I didn’t travel to the SQL Pass Business Analytics conference this week but I keenly followed what was going on via the #passbac hashtag on Twitter. Seemingly the big announcement was Geoflow Preview for Excel 2013, an add-in for Excel that visualises data over space and time (read more at Public preview of project codename “GeoFlow” for Excel ...

Spring is a conferences’ season and the upcoming one is no exception. I will be speaking at PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013, which will be the first event this year, so I’d like to spend a few words about my sessions. PASS Business Analytics Conference 2013 April 10-12, 2013 | Chicago, IL – United States This conference is targeted to ...

Tomorrow will mark another chapter in the 24 Hours of PASS series.I am involved once again - this time in a moderator role. The event begins at 8am ET for me.  I will be introducing Alberto Ferrari who will be speaking on ''Excel 2013 Power Pivot in Action'' which is a great self-service BI story. This 24hop event will be in a different ...

Or SSIS 2012? SSRS 2012? SSAS 2012? There’s no substitute for getting your hands on the product, in my opinion. I can hear you thinking, “But Andy, I can’t afford to purchase a copy of SQL Server 2012.” Are you sure? What if I told you that you can get a full-feature version of SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition for $50? Well, you cannot… it’s ...

SQL Server 2012 Integration Services Design Patterns has been released! The book is done and available thanks to the hard work and dedication of a great crew: Michelle Ufford (Blog | @sqlfool) – co-author Jessica M. Moss (Blog | @jessicammoss) – co-author Tim Mitchell (Blog | @tim_mitchell) – co-author Matt Masson (Blog | ...

I recently came in a problem trying to improve the parallelism of Tabular processing. As you know, multiple tables can be processed in parallel, whereas the processing of several partitions within the same table cannot be parallelized. When you perform an incremental update by adding only new rows to existing table, what you really do is adding ...

Yesterday has been published my Q&A interview on my Pre-Conference Workshop at SQL Pass 2012. It’s a good way to understand what will be discussed in the workshop, so if you’re interested or you’re into the Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence field and want to understand how the Agile approach can help you, you can read it ...

For the past two years, I have had the honor and privilege or authoring SSIS Design Patterns alongside Jessica Moss, Michelle Ufford, Tim Mitchell, and Matt Masson. Publication of the book – like many projects of this scope – has been delayed. The current publication date is 27 Aug 2012 and I have high confidence in this date. I take ...

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be delivering a Pre-Conference at PASS Summit 2012. I’ll speak about Business Intelligence again (as I did in 2010) but this time I’ll focus only on Data Warehouse, since it’s big topic even alone. I’ll discuss not only what is a Data Warehouse, how it can be modeled and built, but also how it’s development ...

I am installing SQL Server 2012 Evaluation Edition on a virtual machine as I type. You can do this. Here’s one way: Grab some virtual machine software. I like Oracle VirtualBox. It’s cool. It’s free. Install VirtualBox. Download the 180-day free trial of Windows Server 2008 R2. Also cool. Also free. Once Windows ...