The weather says it’s supposed to be storming today.  What a better way to spend a rainy afternoon that in a conference room with your peers discussing SQL Server.  So come out at 2:30 PM for snacks and socializing and we’ll kick things off at 3:00 PM.

We’ll be hearing about Analysis Services Dimension Creation Best Practices & Disks, Real and Virtual and What is Important for SQL Server.

Feel free to contact me via e-mail (jstrate@digineer.com) or twitter (@stratesql) with questions or for more information.

Related posts:

1. June PASSMN Meeting Tomorrow
2. June PASSMN Meeting (6/16/2009)
3. September PASSMN Meeting Tonight

If you are still trying to make plans for tomorrow afternoon… there is a PASSMN meeting you could attend.  This month we’ll be hearing about Analysis Services Dimension Creation Best Practices & Disks, Real and Virtual and What is Important for SQL Server.  The meeting starts at 3:00 PM and there will some snacks and socializing before hand.

Feel free to contact me via e-mail (jstrate@digineer.com) or twitter (@stratesql) with questions or for more information.

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2. May PASSMN Meeting Today
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The topics and speakers for June PASSMN meeting have been announced.

Analysis Services Dimension Creation Best Practices & Disks, Real and Virtual and What is Important for SQL Server

June 16, 2009
3:00 PM – 5:15 PM
Register Here or visit http://www.mnssug.org/

Analysis Services Dimension Creation Best Practices
Speaker: Brian Larson, Superior Consulting Services

Having dimensions that are well structured and function efficiently is key to having performant cubes and an important factor when encouraging users to use cubes for ad hoc reporting and interactive analysis. This session will look at best practices to observe when designing and creating dimensions in Analysis Services.

Brian Larson has 24 years of experience in the computer industry and 20 years’ experience as a consultant creating custom database applications. He is the Chief of Technology and BI Practice Manager for Superior Consulting Services in Burnsville, Minnesota, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Brian is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA).

Brian served as a member of the original Reporting Services development team as a consultant to Microsoft. In that role, he contributed to the original code base of Reporting Services. Brian has presented at national conferences and events, including the SQL Server Magazine Connections Conference, the PASS Community Summit, and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, and has provided training and mentoring on Reporting Services and business intelligence across the country. He has been a contributor and columnist for SQL Server Magazine. Brian is the author of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services and Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2008, both from McGraw-Hill Professional.

Disks, Real and Virtual and What is Important for SQL Server
Speaker: James Lorenzen, Xiotech Corporation

1. Introduction
2. A brief history of Hard Drives
   1. How Moore’s Law applies
   2. The performance impact of large disks (Greater than 1 terabyte)
   3. Why bigger is not always better
3. Storage topology – DAS, NAS, and SAN
   1. Definitions
   2. Where they fit in a data center
4. Type of disks and interfaces available today
   1. More acronyms (SATA, SCSI, IDE, SSD, etc.)
5. Where the different disks fit, performance and capacity
6. RAID Definitions
   1. Why it came about
   2. RAID Levels (0 through 50, or so)
7. How SQL Server uses the storage
   1. The SQL Server file types
   2. The performance requirements of the different file types
8. Questions

James Lorenzen is a Technical Marketing Engineer at Xiotech Corporation. He is Xiotech’s database specialist with over 25 years of database experience, fifteen years of that working with relational databases, SQL Server and Oracle. At Xiotech, James has focused on how to configure the database storage on a SAN to achieve the best possible performance from the SQL Server database. Prior to joining Xiotech, James has worked as a DBA for various companies both as consultant and dedicated Database Administration Manager. James has presented at user group meetings, covering database configuration on SAN storage. He can be reached at James_Lorenzen@Xiotech.com.

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1. June PASSMN Meeting Tomorrow
2. June PASSMN Meeting Today
3. May PASSMN Meeting (05/19/2009)

In a former life on a SQL Server 2000 project with I had the immense joy of building a few cubes in Analysis Services that took advantage of many-to-many relationships.  At the start I was thrilled to be trying something new and by the end I was cross-eyed trying to keep all of the calculations in the cube straight.  I had heard that in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services all of this would be a lot easier.

To make things even easier, the guys over at SQLBI.eu put together a many-to-may relationship paper with associated projects to help people implement this in SSAS.  It’s an easy read and well thought out and I’ve grabbed on to quite a bit so far in reading it.

PS… am I the only one that says "SQLBI.eu" as {see qual blue} in my head when I read it?

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BI-SIG – Q1 2007 Meeting
Wednesday, March 14th / 3:00 – 6:30
Microsoft Bloomington Offices

Intelligent Business With Business Intelligence

The inaugural meeting of the Microsoft Business Intelligence Special Interest Group (BI-SIG) in December was a huge success with over 120 attendees. Since then the organizational board has held several meetings, established committees, and planned the first meeting of 2007. That meeting is on Wednesday, March 14th. See the agenda and times below. Refreshments will be provided.

3:00 Registration

3:30 BI-SIG Updates & Announcements

3:40 Case Study – Performance Dashboards

Karl Lacher – Manager of Business Intelligence – Capella University

4:30 Microsoft Updates re BI & BPM

4:45 Break

5:00 Key Note Presentation – Project REAL & BI

Rich Johnson – BI Solutions Architect – Microsoft Consulting

With the permission of Barnes & Noble, Inc., Microsoft created an end-to-end data warehouse solution built on SQL Server 2005 based on an actual production data warehouse at Barnes & Noble. Microsoft then put that solution into the public domain as a fully functional data warehouse and set of best practices called Project REAL. Customers can use Project REAL to save 6-12 months of development and design effort in building their own BI solution on SQL Server 2005. Rich was the project architect and manager for the solution at Barnes & Noble and presents and helps customers start their own solutions based on Project REAL. Rich will present a high level overview of all of the pieces of Project REAL during this session.

6:15 Wrap-Up / Prizes

6:30 Optional – Technology Open Forum Q&A Session

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1. February PASSMN Meeting (02/17/2008)
2. June PASSMN Meeting (6/16/2009)
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So there’s this story:

Some time ago, Wal-Mart decided to combine the data from its loyalty card system with that from its point of sale systems. The former provided Wal-Mart with demographic data about its customers, the latter told it where, when and what those customers bought. Once combined, the data was mined extensively and many correlations appeared. Some of these were obvious; people who buy gin are also likely to buy tonic. They often also buy lemons. However, one correlation stood out like a sore thumb because it was so unexpected.

On Friday afternoons, young American males who buy diapers (nappies) also have a predisposition to buy beer. No one had predicted that result, so no one would ever have even asked the question in the first place. Hence, this is an excellent example of the difference between data mining and querying.

Well, while based partially in fact… a lot of the details are just not correct.  Mark Whitehorn researched the story for The Registerand determined that it’s an IT urban legend for the most part.

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Interesting project by Jon Axon, Chris Webb, Mosha Pasumansky, Greg Galloway, Darren Gosbell, and Christine Wade.  To provide the following is AS:

1. To provide a set of useful extensions to Analysis Services 2005.
2. To provide a variety of example source code for people looking to write their own stored procedures.

I have a good feeling I’ll be taking advantage of a little of this.

Related posts:

1. Does Your Stored Procedure Grant Itself Permissions?
2. How to Sort SSMS Project
3. Always Use Parameters. Even if you don’t use Stored Procedures.