Category Archives: Professional Development

SQL Server Social No. 2 – Movember Edition

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SherlockHolmesInnLast Thursday saw the first of many regular SQL Server Social events.Held at the Sherlock Holmes Inn on Collins Street, it was a great event with around 25-30 people in attendance. A lot more than I imagined considering a last minute change to the date.

Stephen Few, renown educator and trainer in BI Visualisations and author, had been giving a BI Visualisation workshop earlier in the week. I was in attendance at the workshop and managed to persuade Stephen to attend our social event. He was only in Melbourne until Friday November 18th, hence the last minute change to the date.

 

It was a Movember themed event, but unfortunately not that many people took part. I was one of two Mo Bro’s of the evening. Angus Bell had quite the impressive Mo and walked away with a heap of Movember merchandise (which he later gave away at another Movember party), as well as bottle of wine. It was a great effort by Angus, check out his Mo below and donate to his cause here:

Angus Bell

 

Next month’s event is in the works and will be held, once again, at The Sherlock Holmes Inn. Dates and times will be communicated soon. Stay tuned for more on SQL Server Social!

Journey to the PASS Summit 2011 – Part 7 – Day 2 Precon PowerShell

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Today was PowerShell day for me at the PASS Summit. After just 3 hours of sleep last night, I did not expect too much (from myself). However, the coffee was good and the realisation of a new skill was enough to keep me going.

It’s fair to say that, although the presentation was a little disjointed, I have seen the PowerShell ‘light’ and what it is capable of. I intend to follow up this precon with a hefting helping of new blogs to read and scripts to write.

The following are some of the notes from the precon today.

What is PowerShell?

According to Wikipedia, PowerShell is a task automation framework, that consists of a command-line shell and an associated scripting language. With PowerShell, administrators can perform administrative tasks on both local and remote machines.

  • Cmdlets
    • Are specialised commands in the PowerShell environment that implement specific functions.
    • Use a verb-noun naming pattern. i.e.
      • Get-Command
      • Get-Children
    • Sets of commandlets can be combined into scripts and executables.
  • Pipeline
    • PowerShell implements a pipeline, which enables the output of one cmdlet to be ‘piped’ as an input to another; this is done using the ‘|’ character.

 

Variables in PowerShell

Variables in PowerShell are declared (using ‘$’) and set in-line. There is no need to declare them up front, or set their data/object type. The variables will take on the appropriate data/object type for the result(s) that are returned. I don’t know about you, but I think that is all kinds of awesome.

 

PowerShell Profiles

These help to load up certain modules/snapins when you load up PowerShell. This means you can port your profiles to any environment and be able to load into a familiar setup.

 

Comparison operators

Operator Description
-eq Equal to
-ieq Equal to (case-insensitive)
-ceq Equal to (case-sensitive)
-ge Greater than or Equal to
-gt Greater than
-le Less than or Equal to
-lt Less than

Logical Operators

Operator Description
-and And
-ne Not Equal to
-not Not
! Not
-or OR

more operator notes over at http://ss64.com/ps/syntax-compare.html

 

PowerShell Resources – great for those just starting out in PowerShell

Journey to the PASS Summit 2001 – Part 6 – Day 0. Getting to Seattle.

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My awesome adventure looooooooooong frikkin’ journey to Seattle started well enough in Melbourne, Australia. Airport check-in was the start of the fun-and-games though. It took over an hour to actually check in and then I found out that the flight had been delayed by 2 hrs. Joy!

All was not lost though, as I had met Darren Gosbell (@darrengosbell) at the airport and we proceeded to have a drink and light lunch at one of the bars. We chatted about the PASS Summit quite a bit as well as the BI Maestro program/exams/certification. once we had boarded the plane, and we were underway the flight was reasonably enjoyable; as much as can be over the course of 14hrs.

My troubles started again in LAX (which is a dump btw). I progressed, slowly, through immigration, customs, picked up my bags and dropped them off at the baggage drop and then proceeded to check-in for my next flight to Seattle. Apparently I had no ticket for this flight. Huh. But it’s right there on my itinerary? 3 phone calls and over an hour later I was running to catch the Alaska Air flight. Thankfully I made it to the gate with 10 mins to spare. Which is all I cared about at that point.

The flight was only a couple of hours and I managed to dose off occasionally. When I was awake I was kept entertained by the interesting landscape of the West Coast. An I may have been dreaming when I saw this and thought “Sim City?”

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The mountain below is, what I can only assume, Mount Rainier.

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I also managed to snap this pic of Seattle right before we came in to land. I couldn’t quite believe it when it was a clear sunny day!

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I’m in Seattle!

Journey to the PASS Summit 2011 – Part 4 – My Pre Conference Session Picks

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PASS_2011_button_180x180This is Part 4 in a series I am writing about my journey to the PASS Summit 2011. If you missed the previous entries, you can read about them here [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]. Follow the journey on twitter with the #j2pass2011, and feel free to use the tag for your own journey!

Pre Cons!

Choosing a pre conference session for Monday/Tuesday was rather difficult. Do you choose something completely new to learn, or do you learn something new about a subject area in which you are already fairly familiar? Not to be outdone by my own questions, I chose to do one completely new subject area and one deeper dive into something I am fairly good at (but know I could be even better). Here are my picks:

It’s my belief that you can always improve the skills you already have and that’s why I’m going to Rob’s Pre-con. My T-SQL is pretty good, but I know there are areas that could do with some improvement. I hoping to get quite a bit out of this session. No pressure Rob!

I also believe that you should stretch yourself and try to learn something new every now and again. Especially when it comes to software or processes. Learning something new gives you a broader perspective and you’ll be better equipped to make the right decisions. This is why I’m taking Aaron’s Pre-con. I have only ever heard the great things about PowerShell can do. I’ll be looking to apply this new knowledge immediately for all the BI projects I work on.

New York Microsoft BI User Group Presentation by Nadav Rayman

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My colleague, Nadav Rayman (Blog | @nrayman | LinkedIn), will be giving a presentation to the New York Microsoft Business Intelligence User group on Monday September 12th 2011.In his talk, titled Future Proof your SQL Server Data Warehouse Process, Nadav will explore some of the key questions on the design and organization of your SSIS Packages including:

  • How do we quickly deploy builds to the data warehouse without a big configuration overhead?
  • How do we adapt to timing issue with data availability without pushing out the entire processing schedule?
  • How do we prove the data is right with each refresh and anticipate issues before they are raised by a business user?

So if you are in Manhattan tomorrow, take the time and go and meet Nadav and hear what he has to say. You can find out more about the event here.