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Microsoft in collaboration with SQLTeach is having a full day of presentation on BI with SQL Server 2012. We will be presenting 5 sessions on different feature of SQL Server 2012 BI Stack. Join us for this free workshop day in Microsoft Office. See the presented sessions below.

Date: Friday April 26th
Location: 100 Queen 5th floor, Ottawa , ON
Time: 8:00am to 5:00pm

I will be presenting 2 sessions:

Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012
An introduction to Data Quality Services. DQS enables to discover, build, and manage knowledge about your data. Use that knowledge to perform data cleansing, matching and profiling. We will explore the numerous features and capabilities of Data Quality Services and its integration with SSIS with the DQS Cleansing Transform. Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012

Microsoft Business Intelligence in Excel 2013
The new release of Excel enables business users to do self-service Business Intelligence directly in the client, which now becomes a complete and powerful self-service BI tool – Basically users have all they need in one familiar environment in order to do data modeling, exploration and visualization of the data. New capabilities and features delivered for end users in Excel 2013; – ability to analyze data ranging from a few rows to hundred of millions of rows with extreme analytical performance – opportunity to speed up analysis in Excel by easily cleaning up and shaping your data with Flash Fill and Quick Explore – mash-up and analyze data from virtually any source quickly and create compelling analytical apps with PowerPivot – provide stunning data visualization to discover new insights with interactive and familiar data exploration, visualization and presentation experience with Power View.
Update: + Data Explorer and GeoFlow

Details: SQLTeach Ottawa BI Day with SQL Server 2012

Register: DevTeach Community event – Ottawa BI Day with SQL Server 2012 April 26th

The long anticipated SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2012 (SSDT BI) templates has just been released.

“With SSDT BI for Visual Studio 2012 you can develop and deploy SQL Server Business intelligence projects. Projects created in Visual Studio 2010 can be opened in Visual Studio 2012 and the other way around without upgrading or downgrading – it just works.” – SSIS Blog

It includes the following:

  • Visual Studio 2012 integrated shell (if Visual Studio 2012 is not installed on your environment)
  • Project templates for:
    • – Analysis services projects
      – Reporting services projects
      – Integration services projects

    The download is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=36843

    DevTeach stands for Developers Teaching. It is a conference done by developers for developers. It offers the elements of an international conference and the elements of a community event.

    This year DevTeach is celebrating their 10th year anniversary!

    I am thrilled to be part of this year event and will be presenting two SQL BI sessions:

    Introduction to Master Data Services in SQL Server
    What is Master Data Services? Why is it important? – Will discuss Master Data Services capabilities, it’s underlying architecture. Will demo creating a model, using SQL Server 2012 MDS add-in for Microsoft Excel, creating hierarchies, business rules and exposing/integrating data with other interfaces (Data Warehouse).

    Microsoft Business Intelligence in Excel 2013
    The latest release of Excel enables business users to do self-service Business Intelligence directly in the client, which now becomes a complete and powerful self-service BI tool – Basically users have all they need in one familiar environment in order to do data modeling, exploration and visualization of the data. New capabilities and features delivered for end users in Excel 2013; – ability to analyze data ranging from a few rows to hundred of millions of rows with extreme analytical performance – opportunity to speed up analysis in Excel by easily cleaning up and shaping your data with Flash Fill and Quick Explore – mash-up and analyze data from virtually any source quickly and create compelling analytical apps with PowerPivot – provide stunning data visualization to discover new insights with interactive and familiar data exploration, visualization and presentation experience with Power View.

    Where: Toronto/Mississauga (Delta Meadowvale Hotel)
    When: May 27-31, 2013

    Take advantage of the early bird discount and save! Register -> http://www.devteach.com/Register.aspx

    There lots of useful scripts out there and many other tools to help you populate the Date Dimension table when building a Data Warehouse, but the challenge as always been addressing the Fiscal Year! Here is a simple T-SQL CTE (Common Table Expression) script that addresses and loads data for the Date Dimension with Fiscal Year. CTEs enables to recursively loop through data until the the desired result are achieved.

    The DimDate table creation script;

    create table dbo.DimDate 
    (
    	DateKey					int not null,
    	FullDate				date not null,
    	DayNumberOfWeek			tinyint not null,
    	DayNameOfWeek			nvarchar(10) not null,
    	WeekDayType				nvarchar(7) not null,
    	DayNumberOfMonth		tinyint not null,
    	DayNumberOfYear			smallint not null,
    	WeekNumberOfYear		tinyint not null,
    	MonthNameOfYear			nvarchar(10) not null,
    	MonthNumberOfYear		tinyint not null,
    	QuarterNumberCalendar	tinyint not null,
    	QuarterNameCalendar		nchar(2) not null,
    	SemesterNumberCalendar	tinyint not null,
    	SemesterNameCalendar	nvarchar(15) not null,
    	YearCalendar			smallint not null,
    	MonthNumberFiscal		tinyint not null,
    	QuarterNumberFiscal		tinyint not null,
    	QuarterNameFiscal		nchar(2) not null,
    	SemesterNumberFiscal	tinyint not null,
    	SemesterNameFiscal		nvarchar(15) not null,
    	YearFiscal				smallint not null
    
    	constraint PK_DimDate primary key clustered	 
    	(
    		DateKey asc
    	)
    ) 
    go
    

    The CTE data insert script;

    declare	@DateCalendarStart	datetime,
    		@DateCalendarEnd	datetime,
    		@FiscalCounter		datetime,
    		@FiscalMonthOffset	int;
    
    set @DateCalendarStart = '2005-01-01';
    set @DateCalendarEnd = '2015-12-31';
    
    -- Set this to the number of months to add or extract to the current date to get the beginning 
    -- of the Fiscal Year. Example: If the Fiscal Year begins July 1, assign the value of 6 
    -- to the @FiscalMonthOffset variable. Negative values are also allowed, thus if your 
    -- 2012 Fiscal Year begins in July of 2011, assign a value of -6.
    set @FiscalMonthOffset = 6;
    
    with DateDimension  
    as
    (
    	select	@DateCalendarStart as DateCalendarValue,
    			dateadd(m, @FiscalMonthOffset, @DateCalendarStart) as FiscalCounter
    				
    	union all
    	
    	select	DateCalendarValue + 1,
    			dateadd(m, @FiscalMonthOffset, (DateCalendarValue + 1)) as FiscalCounter
    	from	DateDimension 
    	where	DateCalendarValue + 1 < = @DateCalendarEnd
    )
    
    insert into dbo.DimDate (DateKey, FullDate, DayNumberOfWeek, DayNameOfWeek, WeekDayType, 
    						DayNumberOfMonth, DayNumberOfYear, WeekNumberOfYear, MonthNameOfYear, 
    						MonthNumberOfYear, QuarterNumberCalendar, QuarterNameCalendar, SemesterNumberCalendar, 
    						SemesterNameCalendar, YearCalendar, MonthNumberFiscal, QuarterNumberFiscal, 
    						QuarterNameFiscal, SemesterNumberFiscal, SemesterNameFiscal, YearFiscal)
    
    select	cast(convert(varchar(25), DateCalendarValue, 112) as int) as 'DateKey',
    		cast(DateCalendarValue as date) as 'FullDate',
    		datepart(weekday, DateCalendarValue) as 'DayNumberOfWeek',
    		datename(weekday, DateCalendarValue) as 'DayNameOfWeek',
    		case datename(dw, DateCalendarValue)
    			when 'Saturday' then 'Weekend'
                when 'Sunday' then 'Weekend'
            else 'Weekday'
            end as 'WeekDayType',
    		datepart(day, DateCalendarValue) as'DayNumberOfMonth',
    		datepart(dayofyear, DateCalendarValue) as 'DayNumberOfYear',
    		datepart(week, DateCalendarValue) as 'WeekNumberOfYear',
    		datename(month, DateCalendarValue) as 'MonthNameOfYear',
    		datepart(month, DateCalendarValue) as 'MonthNumberOfYear',
    		datepart(quarter, DateCalendarValue) as 'QuarterNumberCalendar',
    		'Q' + cast(datepart(quarter, DateCalendarValue) as nvarchar) as 'QuarterNameCalendar',
    		case
    			when datepart(month, DateCalendarValue) <= 6 then 1
    			when datepart(month, DateCalendarValue) > 6 then 2
    		end	as 'SemesterNumberCalendar',
    		case
    			when datepart(month, DateCalendarValue) < = 6 then 'First Semester'
    			when datepart(month, DateCalendarValue) > 6 then 'Second Semester'  
    		end	as 'SemesterNameCalendar',
    		datepart(year, DateCalendarValue) as 'YearCalendar',
    		datepart(month, FiscalCounter) as 'MonthNumberFiscal',
    		datepart(quarter, FiscalCounter) as 'QuarterNumberFiscal',
    		'Q' + cast(datepart(quarter, FiscalCounter) as nvarchar) as 'QuarterNameFiscal',  
    		case
    			when datepart(month, FiscalCounter) < = 6 then 1
    			when datepart(month, FiscalCounter) > 6 then 2 
    		end	as 'SemesterNumberFiscal',	
    		case
    			when datepart(month, FiscalCounter) < = 6 then 'First Semester'
    			when  datepart(month, FiscalCounter) > 6 then 'Second Semester'
    		end	as 'SemesterNameFiscal',			
    		datepart(year, FiscalCounter) as 'YearFiscal'
    from	DateDimension
    order by 
    		DateCalendarValue
    option (maxrecursion 0);
    

    I’m a little bit late to the game, but I wanted to share some great information that was announced earlier this week at the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS) Summit 2012.

    Code named project “Hekaton” is Microsoft’s new in-memory technology for transaction processing that will be built directly into the data platform and ship in the next major release of SQL Server. This will close the loop of in-memory capabilities across analytics, transactions, streaming and caching workloads. Based on some early testing and feedback by customers “Hekaton” will offer considerable performance gains of up to 10 times for existing apps and up to 50 times for new applications optimized for in-memory performance.

    Microsoft also announced the new release of SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) which should be available on the first half of 2013. PDW will be powered by PolyBase, a breakthrough data processing engine that will enable queries across relational data and non-relational Hadoop data (Big Data). PolyBase will enable you to write plain, normal T-SQL queries, and it will know how to translate them, and how to federate the underlying data, so your applications can transparently access a traditional star schema warehouse stored in SQL Server 2012 PDW or read results from MapReduce Big Data processing jobs which are stored in HDFS.

    The much anticipated SQL Server 2012 SP1 as also been released and is now available for download here.

    • SQL Server 2012 SP1 provides rich integration and support for the new business intelligence capabilities in Office 2013. Powered by our in-memory analytics engine, it enables business users to interact directly with raw data in Excel 2013 with tools such as PowerPivot for data modeling and Power View for stunning interactive data visualization.
    • SQL Server 2012 SP1 also delivers a number of non-BI enhancements listed here.

    Also newly available is the Data Mining Add-Ins for Office 2013 which you download here. I also strongly suggest that you take a look at the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP1 Feature Pack available here

    Quite an exciting week it was at PASS Summit 2012 for the SQL Server community!

    For further details and other SQL Server related news please follow this link : Latest SQL Server News