to his commitment to sharing his knowledge with the IT community.  John is an experienced speaker, having given presentations at Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conferences, the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference, Software Development West (SD West), Software Management Conference (ASM/SM), and others. He has also contributed to two recent books on SQL Server 2008, “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration” and "Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008".
John writes a blog on business intelligence topics at http://agilebi.com/cs/blogs/bipartisan. He also writes one focused on SSIS topics at http://agilebi.com/CS/blogs/jwelch/. He is also active in open source projects that help ease the development process for Microsoft BI developers, including BIDS Helper (http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper), an add-in for Business Intelligence Development Studio that adds commonly needed functionality to the environment. He is also the lead developer on ssisUnit (http://www.codeplex.com/ssisUnit), a unit testing framework for SSIS.

The files from Scott's presentation on using Excel to automate users acceptance testing (UAT) are available for download.

To make things a little less confusing for people who were not at the meeting I have commented out the following code in the workbook.  For automating your tests and getting the html output you will want to uncomment the code.

Private Sub Auto_Open()
   ' ThisWorkbook.XmlMaps("Root_Map").Export ThisWorkbook.Path & "\" & Format(Date, "yyyymmdd") & "_UAT.xml", True
    'Application.DisplayAlerts = False
    'Application.Quit
End Sub

6:00 – 6:30 Pizza and Networking
6:30 – 6:40 Announcements
6:40 – 6:50 Paul S. Waters: Upcoming Local and PASS SQL Events
6:50 – 8:15 Scott Currie: Techniques for Automating T-SQL Unit Tests and User Acceptance Testing  (UAT)
8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways.  Yes, we have SWAG!

Techniques for Automating T-SQL Unit Tests and User Acceptance Testing  (UAT)
In this informal talk, we will spend most of the time in development tools, implementing actual tests.  We will begin with unit test implementations using Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals (VSTSDB).  While VSTSDB will be the focus, other unit test frameworks (T.S.T, TSQLUnit, utTSQL) will be discussed with examples.  There will be a brief discussion of code coverage and a walkthrough of how a system could be built to measure code coverage using the Sql Server Profiler.  Finally, we will examine an approach for creating and automating user acceptance tests using a simple Excel harness and rules that business analysts can write.  Expect an informal atmosphere with lots of Q&A.

Biography
Scott Currie is the founder and CEO of Varigence, Inc., which offers a comprehensive collection of tools and frameworks for the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.  By leveraging the latest technologies from application development and programming language compilers, Varigence revolutionizes the way enterprises build, manage, and use Business Intelligence across their entire organizations.
 
Prior to founding Varigence, Scott worked for 7 years at the Microsoft Corporation.  Scott was the Program Manager for managed interoperability in the Visual C++ Compiler and the 64-bit Just In Time (JIT) compiler for the .NET Framework.  He also lead several important customer connection initiatives for the Developer Division at Microsoft including product feedback, product preview (CTP) and early adopter (TAP) programs, online crash analysis, and customer satisfaction measurements.  Scott later created and served as the Product Unit Manager for the Detego team at Microsoft, which was responsible for leveraging agile application development methodologies in the development of Business Intelligence solutions.
 
Scott graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with undergraduate majors in economics, mathematics, and computer science and a master's degree in computer science.

Thank you Scott.  The presentation was very thought provoking as well has informative.

Slide Deck: Better with BI

Please register at http://bit.ly/9wOSd

6:00 – 6:30 Pizza and Networking

6:30 – 6:40 Announcements

6:40 – 6:50 Paul S. Waters: Upcoming Local and PASS SQL Events

6:50 – 8:15 Scott Currie: Better with BI: How to use the best of large application development practices more effectively with Business Intelligence

8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways (maybe, short on them)

Better with BI: How to use the best of large application development practices more effectively with Business Intelligence
 
Talk Summary
In the past two decades, there have been substantial advances in application developer tools, team development processes, application lifecycle management, and a variety of software development models (including agile and SDLC).  While there has been some adoption in the business intelligence community, the current state of BI tools and frameworks present a variety of stumbling blocks to fully leveraging these advances.  As one concrete example, the use of SSIS (DTSX) packages and SSAS (CUBE/DIM) definitions with source control systems is highly problematic.  However, you can adopt many of the best practices and adapt others to work even more effectively for business intelligence than they do for application development. 
 
In this talk, Scott Currie will discuss some of the practical things that you can do today with examples from real world deployments at Fortune 100 companies.  Scott will also discuss the future and how to best prepare your projects for upcoming changes.
 
Biography
Scott Currie is the founder and CEO of Varigence, Inc., which offers a comprehensive collection of tools and frameworks for the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform.  By leveraging the latest technologies from application development and programming language compilers, Varigence revolutionizes the way enterprises build, manage, and use Business Intelligence across their entire organizations.
 
Prior to founding Varigence, Scott worked for 7 years at the Microsoft Corporation.  Scott was the Program Manager for managed interoperability in the Visual C++ Compiler and the 64-bit Just In Time (JIT) compiler for the .NET Framework.  He also lead several important customer connection initiatives for the Developer Division at Microsoft including product feedback, product preview (CTP) and early adopter (TAP) programs, online crash analysis, and customer satisfaction measurements.  Scott later created and served as the Product Unit Manager for the Detego team at Microsoft, which was responsible for leveraging agile application development methodologies in the development of Business Intelligence solutions.
 
Scott graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with undergraduate majors in economics, mathematics, and computer science and a master's degree in computer science.

 Please register at http://bit.ly/c64mv

6:00 – 6:30 Pizza and Networking sponsored by TEKSystems

6:30 – 6:40 Announcements

6:40 – 7:50 Paul S. Waters: Upcoming Local and PASS SQL Events

7:50 – 8:15 Chris Eargle: Exposing your SQL Data with REST

8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways

Exposing your SQL Data with REST

REST is an architectural style that allows for a layered, scalable, and cacheable enterprise information system. With ADO.NET Data Services, a database can be surfaced to a service as a REST-style resource collection that is addressable with natural URIs and can be interacted with using the usual HTTP verbs: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. This session will describe RESTful Data, the benefits it conveys, and its uses. Then we will set up a data service using an existing database that developers would then access rather than accessing the database directly.

About Chris Eargle

Chris Eargle is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional - Visual C# (C# MVP) and INETA Community Champion from Columbia, SC.  Besides designing and developing software at South Carolina Farm Bureau, he runs the local .NET User Group: the Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild. In his spare time he travels to conferences and user groups to promote best practices and new technologies in the development community.

 Please register at http://ssig200906.eventbrite.com/

This is a different day then our normal date.  We will be back to the first Tuesday of the month for July. 

6:00 – 6:30 Pizza and Networking

6:30 - 6:40 Announcements

6:40 – 7:00 TBD

7:00 – 8:15 Andy Leonard: Database Development as part of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways

Database Development as part of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Based on the popular Example of Test-Driven Development series at SQL Server Central, this session focuses on Database Development as part of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) process. Examples demonstrate how to test, but the session focuses on the benefits of testing database scripts. T-SQL error trapping, database projects, test artifacts, and source control are also discussed.

About Andy Leonard

Andy Leonard is an Architect and manager with Unisys Corporation, SQL Server Database and Integration Services developer, SQL Server MVP, PASS Regional Mentor (Southeast US), and engineer. He is a co-author of Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services , Professional Software Testing with Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Tools for Software Developers and Test Engineers , and MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-441): Designing Database Solutions by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 . Andy founded and manages VSTeamSystemCentral.com and maintains two blogs there: Applied Team System and Applied Business Intelligence . He also blogs for SQLBlog.com . Andy's background includes web application architecture and development, VB, and ASP; SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS); data warehouse development using SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008; and test-driven database development.

6:00 – 6:30 Pizza and Networking

6:30 - 6:40 Announcements

6:40 – 7:00 Ken McClaren : SQL Server Certification

7:00 – 8:15 John Welch : Doing More (ETL) with Less (Effort) by Automating SSIS

8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways

SSIS is a great tool for transferring data from one data source to another, and for implementing complex ETL processes. However, for simple, straightforward data transfer tasks, creating SSIS packages by hand can be time-consuming and repetitious. By attending this session, you'll learn how to automate data transfers from a source to a target using SSIS. You’ll see the steps necessary to create both the control flow and the data flow portions of an SSIS package using the API and C# code. You’ll also learn about altering existing packages programmatically. Specific attention will be given to the generation of data flows with the proper source and destination components. We’ll take a look at some of the open source solutions available for this, plus some “roll your own” options.

Takeaways:

1.       Generating Control Flow Tasks through the API

2.       Generating Data Flow Components through the API

3.       How to Alter Existing Packages Programmatically

John Welch is Chief Architect with Mariner, a consulting firm specializing in enterprise reporting & analytics, data warehousing and performance management solutions. John has been working with business intelligence and data warehousing technologies for 7 years, with a focus on Microsoft products in heterogeneous environments. He is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP), an award given due to his commitment to sharing his knowledge with the IT community.  John is an experienced speaker, having given presentations at Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conferences, the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference, Software Development West (SD West), Software Management Conference (ASM/SM), and others. He has also contributed to two recent books on SQL Server 2008, “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration” and "Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008".

John writes a blog on business intelligence topics at http://agilebi.com/cs/blogs/bipartisan. He also writes one focused on SSIS topics at http://agilebi.com/CS/blogs/jwelch/. He is also active in open source projects that help ease the development process for Microsoft BI developers, including BIDS Helper (http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper), an add-in for Business Intelligence Development Studio that adds commonly needed functionality to the environment. He is also the lead developer on ssisUnit (http://www.codeplex.com/ssisUnit), a unit testing framework for SSIS.