January 2009 - Posts

• Lost a Bet

  I lost a bet for reasons that bear never mentioning in a public forum. The consequence of losing that bet is that I must post this new banner ad that I was hoping would never see the light of day. You probably won’t see this in SQL Magazine or SQLServerCentral.com anytime soon :). <hanging my head in shame> </hanging my head in shame> Posted Jan 28 2009, 09:58 PM by Brian Knight with no comments Filed under: Pragmatically Speaking

• Pragmatically Speaking is Born

  Pragmatically Speaking is a fun way to look at technology for those that are overstressed in our field. We hired a team of highly trained apes with masters degrees in marketing to come up with some great marketing campaigns centered around SQL Server. After much dismay in the apes' progress, we decided to instead hire a team of highly trained developers and DBAs to design our marketing campaign and a team of apes to manage them. Such is the birth of many brilliant ideas. In our first series of cartoons, we show you the top 10 reasons to manually migrate your DTS packages to SSIS. Hopefully you take it for the humor that was meant as none of these will be politically correct (I love working for a small company)! We'll be posting a new one every few days. Watch for Easter eggs in each one :). Watch Pragmatically Speaking at http://www.pragmaticworks.com/page.asp?page_id=66. You won’t want to miss Reason #6 :).     Posted Jan 28 2009, 09:01 PM by Brian Knight with no comments

• School of Wrox: Week of Warehousing (free webinar series)

  Week of Warehousing Webinar Series Join SQL Server authors and MVPs for a week of warehousing and get the latest on Microsoft Business Intelligence inside your environment. If you are in any stage of a data warehouse design, administration or planning you won't want to miss out on this free "week of warehousing" webinar series, free from SQLServerCentral.com and in partnership with Wrox and Pragmatic Works. You may attend all five sessions if you wish or register for the sessions independently. Audio is provided either via a phone or over your computer speakers (voice over IP). In this week of warehousing, you'll learn how to design a data warehouse, load it using SSIS, place a cube on top of it using SSAS and report against it using SSRS. Finally, you'll see how to performance tune and scale the data warehouse using common techniques. All speakers have authored many of your favorite books from Wrox (some speakers will be announced next week). SQLServerCentral.com's last webinar series had nearly 15,000 registered so register quick for one the morning or afternoon session to claim your spot! Registration information and times can be found here: http://pragmaticworks.com/schoolofwrox Posted Jan 27 2009, 05:57 PM by Brian Knight with 1 comment(s)

• New MSDN and TechNet SSIS Sites

  Have you seen the new Integration Services 2008 portal page on MSDN (and Technet)? The new sites are way more comprehensive and aggregate SSIS content from throughout the Internet. It's worth a look and it's a great way to get content quickly. Posted Jan 08 2009, 09:53 PM by Brian Knight with 2 comment(s) Filed under: SSIS