Stephen Wynkoop

Demo: Capture perfmon counters to binary logs and at the same time capture SQL Profiler. Then you can load both into profiler and see both at the same time. Great for troubleshooting what might be causing a problem or what is happening at a particular point in time.

Historical only (not real-time)

When things go Wrong

• What changed?
• What were you doing?
• What were you seeing?
• Answer: NOTHING.

Add all the counters you need. Don’t be skimpy. Start broad and then narrow down. If you don’t record it, you can’t see it.

Intro to SSAS 2008

Marc Beacom

• www.MarcBeacom.com
• twitter.com/MarcBeacom

You can import an existing cube into BIDS which will essentially create a copy of the project that was used to create the cube. (Probably only to a certain extent)

PerformancePoint Services 101

Craig Utley

• Craig Utley, Mentor with Solid Quality Mentors
  • Consultant specializing in development with Microsoft technologies and data warehousing
  • Published author of books, whitepapers, articles, and courseware
  • Operator of LearnMicrosoftBI.com

Performance Point Services

Monitoring, Analytics and Planning

Planning being removed in the next version

• Monitoring: Scorecards and dashboards.
• Analytics: Drill up, drill down, slicing, dicing, etc…

Performance Point ships only with MOSS. With MOSS 2010, 64-bit only, no 32-bit.

KPI Sources are usually cubes but can be other sources including SQL Server, Excel and other sources.

No Pie Charts until next version.

Financial analytics with SQL Server Analysis Services

Donald Farmer

@donalddotfarmer

Need to listen to the Scottish Starbucks analogy again. It was a great analogy but want to be sure I didn’t miss something.

Financial Calculations

• Currency Conversions
• Time Intelligence
• Account Intelligence

Resources

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/analysis-services.aspx
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/mosha/default.aspx
http://www.sqlserveranalysisservices.com/default.htm
http://sqlcat.com/Default.aspx

Full SpectrumBusiness Intelligence

Donald Farmer

@donalddotfarmer

These slides are masterful is telling the verbal story Donald is presenting. I am putting up a few of the key slides that will server as good reference to me.

Thanks Donald!

Data quality is “fitness for purpose”. IT cannot tell you is a record is good.

TJ Belt

http://tjaybelt.blogspot.com
http://www.twitter.com/tjaybelt

You are on-call, maybe middle of the night and you get a call and there’s a problem. What do you do?

• What tasks were last performed by what persons?
• Start documenting incidents if you don’t already. Great for helping resolve things later down the road.
• Document, document, document

Items to be sure of and continuously check

• Scan OS error events
• Check on backups
• System specific output files (xml, reports, files)
• Log and data file sizes
• Space available / Free space on drives
• Replication health
• SQL Server logs
• Other notes of interest

Work to get your logs clean over time so that problems become more apparent and you will spend less time chasing red herrings.

“You only need one. Either a good backup or a good resume.”

Only notify on error, not on success. (Of course there may be exceptions)

• What are Microsoft SQL Server operators and how to define them (Part 1)
• Undocumented SQL Server 2005 Database Maintenance Plan Stored Procedures
• DB2 and the Procedural DBA, Part 1

Dimension Table ETL with SSIS

Erik Veerman
Mentor, Solid Quality Mentors
SQL Server MVP

Dimension tables contain the “text descriptors” or attributes. Also organized as hierarchies of categories, levels and members.

Slowly Changing Dimension (Ralph Kimball)

• Type 0:No change (Fixed Attribute)
• Type 1:The value is overwritten (Changing Attribute)
• Type 2:Slow changes. A new row is added (Historical Attribute)

Type 2 – New surrogate key and Start Time/End Time updates so to add the new record.

Inferred Members

• Missing dimension member during Fact load later becomes available in the Dimension source
• Also known as late arriving dimensions
• Fact load, placeholder record added to dimension table with new surrogate key generated
• Dimension process, for inferred members, all dimension attribute columns are updated with new values (type 2 attributes are handled as type 1)

Additional SSWUG Articles

• Troubleshooting SQL Server 2005 Integration Services
• MSDN Webcast Summary: Introducing SQL Server Integration Services for SQL Server 2005
• Tips for using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Part 3)

Fact Table ETL with SSIS

Erik Veerman
Mentor, Solid Quality Mentors
SQL Server MVP

Identify Dimension Surrogate Keys

• Locate dimension candidate keys in transaction source
• Validate uniqueness and data integrity
• Considering historical changes
  • Identifying current dimension record, combine business keys with current identifying meta data (data identifier or boolean)
  • Handle missing dimension records
• SSIS Data Flow Options
  • Lookup transformation
  • Merge Join transformation
  • Fuzzy Lookup transformation
• SSIS Control Flow Option
  • Execute SQL Task

• Fact ETL involves surrogate keys, grain changes, and measure calculations
• SSIS handles these through several out-of-the-box transformations

Loading a Data Warehouse with SSIS

Brian Knight
bknight@pragmaticworks.com
CEO, Pragmatic Works

Why Data Warehouse?

• Get users off of transactional systems
• Keeping more data online
• Easier reporting
• Consolidate data sources

Data Separated into fact and dimension tables

• Dimension tables answer the pivot or where clause
  • Make as wide and descriptive as possible
  • Surrogate keys operate as unique ID for each row
  • Keep surrogate keys as small as possible
• Fact tables answer the what or select statement
  • Intersect all dimension tables
  • Surrogate keys from each dimension in this table
  • Measures are the “what” like Price, Quantity, Duration

Additional Articles

• MSDN Webcast Summary: Introducing SQL Server Integration Services for SQL Server 2005
• SQL Server 2008 Katmai Change Data Capture (CDC)
• Troubleshooting SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

• http://Blogs.pragmaticworks.com/brian_knight
• http://www.twitter.com/brianknight

Live – SQL Server Analysis Services – Real World Performance Tuning (4hrs)

Ted Malone

(I only caught a few minutes here and there of this marathon live session, but the parts I caught were good. We’ll have to watch the on demand once it goes up.)

• Recommends looking at a product called Performance Advisor from SQL Century for getting performance insight into SSAS.

DBA Checklist

Buck Woody, Microsoft SQL Server Specialist

http://blogs.msdn.com/buckwoody
http://www.informit.com/guides/guide.aspx?g=sqlserver
http://edge.technet.com/People/BuckWoody/

SSMS

• Object Explorer: Right click to see additional columns including Last Backup.
• Standard Reports available via right click
• Log Viewer

oSQL or SQLCMD

PowerShell – Latest and greatest

Post Installation

Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly

Recommends being alerted of both error AND success in order to know that maintenance task really did run.

Maintenance tasks

• Do not run the auto-shrink option in your tasks.

Take a baseline with PerfMon. Email him for a list of counters.

Keep a SQL Server run book containing all configuration changes.

Solving Business Pains with SQL Server Integration Services

Jason Strate

SQL Server MVP
Enterprise Consultant with Digineer
Working with SQL Server since 1997

feeds2.feedburner.com/StrateSql
twitter.com/StrateSQL

• Consolidate packages and deployment
• Use ForEachwith ADO Enumerator for non-file looping
• Expressions on connections increase flexibility of package
• Store config type info in tables for easy retrieval and looping

Add It Up – Analysis Services Aggregations

Craig Utley, Mentor with Solid Quality Mentors
–craig@solidq.com

LearnMicrosoftBI.com

• Hierarchies must be natural to create aggregations at various levels
  • This means creating attribute relationships
• ProcessFulland ProcessIndexesbuild indexes and aggregations
• ProcessUpdateperforms adds, updates, and deletes to a dimension table
  • If a change is detected, flexible aggregations are dropped
• ProcessAddonly adds new records so both flexible and rigid aggregations are kept

OLAP and Data Warehousing – Data Warehousing Solution Architecture (Part 2)

Avoiding Common Analysis Services Mistakes

Craig Utley, Mentor with Solid Quality Mentors
–craig@solidq.com

LearnMicrosoftBI.com

• Dimensions appear to be especially problematic for companies
• The first thing companies should do is correctlyidentify attribute relationships
  • Not identifying them is bad
  • Incorrectly identifying them is worse
• Attribute relationships with flexible relationship types can cause problems with non-unique attributes (eg. Date hierarchy)
• Decide when IgnoreUnrelatedDimensions should be true
• In MDX explicitly reference cells when possible
  • Products.Printersinstead of Dimensions(2).Printers
  • Products.Printersinstead of Products.CurrentMember

Live Session – DBA Survivor II

Thomas LaRock

http://thomaslarock.com/presentations

• Know your RAIDs.
• HA vs. DR – Two different things. Glad he is reminding folks of this!
• Networks – Don’t forget this can cause “performance” problems.
• DBA = Default Blame Accepter (I know Network admins that might argue about that.)
• Be Nice! – #1 rule?
• Email – DON’T DO THIS.  hehe
  • “I have never, nor will I now, tolerate your foolishness.”
  • “I am done with your useless babble.”
• Development
  • “A development server is a production server to a developer”
  • Ask them if it is OK to lock down that server, should fix that response.
  • Manage expectations
    • Be responsive AND responsible
      • Own success AND mistakes (Amen!)
    • Results, not effort
    • Tangible output
  • Get used to developers being needy – They are undo pressure to deliver products on time and under budget.
• Time Management
  • Get in a routine
  • To-Do List
  • Chunking – Write those 6 blog articles at once and schedule publication over the week.
  • Know when to say No

SSWUG.org is starting their spring 2009 virtual conferences this morning. There are four conference running concurrently:

• SQL Server vConference
• .NET Development vConference
• Business Intelligence vConference
• Sharepoint vConference

New to this conference:

• Some LIVE pieces – Keynotes and some sessions
• DVD sets of the sessions are available for purchase
• Twitter feed for the #sswugvc tag.
• Broadcasting in HD. (Great improvement here!)

Day 1 I plan to hit the following sessions

• The Accidental SQL Business Intelligence Administrator
• Deep Dive: Extending SSIS with .NET Development
• Agile Business Intelligence – Proven Techniques that move BI Development into the Agile World
• Analysis Services 2008 End-to-End
• Do It Right: Best Practices for Analysis Services 2005 and 2008
• SQL 103 – The Essentials – DMV’s & t-sql for internals.