SSIS Team Blog : Conferences

2009 PASS Summit next week

mmasson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:01:49 GMT

I’m really looking forward to attending PASS next week!

I’ll be presenting two separate talks this time around:

Maximize Your SSIS Investment with Tuning Tricks and Tips

Session Details

Maximize the performance of your packages with this set of best practices and data flow tuning techniques. We'll show you how to improve the operational efficiency of various Integration Services connectors, and take a look at how to efficiently load your data warehouse solutions.

This is basically a talk about how to get good performance from SSIS without having to invest too much time and effort. I’ll talk about “smart package design”, how to effectively introduce parallelism, and then jump into some of the easier tuning tweaks you can do in your packages.

Originally this talk was scheduled as one of the first sessions on Tuesday, which made it a very good segue for Thomas Kejser’s SQLCAT chalk talk on Tuning ETL and ELT. It looks like my session was moved to Thursday in the latest PASS schedule, which means I’ll be presenting after he does. I think both sessions are a good compliment to each other - While mine focuses on package design, Thomas takes a more scientific approach to performance tuning, with a pretty deep dive on SQL Server optimization. If you’re interested in performance, I highly recommend attending both sessions (there shouldn’t be much overlap).

My other session is a Chalk Talk that I’ll be co-presenting with John Welch.

Metadata Driven ETL - Creating Dynamic Packages with Integration Services

Session Details

Schema changes got you down? Tired of hand coding your SSIS packages for a ton of different data sources? Come see this session where we'll focus on the requirements for metadata driven ETL, and how you can build your own dynamic package generation framework using the SSIS object model. We'll talk about some of SSIS package frameworks currently used in-house at Microsoft, how to automate and test your packages, and about the open-source resources available online.

I’ll be at the SSIS booth and Ask the Experts areas throughout the conference, so be sure to come by and say hello.

Speaking for the Vancouver BI PASS Chapter

mmasson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:09:46 GMT

I’ll be presenting for the Vancouver BI PASS Chapter next Friday, July 10th, at the Microsoft Canada offices. I really enjoyed meeting the Pacific Northwest SQL Server User Group a couple of weeks ago, and I’m looking forward to sharing SSIS with my fellow Canadians in Vancouver. I’ll be going over some common SSIS pitfalls, and it seems like I’ll have plenty of time to go over any other topics that come up (perhaps there will be interest in CDC & Merge?)

Hope to see you there!

Friday, July 10^th 2009
8:30 - 11:30 AM

Microsoft Canada
1111 W. Georgia, Suite 1100 (11th floor)
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6E 4M3

Speaking at the PNW SSUG

mmasson — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:41:51 GMT

I’ll be speaking at the Pacific Northwest SQL Server User Group meeting next Wednesday, June 10th. I’ll be giving an updated version of the Avoiding Common Pitfalls in SSIS talk I gave at TechEd a couple of weeks ago. It will be my first time attending a user group meeting, and I’m really looking forward to meeting some more SQL people from the area.

See you there!

SSWUG.ORG Ultimate Virtual Conference – April 2009

mmasson — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:58:57 GMT

I flew to Tucson last week to record my sessions for the upcoming SSWUG.ORG Spring Virtual Conference. I recorded three sessions for the BI track:

How to Avoid Common Pitfalls with SSIS

Starting up a new project with SQL Server Integration Services? Save time and money by learning about how to avoid common issues that users hit when implementing their ETL solutions. Drawing on the most frequently asked questions in the MSDN Integration Services forum and some of the more interesting packages we've seen over the years, we'll highlight common mistakes, clear up some misconceptions, and provide best practices to help you efficiently and effectively use Integration Services.

Incremental Data Warehouse Loads with MERGE and Change Data Capture

This talk describes the new MERGE statement and Change Data Capture (CDC) feature introduced in SQL Server 2008, and how to take advantage of them in SQL Server Integration Services. We'll cover the traditional ways of doing incremental data loads, and see how these new key features make the process a whole lot easier. If you're interested in learning best practices for this new SQL Server 2008 functionality, you won't want to miss this session!

New Connectivity Options in SSIS 2008

Figuring out the best way to connect to your data sources can be tricky. SQL Server Integration Services 2008 has made it easier with the addition of new high performance connectors for Oracle, Teradata, and SAP BI. This talk will walk through their features, and take a look at how they can drastically improve the performance of your data loads.

They put together a very impressive list of speakers again (I’m still surprised – and honored – to see my name next to these people!), and the sessions look pretty good as well. I’m sure I’ll be attending a number of the sessions myself. Some of the other SSIS ones include:

Anthony D'Angelo - Deep Dive: Extending SSIS with .NET Development

Brian Knight - Dynamically Configuring SSIS packages, Loading a Data Warehouse in SSIS, Performance Tuning SSIS 2005 and 2008

John Welch - Doing More (ETL) with Less (Effort) by Automating SSIS, Processing Flat Files with SSIS

Ted Malone - Agile Business Intelligence - Proven Techniques that move BI Development into the Agile World

They still have an early bird registration rate going, and you can use the vip code SPVMMASP09 to get an additional discount. The conference runs from April 22-24th… hope to see you there!

Microsoft Tech-Ed North America 2009

mmasson — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:32:19 GMT

Are you going to TechEd in May? I’ll be down there in lovely Los Angeles answering questions at the SSIS booth and doing a Chalk Talk on avoiding common pitfalls with SSIS. There’s only a couple of SSIS related breakout sessions this time around, but plenty on the database platform and BI in general (there’s 430 breakout sessions in total).

BIN301 Connectivity Options for Data Integration with Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services

BIN207 Upgrading DTS Packages to Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services

Let me know if you’re going! Maybe we can arrange some sort of party for SSIS on the side…

SSWUG.ORG Spring Virtual Conference ‘09

mmasson — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:38 GMT

I’ll be flying down to Tucson, AZ in March to record sessions for the upcoming SSWUG.ORG Ultimate Virtual Conference. I participated in the conference last year, and was really impressed at how well the format works and the quality of the presentations they were able to put together. They have many of the same speakers as last time, as well as a couple of new people. I’ll be participating in the Business Intelligence track, and presenting three different SSIS topics.

The conference will run online from April 22-24th, 2009. The current early bird registration rate is only $90, and you can use the VIP code SPVMMASP09 to get an additional $10 off.

SSWUG.org Business Intelligence Virtual Conference

mmasson — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:34:31 GMT

The SSWUG.org virtual conference is less than a week away. If you haven't already registered, you can use this VIP code to get an additional discount off the admission price.

VIP CODE: MMASVIP

Incase you missed it, a preview of my Lookup session (as well as sessions from John Welch and Matthew Roche) are available on the virtual conference site.

Lookup presentation teaser available online

mmasson — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:28:59 GMT

They've posted part of the Advanced Lookup Scenarios presentation I recorded for the SSWUG conference on the vConference site. You can now watch the first ten minutes online. I recorded two other sessions in addition to the Lookup one - "Beyond Scripting", which talks about extending SSIS using scripts and custom extensions, and a "What's New in SSIS for 2008" session which goes into detail about some of the things I've previously discussed in this blog.

You can also view teasers from some other SSIS presentations from the conference:

Configuration Patterns in SSIS from SQL MVP John Welch

Introduction to Scripting in SSIS from former MVP (now MS employee!) Matthew Roche

Enjoy!

Presenting at PASS

mmasson — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:37:29 GMT

I’ll be co-presenting a session at PASS this year entitled Incremental data warehouse loads with MERGE and Change Data Capture. This will be my first PASS conference, and I’m really looking forward to it.

The conference is November 18-21 in Seattle. Hope to see you there!

SSWUG virtual conference interview

mmasson — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:20:00 GMT

Chris Shaw has posted my answers to some interview questions he sent out to all of the speakers at the upcoming SSWUG Virtual Conference. I hope I don't get into trouble for any of them.

I've mentioned the conference before, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to point out that they've changed things around a bit. The conference is now at the beginning of November, and instead of being focused on Business Intelligence, they've combined their conferences for SQL Server, SharePoint, and .NET Developer technologies into one big show.

I flew out to Tucson at the beginning of September to record my sessions, and had a really good time. I learned a lot about how the conference works, and was really impressed with the format, and how things are run. Compared to what other conferences costs, I think you get a ridiculously large amount of content for what they are charging.

Presenting at the Microsoft BI Conference

mmasson — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:27:14 GMT

On Monday (October 6th) I’ll be doing a chalk talk presentation at the MS BI Conference. The topic is Advanced Scenarios with the Lookup Transform. Here is the abstract:

Performing lookups is one of the most common operations in the ETL process, and doing them incorrectly can severely affect the performance of your data load. In this talk you’ll learn best practices and design patterns for using the lookup component in SQL Server 2008 Integration Services, and how to take advantage of the new lookup features. If you’ve ever wondered about the differences between full and partial caches, the advantages of cascading lookups, and how to do ranged lookups, you won’t want to miss this talk.

I’ll also be hanging out at the SSIS / SQL BI booths throughout the day. Come by and say hello!

SSWUG Business Intelligence Virtual Conference

mmasson — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:30 GMT

I’ve been invited to speak at the SSWUG BI Virtual Conference in September. Like John Welch mentioned in his blog, the current speaker lineup is very impressive. I’m honored (and a little intimidated) to be on the presenters list! I’ll be flying out to Tucson in early September to record three SSIS related sessions:

What’s new in SSIS in SQL Server 2008
Beyond Scripting – Developing reusable extensions for SSIS
Advanced lookup scenarios in Integration Services with SQL Server 2008

The conference will take place online September 24th – 26th. The session list hasn’t been posted yet, but judging by the list of speakers, I’m sure it will be interesting.