fwPASS - Professional Association for SQL Server fwPASS blog<![CDATA[Overview Ola Hallengren's maintenance routines - Jed Wilson]]>On August 23, Jed Wilson (blog | twitter) gave an excellent overview of using Ola Hallengren's maintenance routines as an alternative to SQL Server's Maintenance Plans.

Jed covered:

  • overview
  • installation options
  • installed components (table, SP's, functions, SQL Agent jobs) 
  • backup scripts (Full and simple recovery modes)
  • verification
  • index optimization (rebuild, reorg, update stats)
  • Feature comparison between Ola's and Maintenance Plans
  • a Power Shell script for backing up SSAS databases

I particularly liked how he showed us a standard DBA Admin table and naming conventions for consistency from environment to environment in a multi-location/multi-server shop.

He gave a great tip to do Transaction Log backups every three minutes during Index Rebuild operations to keep the transaction log size at a more consistent size.

Ola generously provided Jed with additional resources, demo scripts, and a supplemental Power Point slide deck.

]]><![CDATA[PASS November chapter deck]]>PASS Chapter Deck - November 2010
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]]><![CDATA[Developing Data Warehouses in SQL Server 2008 - Arie Jones (AJ)]]>web | twitter rocked the house going from zero to Cube in 60 minutes! We had a great turn out and several new faces.

Check out the summary and sample SSAS project and slide deck.

There was lots of great discussion after the presentation. We raffled off books, pen drives, Windows 7 Ultimate, a mobile office toolkit, and a magnetic dart board. Please check out our gracious sponsors. ]]><![CDATA[fwPASS on facebook]]>fwPASS facebook fan for the latest news and links to SQL related training events and webinars.]]><![CDATA[April 2010 PASS chapter deck and resources]]>Chapter Deck 2010 April
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]]><![CDATA[SSIS Soup to Nuts - JR Miller presentation]]>Idera software so it was a NO CHARGE meeting.

What I liked most about JR's presentation was that he described several real world examples of how he has used, or one can use SSIS to meet varying business needs. The examples were also from different industries, it wasn't just the a simple AdventureWorks or Northwind presentation.

For door prizes, we gave away:
  • Idera T-shirts and pens
  • SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning book
  • SQL Server 2008 Pocket Consultant's Guide
  • Windows 7 Ultimate Edition
  • Office 2007 Standard Edition
  • Xbox 360 Halo 3 ODST
  • Xbox 360 Forza Motorsport 3
]]><![CDATA[March 2010 PASS chapter deck and resources]]>Chapter Deck 2010 March
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]]><![CDATA[Ten Reasons to Join a Professional Association like fwPASS]]>This is a link to a blog post written by fwPASS chapter President Dean Willson referring to Professional Organizations in general. The added benefit to joining an organization like fwPASS and NUFW is that we often get to raffle off great SWAG like software, hardware, and books that you don't get from some of the other professional organization meetings.

Ten Reasons to Join a Professional Association like fwPASS

]]><![CDATA[Data Mining in SQL Server 2005 - Dean Willson presentation]]>Dean Willson presented an introductory overview of data mining and finished with a walk-through of the Visual Studio tools for creating mining models. The slide deck and partial video of the presentation is at his  technical blog .

About twelve people showed up. We gave away three Quest @brento TweetSQL t-shirts, a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, A couple Microsoft Press books, and a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Standard Edition, and a Microsoft Arc Mouse.

]]><![CDATA[PowerPivot Self-serve BI - Derek Comingore presentation]]>Derek Comingore from BI Voyage presented an abbreviated version of his Louisville SQL Saturday presentation and demos. The technology shows a lot of promise as it fills a gap in the current Microsoft BI offerings. The technology capitalizes on much of the existing Microsoft offerings like SQL Server, SharePoint, and the widely used Excel.

It is not without its shortcomings, but with all processes and technologies that empower organizations via the use of their information, there is a responsibility to understand the trade-offs and considerations.

PowerPivot appears to be flexible and have different uses depending on the type and size of the organization.

  • I can quickly see it has an enormous potential as a model or prototype for understanding the ROI that can be achieved by implementing traditional BI, Enterprise Data Warehousing, or Datamarts.
  • It has the ability to provide options for organizations that don't have the resources to put traditional BI in place, but want to capitalize some of the advantages that it can provide.
  • It can be a great communication tool to demonstrate and refine the type of reports/analysis that the business consumers would like added to the formal EDW/BI.
  • It can be used to supplement and extend the information from the formal IT BI with other non-ERP data like employee satisfaction surveys/ 360 degree reviews, etc. 
New late breaking information from Derek, the morning after the presentation:
SharePoint & Office 2010 Betas became available as of yesterday for MSDN & TechNet subscribers. Also, PowerPivot for Excel (client) CTP3 is to become available as of today, Nov 18, 2009, expected to be available at www.powerpivot.com .
 
Thus, to create a single-machine environment I recommend the following configuration (physical or virtual machine):
  1. Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 with Web & Application Server Roles
  2. SharePoint Server 2010 x64
  3. SQL Server 2008R2 November CTP (allready released http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2Downloads.aspx ). Configure Analysis Services for SharePoint Integrated Mode
  4. Office Client Suite 2010 Beta x64
  5. PowerPivot CTP3 when available today
    This will create an end-to-end SQL Server PowerPivot Suite for evaluation.

Giveaways were two USB Drives fromSQLServerPedia and Quest Software , two books - Collective Intelligence by O'Reilly and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services by Microsoft Press, and four @BrentO TweetSQL T-shirts from Quest Software.

During the networking part of the meeting Clifford Clarke made us aware of the Professional Connections of Northeast Indiana group that meets on Wednesdays to assist executives in their career transitions.

]]><![CDATA[A Developers View of SQL Server Security - Scott Gorrell presentation]]>We had a great turn out for Scott's presentation. I expected ten members and we had additional four show up for the meeting. The pizza was sponsored for the second consecutive meeting by Quest Software. The presentation left plenty of time for ad-hoc open discussion about SQL Server security, best practices, and brief horror stories. There was even a little passionate discussion about the considerations surrounding technologies like Linq vs. Stored Procedures.

If you missed the meeting or wanted a review of the material, the presentation and sql scripts he used in the presentation can be downloaded from the downloads page.

We gave away two books, one from Microsoft Press, the other from Pearson publishing. We also gave away three 2Gb USB drives and a mobile office toolkit courtesy of Quest Software and SQLServerPedia. (We also handed out the Quest T-shirts to those few that missed the last meeting where everyone got a T-shirt).

Many thanks to Scott for taking the time out of his busy schedule to prepare a presentation that provided a forum for engaging discussion.

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