Build Schedule

Testing is critical to managing a high-quality data lifecycle. Unfortunately, SSIS has no built-in support for test authoring and the tools for relational database testing are limited. As a result, most organizations forgo automated testing and focus entirely on manual user testing, which is both expensive and often occurs too late in the process to address all of the issues discovered.  

In this session, a new approach to unit testing (focusing on verifying the correctness of individual packages, tasks, or dataflows) and integration testing (focusing on validating that the data produced by an entire sequence of transformations) will be discussed. This approach uses metadata authored by analysts in Excel to automatically generate testing logic within the corresponding packages or to automatically generate standalone test packages that contain all of the necessary validation logic. All code will be shared with attendees for free and unrestricted use within their own projects.

Scott Currie

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 8

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Join us as we take a tour of Microsoft Azure's HDInsight HBase offering. We will introduce the main HBase features, as well as the HDInsight HBase preview service hosted in Microsoft Azure. Apache HBase is an open-source "big data" database that can hold billions of rows and millions of columns. It is a distributed, versioned, non-relational database. Presented by Bill Carroll and Jason Howell from the Microsoft Big Data support team.

Jason Howell

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 3

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Text mining is projected to dominate data mining, and the reasons are evident:  we have more text available than numeric data.  Microsoft introduced a new technology to SQL Server 2014 called Semantic Search. This session's detailed description and demos give you important information for the enterprise implementation of Tag Index and Document Similarity Index, and will also provide a comparison between what semantic search is and what Delve does. The demos include a web-based Silverlight application, and content documents from Wikipedia. We'll also look at strategy tips for how to best leverage the new semantic technology with existing Microsoft data mining.

Mark Tabladillo

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 4

Level: Intermedia

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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APS is the next generation platform for high performance Data warehouses.  In this session we will cover, how to analyze your existing solution to see if you are ready?   How to migrate an existing solution to APS?  We will cover the benefits of migrating?

Andy Isley

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 5

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Are your databases being backed up? Are you sure? Are you sure they're being backed up correctly? Maybe you're an "accidental DBA" or a developer who's not quite sure of the answers to those questions. In this session, you'll learn what the different types of basic backups are, how to execute them, and (perhaps most importantly) how to restore from them if and when necessary.

Ben Thul

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 1

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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If your company is planning to build a data warehouse or BI solution, you need to be aware that BI projects have high failure rates. Gartner says between 70% to 80% of corporate business intelligence projects fail. And with “big data” adding more complexity you can expect even more failures. However, the major causes of these failures are well known and can be avoided by implementing a set of best practices.

I have worked on dozens of end-to-end BI projects and have seen my share of successes and failures. I will talk about the reasons BI projects fail and share best practices and lessons learned so your BI project will fall into the “successful” category.

James Serra

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 4

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Data Warehouses and OLTP systems are different!  But there are some core concepts that we need to understand for managing and maintaining both.  Do you want to know how you can load data faster, just by setting up your database correctly?  Are your queries running slow?  Want to understand how you can reduce locking and blocking in reporting queries?  Do you have a system with views, that reference views, which reference more views?  Let's discuss some core concepts and techniques that will get you out of the slow lane and on your way to a faster Data Warehouse!

Bradley Ball

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 1

Level: Advanced

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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 BIML--Business Intelligence Markup Language is your key to faster development of SSIS Packages. This session will guide you through an introduction to BIML. We'll explore the capabilities of BIML and BIMLScript, available through the free Codeplex BIDSHelper download. We'll move through basic syntax of plain BIML, and progress to BIMLScript, which enables exponentially faster development of SSIS packages.

Julie Smith

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 8

Level: Intermedia

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Learn how to build an MDM Center of Excellence with Best Practices using extensive demo. The session will including building a complete sample customer domain including data quality, merge, match and deduplication, and business workflow.

Gene Webb

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 5

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Change Data Capture (CDC) and Change Tracking (CT) have been standard features in SQL Server for a few years now but there's not really that much useful information out in the blogosphere about how they work under the hood. Kevin Hazzard will dig deep into the implementations of CDC and CT in SQL Server, showing you all of the parameters you can use to make these great features serve your organization well. This will be a highly-interactive, highly-entertaining session with lots of questions answered and mysteries revealed.

Kevin Hazzard

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 1

Level: Intermedia

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Existing SSIS automation solutions are focused on forward-motion activities: creating packages and pushing them to the server.  Little or no thought is given to the management of the packages once they are in production - tools like SQL Data Tools, BIML, and MIST offer nothing to help you understand and manage a live, money-printing ETL workflow based on SSIS packages.

BIPS is an open source project that allows you to manage a live SSIS package tree from PowerShell.  It closes the automation loop, providing the ability to learn and discover the features of an existing package deployment tree as well as manipulate it.  In short, the goal of BIPS brings a devops perspective to managing your SSIS packages.

In this session, you will learn how to leverage BIPS in your own environment.  Specific attention will be given to searching and filtering tasks and data flows on arbitrary criteria and manipulating specific parts of the ETL workflow from the shell. 

Jim Christopher

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 8

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Cloud, Cloud, Cloud.  Microsoft is "all in". CxOs love the idea of renting compute resources.  You know this is where our profession is headed, but when and how fast.  When should you jump on board?  The good news is cloud will not eliminate or even reduce the need for IT and Data professionals.  The bad news is our world and our profession is changing.  Adapt or be left behind.  Come see what Microsoft Azure has to offer Data Professionals.

Geoff Hiten

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 5

Level: Intermedia

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Have you heard about columnstore indexes? Maybe you've read about it, but not yet tested it? If you're developing or managing data warehouses, then the columnstore index is the biggest turbo button you'll ever get for your current hardware. Learn how SQL Server stores the data differently and how it uses new access patterns to retrieve data at blazing speeds. You'll see the difference between clustered and non-clustered columnstore indexes as well as the advantages and disadvantages of both.

Patrick Keisler

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 3

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml) automates your BI patterns and eliminates the manual repetition that consumes most of your SSIS development time. During this hour long presentation, Scott Currie from Varigence will use the free BIDSHelper add-in for BIDS and SSDT to introduce Biml and use to automatically generate large quantities of custom SSIS packages. The session will be largely demonstration driven, and reusable sample code will be distributed for you to use in your own projects. Using a live-typing approach, Scott will start from scratch and by the end of the session create a full-blown staging environment. This will include the creation of *hundreds* of target table creation scripts, data load packages, data scrubbing rules, logging, and more. The best part is that you can freely reuse the code in your own environment just by changing the connection strings - or make small changes to implement your own data load patterns.

Scott Currie

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 8

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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This presentation includes a complex business analytics solution using elements across the Microsoft Business Intelligence technology.  This talk will not have all the steps spelled out.  Therefore you should prepare -- for example, by looking at the SQL Server 2014 Developer Kit -- since attendees will be expected to have working knowledge of SQL Server relational database, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, SSMS and SSDT.  At the end of the demonstration, you will be expected to participate in groups to promote one idea which builds on the demo, and everyone will be voting for their favorite groups.  Come ready to create and celebrate your peers.

Mark Tabladillo

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 2

Level: Advanced

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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In this session, we will look at the new BI query language for PowerPivot and Tabular - DAX. This session will give you an introduction to Data Analysis eXpressions (DAX) and will provide you the necessary understanding to start using in your environment for data analysis. No prior experience with DAX is needed to attend this session.

Damu Venkatesan

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 6

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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You have been given responsibility over an SSIS package.  One of the first things that you want to discover is where the data is coming from and what operations happen between the source and the target.  In this session you will learn some XQuery that you can use to trace the flow of data from different sources to SQL Server.  You will identify the Derived Column operations that alter the data from the source. You will see how to load XML from a file to query it.

Russel Loski

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 8

Level: Intermedia

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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This session provides an introduction to Reporting Services for report developers who have no prior experience with the product by explaining design elements of SQL Server 2014 Reporting Services such as tablixes, maps and charts to create dynamic reports. We will also discuss the differences of report design applications including SQL Server Data Tools (previously BIDS) and Report Builder and use each application to deploy reports that every user will love.

Josh Gerszewski

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 5

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Hive is the SQL like interface for Hadoop, aka Big Data. Hive was developed for two audiences, the newbie and, the hive developer. For the newbie almost any query will work in hive, eventually. The first part of the session will cover the differences between SQL and HQL so that anyone that has written a SQL query can start working with Hive. The second part of the session will cover the differences, at a high level, in how a traditional query engine works and how the Hive query engine works. We will discuss how the Hive query engine makes use of the distributed nature of Hadoop and what are considered best practices when writing Hive queries.

Kevin Goode

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 3

Level: Beginner

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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Indexes are like a turbocharger for your queries: they help the engine process queries faster. Without having the right index strategy, you will be stuck managing a SQL Server environment that end users may constantly complain is “too slow.” How do you avoid that situation by knowing which indexes to add or which ones to remove if they are not working—especially if you are not intimate with a particular application’s database? Knowing fundamentals such as baselining performance and proactively monitoring performance are crucial for long-term index maintenance. This session will give you those fundamentals and more to enable you to implement a solid index tuning strategy for your company’s applications.

Ben DeBow

Session Type:
Regular Session

Track:
Track 1

Level: Intermedia

Session Code:

Date: October 04

Time: 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM

Room: TBD

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