Category Archives: #SQLFamily

Welcome to Azure Synapse at SQL Saturday Tampa 2020

See the source image

SQL Saturday Tampa is coming up again in a couple of weeks on February 29th and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be there and presenting my session Welcome to Azure Synapse. In this session, I’m planning to deliver a overview of Azure Synapse as well as demo Synapse Studio!

Microsoft’s powerful new service, Azure Synapse, brings together the worlds of data warehousing and big data analytics by providing a unified experience for ingesting, cleansing, modeling, and sharing data. In this session, we’ll discuss the basics of Azure Synapse, ideal uses cases for Azure Synapse, and demonstrate how attendees can use Azure Synapse. By the conclusion of this session, attendees will have a deeper understanding of Azure Synapse and how to begin using Azure Synapse.

So if you’re in the area and interested in learning more about Azure Synapse, this will be a great session for you. You’ll need to register for SQL Saturday Tampa here. Don’t hesitate though, this event will fill up very quickly! I hope to see you there!

See You at SQL Saturday South Florida on Saturday June 8th!

image

SQL Saturday South Florida is on Saturday June 8th and its just around the corner! The event is hosted at the Nova Southeastern University campus in Davie, Florida near Fort Lauderdale and its always a tremendous event with great speakers, content, and fun with the community. If you haven’t registered then you need to do it right away by going here. But I’m also excited and please that I’ll be delivering two sessions! Continue reading See You at SQL Saturday South Florida on Saturday June 8th!

Power BI Governance 101 at SQL Saturday 820 in Jacksonville, Florida on May 4

image

Coming up in just a couple of weeks, I’ll be presenting my session, Power BI Governance 101, at SQL Saturday #820 in Jacksonville, Florida on May 4th. The event will kick off at 8 AM with breakfast and sessions will be starting at 9 AM! SQL Saturday Jacksonville is being hosted at the beautiful University of North Florida campus. I’ve attended a lot of SQL Saturday events, and the Jacksonville event is my favorite to attend! It’s well organized, the speakers and content are top quality, and it’s always a great crowd.

But this year’s event is special! This year’s SQL Saturday in Jacksonville is a Jedi-themed event! So don’t forget to wear your favorite Star Wars gear! I know I will! You seriously do not want to miss this event!

Get Registered Here

My session, Power BI Governance 101, is scheduled for 10:15 AM in room Coruscant 51-1205. Deploying an enterprise business intelligence solution is no small task but one of the most important factors to consider in order to have a successful roll-out of a self-service analytics tool like Power BI is governance. We’ll discuss why governance is so important for a successful Power BI deployment, what are the components of Power BI that require governance, and how to govern your Power BI environment. By the end of this session, you should have a clearer understanding of governance in the context of Power BI. Check out the event schedule here.

If you’re planning to attend, leave a comment here and don’t forget to stop by and say “hi”!

Data Warehouse Design and Power BI at SQL Saturday Tampa 2019

SQLSaturday #859 - Tampa 2019

Hello, fellow data nerds! I wanted to make you aware of a fantastic event coming up this month in Tampa, Florida. On Saturday, March 23, 2019, the annual SQL Saturday event will be hosted at the University of South Florida! This is a really tremendous opportunity to engage in some quality training at little to no cost. If you’re able to be in the Tampa area Saturday 3/23 then you need to register for this event. I’ve seen the schedule and the line up is impressive! Old dogs and young dogs alike will learn something new from a host of professionals and industry experts!

I’ll be presenting two sessions during the morning of March 23 at SQL Saturday Tampa and I’d love to see you there!

Making Sense of the Power BI Ecosystem

Power BI has taken the world by storm since it’s release in mid-2015. Since then, Microsoft’s cloud analytics service has matured and grown in scope and complexity. In this session, we’ll seek to understand the moving parts of the Power BI ecosystem including Power BI Pro, Premium, Report Server, Embedded, Data Flows, and more. By the end of this session the audience should have a firm grasp on the components ecosystem and how those components work together.

Building a Data Warehouse from the Ground Up

What if you could approach any business process in your organization and quickly design an effective and optimal dimensional model using a standardized step-by-step method? In this session we’ll discuss the steps required to design a unified dimensional model that is optimized for reporting and follows widely accepted best practices. We’ll also discuss how the design of our dimensional model affects a semantic modeling technologies like SQL Server Analysis Services or Power BI and how the choices we make during the data warehouse design phase can make or break our reports.

I hope you can make it to this really amazing event and can make it to one of my sessions! Don’t forget to register! If you do, swing by and say hi to me!

Introduction to Power BI Desktop – Session Materials Available

imageFor my second time, I was afforded the great opportunity to present virtually to the great people of the Madison Power BI User Group. I’m always really excited when someone invites me back a second time to speak because that means that the first time wasn’t completely awful! We had a great time last evening discussing Continue reading Introduction to Power BI Desktop – Session Materials Available

SQL Server 2016 Rundown – Session Materials Available

imageYesterday evening I had the distinct pleasure of presenting at the Jacksonville SQL Server Users Group on some of the new features of SQL Server 2016. We had delicious pizza, lots of great networking, and a lot of fun talking about SQL Server. The group had a ton of great questions, too! Thank you to everyone Continue reading SQL Server 2016 Rundown – Session Materials Available

Why I Joined Microsoft

new-microsoft-logo-square-largeIf you follow me in social media, you may have seen my announcement that I’ve joined Microsoft. Late in October I resigned my position at Pragmatic Works as a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant and accepted an offer from Microsoft to join their Education Specialty Teams Unit as a Data Platform Solutions Architect. This is such an awesome opportunity and one that I’m so very excited about but I wanted to take a few moments to share my reasons for resigning from Pragmatic Works and joining Microsoft.

This was an incredibly difficult decision that I did not make lightly. I spent over a month thinking, praying, and talking with my wife, Dad, and a few trusted friends about the decision. For the past seven years I’ve loved working, growing, and learning with the wonderful people at Pragmatic Works so I knew any opportunity I would consider would have to be the exact right opportunity. But after all the consideration both my wife and I felt like that this was an opportunity we were led to and that was right for our family at this point and time.

I knew that transitioning from a consultant to a solutions architect position would challenge me and force me to stretch and grow. I felt like that the opportunity at Microsoft would provide me the chance to continue my learning on a different level and this is one of the things that led me to Microsoft.

Also, the information technology field is changing so mind-numbingly fast that its impossible to stay abreast of all the changes, update, and products. Working with Microsoft will provide me the opportunity to learn and work with these new technologies before they’re even released. With Microsoft, I can stay on the bleeding edge of Microsoft’s data platform.

My position at Microsoft also affords me the ability to work from home unless I’m on the road. Time with my family and children is incredibly important to me. Working from home affords me the luxury of eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with my wife and babies. My kids are growing up and changing so fast and I want to be there for as much of it as possible.

So how will things be changing here at SQLDusty.com? Well, I’m in a brand new role facing an incredible challenge to learn the ins and outs of a bunch of quickly changing technology so you notice that I’m not posting as frequently.

Also, the topics I do post on may increase in variety of topic. Previously I was neck deep in business intelligence (which isn’t a bad thing! BI is awesome!) but now I’ll be working with customers and technologies across the data platform.

I know this is going to be a wonderful journey and learning opportunity and I can’t wait to share what I’m learning with you, my friends and fellow nerds!

 

 

Thank You for Attending my #SQLSatOrlando Session! Slides, Resources, Recording

SQL Saturday #442 in Orlando, FL has come and gone but what a turn out! The event was excellent, we had a great turnout for our session and had a blast! And as a bonus, the BBQ lunch, baked beans, coleslaw, mac n cheese and dessert were amazing. Seriously one of the best lunches I’ve had a SQL Saturday event! Plus, the Lego name tags were epic! 100% without a doubt the coolest name tag ever.

Continue reading Thank You for Attending my #SQLSatOrlando Session! Slides, Resources, Recording

How I Got my Start at Pragmatic Works

October 4th of this month was my seven year anniversary as an employee of Pragmatic Works. Things have changed a lot over the past seven years. Working with the wonderful people at Pragmatic Works has been quite an amazing journey and incredible opportunity. With that in mind I thought that I should share my story of how I ended up working in the business intelligence field with the great team at Pragmatic Works. Continue reading How I Got my Start at Pragmatic Works