Alberto Ferrari Pre-Con Survey

Excitement is building up – BIG TIME!

We announced Alberto Ferrari’s participation in Asia’s First SQL Conference and the response has been awesome.

Now, help shape up Alberto Ferrari’s pre-conference seminar. Apart from regular break-out sessions, Alberto will be delivering a whole day pre-con seminar on Aug 26.

What is a pre-con seminar?

Pre-Conference Seminars are focused, day-long classes led by noted industry experts, and cover topics that address relevant issues for today’s SQL professionals. This education richly enhances your summit experience and expertise and prepares you for the session content and hands-on labs that are offered throughout the next 3 days! Pre-Con content is designed to provide you with a deep knowledge base and skills that you can apply to your immediate business needs.

SQLServerGeeks Annual Summit 2015 will have five pre-con seminars, each delivered by a MASTER! The 5 tracks are DBA, Developer, Analytics, Cloud & Big Data. Pre-Cons will happen on August 26. Regular Conference is from Aug 27 to 29.

Now, help us shape up Alberto’s pre-con. Alberto’s pre-con is meant for Developers and Business Intelligence professionals and will focus on the BI track. He has proposed four options. The process is participating in this survey is very simple. Review the 4 choices below and then scroll down to see the survey link. Click on the survey link and cast your vote. That’s it! Isn’t this amazing that you are contributing and helping us shape up the conference. Yes, this is your conference. So go ahead and vote for your favorite topic in the BI track pre-con!

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Option 1: From 0 to DAX

Abstract: The DAX language is the foundation of self-service Business Intelligence using the Microsoft stack. It is the language used to query and program Power BI, PowerPivot for Excel, and SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular models. Learning the basics of DAX is very simple, but mastering it is a different story because it requires a mindset that needs some study, for both BI Professionals and Information Workers.

During this one-day workshop, the authors of the best seller books The Definitive Guide to DAX, The Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model, and Building Data Models with Power Pivot will guide you in the process of learning the DAX language, through many examples and scenarios that will help you understand the important concepts of DAX and how to leverage them in the everyday work.

The workshop is useful to many profiles: Information Workers interested in exploiting the many interesting features of PowerPivot for Excel 2013 and BI developers who want to learn the DAX language.

 

Option 2: Data Modeling in SSAS Tabular

Abstract: Analysis Services offers two different types of modeling: Tabular and Multidimensional. The Multidimensional model is based on the OLAP engine and the MDX language. The Tabular model has been introduced in 2012 and is based on the DAX language and on a fast in-memory engine called VertiPaq, which provides state-of-the art compression algorithms and query performance.

This full-day seminar is dedicated to Tabular Modeling in Analysis Services 2012 and is the best way to learn this new technology directly from two SSAS Maestros that used the product since early beta releases and wrote a book and many articles about it. No knowledge of previous versions of Analysis Services and UDM is required, because Tabular is based on different concepts and on the new DAX language. Each attendee will learn the best practices of creating Tabular data models, using the right techniques to design entities and relationships of the business model, optimizing the memory consumption and the performance.

The seminar also cover features that affects presentation (hierarchies, table and column properties, formatting) and topics related to deployment, security, and partitioning.

 

Option 3: Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a cloud service that provide a complete self-service analytics solution, including tools for data extraction, transformation, modeling and visualization. Data modeling is possible by using both Excel or Power BI Designer. The Power BI Service enables you to create reports and dashboards, sharing them with other users. Mobile apps for several platforms also improve access on any device.

In this full-day seminar, you are guided in creating a complete solution step-by-step, using all the features of Power BI. Starting from scratch, you see how to create query in a visual way to import and integrate data from many different sources, with a particular attention on leveraging existing data in the company, transforming data in order to improve the resulting model and sharing the results of the queries created, so that they will be easy to reuse. Then you see how to create a data model following the best practices and using the resources available on the web in order to accelerate the creation of tables and formulas that can be shared in many models. The reference data model will improve over the day, adding metadata to improve the usability of other Power BI features. You will also learn how to connect to existing on-premises data models in Analysis Services, without copying and storing data in the cloud.

Once the data model is ready, you see how to create reports and dashboards in Power BI, leveraging the many data visualizations available. After publishing the result on Power BI site, you see how to refresh the data on the cloud, including all the details about correct configuration and best practices for moving on premise data to the cloud in a secure way.

You will see how to use Q&A, learning how to optimize the data model for a better user experience during data exploration with this tool. Q&A enables queries written in natural language, and it might require some information in the data model in order to disambiguate similar names or similar relationships.

At the end of the day, you will be ready to start using the entire Power BI stack in your company, choosing the right feature for each requirement and applying the best practices in each step.

 

Option 4: DAX Patterns

Improve your DAX skills by learning DAX Patterns directly from one of the authors of the DAX Patterns web site and book on this full-day seminar. DAX Patterns is a collection of ready-to-use data models and formulas in DAX, which is the programming language of Power BI, Power Pivot, and SSAS Tabular. Create your data model faster by using a DAX pattern!

In the seminar we will explain the more used patterns to solve common business scenarios, explaining how they work internally and how to adapt them to your own specific model, not only by showing the code, but helping you understand the underlying techniques.

The Static and Dynamic Segmentations patterns solve very common requirements, presenting different approaches to the problem that differs in performance and usability. The New and Returning Customer pattern will be useful also to learn how to create optimized formulas to perform calculations over set of filtered data, similar to what you would do in SQL by using subqueries. The Budget Patterns describes how to manage virtual relationships in a data model at different granularities, and how to write an allocation algorithm based on such relationships. The Cumulative Total pattern is the starting point for many scenarios, such as Inventory Valuation and Balance Sheet analysis.

The goal of the day is to transfer the knowledge behind the patterns, enabling students to write their own customized version of the patterns or completely new ones, using the same DAX coding techniques adopted in the patterns.

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Done reviewing the pre-con titles and abstracts? Now, time to cast your vote!

If you want to cast your vote in our FB group, click here.

If you don’t want to use FB, click here.

 

Thank you for helping us shape the Asia’s First SQL Conference!