On Thursday 5 November at 1pm, Grant Paisley will team up with Paul Turley to present at the SQL PASS conference in Seattle. Paul will be presenting on Super Reports: Patterns and Recipes and Grant will join Paul for a part of the presentation to talk about building dynamic reports on Cubes.

An interesting demo shown at the Microsoft B.I. Conference in Seattle, showing B.I. data overlayed on a 3D representation of the city, completely interactive using Microsoft's Surface touch screen technology.

From the Microsoft MSDN Channel 9 site:

"This screencast is the first in a series BI Developer screencasts recorded as part of a workshop built on SQL Server 2005 that has been delivered around the globe by Microsoft and Microsoft Partners.  This training event takes the student through the Microsoft BI Platform giving a BI Developer the introduction and basic comfort needed to tackle a BI project using Microsoft technology.

This first screencast will take you through the Microsoft BI Platform briefly touching on each of the technologies".

This is an introductory level screencast. If you have any questions at all, please fell free to ask them in the comments section of this post.

See the video here

From the Microsoft MSDN Channel 9 site:

"This screencast is the first in a series BI Developer screencasts recorded as part of a workshop built on SQL Server 2005 that have been delivered around the globe by Microsoft and Microsoft Partners.  This training event takes the student through the Microsoft BI Platform giving a BI Developer the introduction and basic comfort needed to tackle a BI project using Microsoft technology".

This is a developer level screencast, so if you have any questions at all, please fell free to ask them in the comments section of this post.

See the video here:

Grant will be presenting at the Office DevCon conference to be held at the Sydney Microsoft office on 15-16 Nov 2008. Office DevCon is a free community driven conference about all aspects of Microsoft Office Devlopment.
 
This is a deep-dive session.

Data mining has moved from the hallowed halls of long bearded professor types to today where literally anyone can dabble with some serious data exploration. Come along and learn how to take data in Excel and utilizing the new Table Analytics (Data Mining Excel 2007 Add-In) and really understand the behaviour of people like Dick and Jane. How are your customers similar? What customers are different? Basket analysis - is there really a relationship between Nappies and Beer?

Find out more here http://www.officedevcon.com.au

Below is a list of sessions that the Angry Koala crew will be presenting at TechEd 2008. TechEd is Microsoft's premier developer conference in Australia.

Grant Paisley

Report Authoring with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

Grant will cover tips learnt building reports in SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, including a walkthrough of the many enhancements in the new Report Designer tool. Learn about some of the new Report Designer usability features, how to add data visualizations, build complex structures with Tablix, and build richly formatted Textboxes. You may even see sperm!

For more details see http://www.sqlserver.org.au/events/ViewEvent.aspx?EventId=340

This month I presented at the Sydney Business and Technology User Group on the topic of MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) and BI.

You can read Craig Bailey's review of the session here: http://blog.craigbailey.net/2007/07/sbtug-report-on-last-meeting-online.html.

This month I presented a talk at the Sydney SharePoint Users Group about Business Intelligence.

There is an overview of the session in a great blog post by Nick Kellett here: http://planetmoss.blogspot.com/2007/06/yesterday-i-attended-monthly-sydney.html.

Nick also has some other great posts on SharePoint over at his Planet Moss Blog.

Thanks for the post Nick!

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services includes a complete re-architecture of the Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) engine from Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

In this session we will focus on the performance and scalability aspects of the Analysis Services architecture and cover cube design, providing specific guidance on how to design for optimal performance, and also cover MDX and calculations.

Cube design and storage

We will discuss cube modeling (emphasizing the importance of attribute relationships), partitioning strategies, aggregation management and cube processing. For each of these, we will explain the important design principles, and provide best practices for performance and scalability.

MDX and calculations

We take common business problems and show how MDX can be utilized to solve them while keeping query performance under control. Finally we point out common gotchas for poor performance in MDX and best practices to address them.

These principles and practices should be a necessary foundation for any organization embarking on a large-scale business intelligence project based on Analysis Services 2005.

We will make *you* the BI hero!

For more information see http://www.sqlserver.org.au/Events/ViewEvent.aspx?EventId=264