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.

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.

Atlanta Microsoft BI March meeting notes

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This month’s meeting was sponsored by X-IO. Good demo of an interesting product that delivers very high performance. It would be good to see a full presentation in the future.

The speaker for this month was Aneel Ismaily presenting “Building a Custom ETL Framework with SSIS 2012”. A quick poll showed a surprisingly high number of people in the audience are still running 2008 versus 2012. Good overview of 2012 logging features and comparison with 2008. Lots of links to samples in the slides and some detail about specific tables. The presentation was well done and included some good comments and questions afterwards from the audience.

A quick raffle for the vendor giveaways following the presentation and we’re done. Like most meetings, it seems like there is more networking/discussion after the meeting than before. Good turnout for the meeting, especially considering many people are out of town for spring break.