Neal Waterstreet

Atlanta Microsoft BI January 2015 meeting notes

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Slow start to the meeting for attendance, but it looks like this was due to a lot of traffic around the mall. Good turnout after a slow start – I counted 52. This month’s sponsor is Nebula Partners. Thanks for sponsoring the meeting and the food!

Teo Lachev

Teo Lachev

This month we have Javier Guillén from BlueGranite. Javier is presenting “The Emotional factor in BI Solutions” which should be an interesting topic that is often overlooked. Javier has a background in psychology and applied some of those principles to his projects. Someone asked how to apply some of these while working remote. Javier replied that is why he meets in person frequently. Great presentation and nice discussion afterwards. Check this presentation out if you have a chance.

Javier Guillén

Javier Guillén

Before the meeting, there was some discussion about volunteering with the group and some roles. More importantly, some discussion about moving from pizza every meeting and giving something else a try. Lots of factors here to consider:

  • Cost. This is big since we do have a limit
  • Ease of preparation. Pizza is very easy to set up and break down.
  • How “messy” the food is. In terms of spills and drops, pizza is pretty solid.
  • Something everyone will want to eat

Any ideas? if so, I’d like to hear them. It’s turned out to be a little more complicated than just switching to something else.

2014 Goals: Year End Review

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So, finally ready to discuss my 2014 goals…

Certification
Status: Pass, 1 exam left for MCSE, just need to get it knocked out. I am still prepping for Tableau Desktop and Hortonworks Certified Apache Hadoop 2.0 Developer.

Projects
Status: Pass, Hard to measure, but all projects are in good shape and met all deadlines.

Healthcare VC:
Status: Pass, We had a good run last year and have had a few months off. Jumping back in this month and really need to get it where we want/expect it to be.

SQL Events/Training:
Status: Pass, I attended 1 SQLSaturday (Nashville) and the PASS BA Conference in the spring. Normally, with formal training this year I would say this is a failure, but I was able to learn a lot on my own in many new areas.

Learn something new:
Status: Pass, this started slowly , but I’ve spent most of my time lately with R, Tableau and Hadoop. Still need to look at BIML more.

Blog:
Status: Fail. Not nearly enough posts. I’ll try again in 2015.

Technical Books:
Status: Pass. I lost count of many I read which is a good thing, but need to start doing some reviews of those.

Review Yearly Goals:
Status: Fail. I stopped looking by mid year.

So, not good but not bad either. I had a great year, but really fell short with blogging and speaking. I’m trying to find a better way to quantify my goals for 2015. Maybe I need a Dashboard and Metrics…

Atlanta Microsoft BI April meeting notes

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This month’s meeting was sponsored by Pyramid Analytics. Remote demo but a reminder about following up with questions in person at SQL Saturday Atlanta.

The topic this month was Power BI by Brian Jackson of Microsoft. Much more technicial detail in this presentation than the one’s I’d seen previously. Sounds like Power Query is here to stay. Lots of good demos and useful information as always from Brian.

Quick raffle for some shirts and we’re done. Lots of discussion afterwards about the upcoming SQL Saturday in Atlanta. I didn’t get an exact count, but looked like a good turnout.