We’ve had some major issues with our blog software and we’ve made the cut over to a new system. You can now catch me at http://blogs.pragmaticworks.com/Brian_Knight. My RSS feed has been moved to http://blogs.pragmaticworks.com/brian_knight/atom.xml. All the old posts have now been copied over to the new location and this will be one of my last posts on this system.

When you have a moment, please move your RSS readers to the links above. Thanks!

Again we’ve learned that combining alcohol and SSIS training videos is a very bad combination. We’ve now launch a new series of fun videos that teach you SSIS in a very interesting way. Let us know what you think as we’re not sure we hit the mark with them :)

Moron’s Guide to SSIS: Episode 1 – Introduction to the Environment : www.youtube.com/pragmaticworks.

We’re looking for a number of product suggestions where you’d like to see our product grow into. Once your suggestion is made, it goes into the list to be voted on by the user community. If you’re one of the first 5 ideas to be accepted and we begin work on it, you will win a copy of my latest SSIS book: “Knight’s 24 Hour Trainer: SQL Server Integration Services”, which is a video based lesson book. The book will be released in early July.

To add your product idea, please go to: http://pragmaticworks.uservoice.com. To be eligble to win the contest, make sure you sign in to the comment system prior to suggesting the idea so we know who to to mail the prize to!

Thanks,

Brian Knight

Last night, I upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows Vista on my Dell Latitude D830. It was probably the easiest installation I’ve ever made. It asked me the license number and then a few hours later, it was upgraded. That said, the wizard did reject me a few times from upgraded for a few reasons.

The first reason was drive space. I have a solid state drive (SSD), which is only 64 GB. Because of this, I’m in a constant struggle to conserve space. I only started the upgrade with 7GB and it required 12GB. After removing many old programs and cleaning up those pesky family photos that take up so much space, I was able to squeak by with just at 12GB. The wizard got by the first check but then failed because I had Windows Live One Care installed. I really enjoyed this tool but I had already put my head down to do this so I exited and then removed that application as well. Why Microsoft couldn’t upgrade until that was removed was beyond me.

Finally, after addressing those two things, I was off to the races. Well not so fast. The race was more like a race of a snail and a slug. The upgrade took easily 2 hours. I got so bored watching it that I eventually went to bed. Once I woke up, my computer had gone to bed as well and was in hibernation. After turning the laptop on again, it was off to the slow race again. Another 30 minutes passed and the upgrade was complete.

While I only have been upgraded for a few hours, I have been digging into the features and have only a few initial reactions. The rumors about the Windows 7 speed are well founded. It is easily 50% faster on my laptop for boot up and just regular operations. One of my favorite new features is the lack of features! It’s a paired down operating system that’s not heavily loaded with burdensome features that no one uses. One thing that I really enjoyed was I started with 12 GB and now I came out of the upgrade with 19GB! My SSD thanks you for that one and it really feels like an SSD. How the system tabs applications is quite neat. For example, if I have 4 windows of Internet Explorer open, I can hover over the Internet Explorer icon in the system bar and then pick which one I want.

The last thing I was worried about was application compatibility. No problems here at all. The only one was Windows One Care that had to be removed. All other critical applications work great. The laptop I actually installed this on is my production PC and it already feels more stable than my previous Vista installation (pretty remarkable seeing that it’s only a Release Candidate). That said, I would highly recommend the installation even for a more heavily used primary machine. Note that you will have to do a reinstall once the final release comes out so an install now will only be 3 months prior to repeating the installation.

Jacksonville, Fla.—  Today, Pragmatic Works Software™, www.pragmaticworks.com provider of business intelligence solutions that complement Microsoft SQL Server announced today they have opened a new office in Haverhill, Massachusetts, as part of a strategic effort to expend its Sales and Marketing operations. Due to steady growth over the last two years, the new office will support its growing customer base in North America.  The company is recruiting for telesales and sales positions at the Haverhill location.

Tim Moolic, Principal, Sales and Marketing at Pragmatic Works , said "Pragmatic Works Software is fortunate to see growth while most companies are downsizing.  With the Haverhill expansion, we can double our existing sales team and continue to grow as needed.  We chose the Haverhill area because it lowers cost for our employees with train service, no tolls, and free parking.  Additionally, our business benefits,  with Haverhill’s  large pool of well educated talent and the lowest operational cost we could find in the area.”

About PragmaticWorks:
Pragmatic Works Software a Microsoft Gold Partner is a privately held company with offices in Jacksonville, Florida and Haverhill, Massachusetts providing business intelligence solutions that complement the Microsoft SQL Server platform.  For more information or free trial go to www.pragmaticworks.com

BI xPress has now released tonight, which gives you all the benefits of a mature auditing, notification and SOX framework for your SSIS packages without having to code! This is a framework we’ve been working on more than a year and have implemented it at hundreds of clients in the proving of it. From BIDS, you can right-click on any package and add a framework for notifying you of a failure or giving you robust reports that show errors, warnings, and the amount of rows that transformed. You can also use BI xPress to deploy your packages easily no matter where you wish to deploy them to or if you want to change the config file path.

Download BI xPress.

Wait to you see what we’re going to do next with BI xPress over the next few months. You’ll soon see SSAS, SSRS features and much, much more SSIS code reusability components.

I received a shipment of Thrive Cards to giveaway for SQL Saturday. A Thrive Card is a generous Microsoft card that gives you either a free certification test or a subscription to TechNet Direct for 1 year (includes pretty much all the software that Microsoft makes for business). What I didn’t realize was that they expire on 4/30 and SQL Saturday in Jacksonville is on 5/2, making my dozen Thrive Cards not very useful. I gave away most of these at two recent user groups but I still have a good number to give away.

In thinking of an interesting way to give these away, I thought I’d give them away virtually to people that have keen eyes. Follow me on Twitter to find out how you can win one of my remaining Thrive Cards and I’ll throw some other goodies in there as well: http://twitter.com/brianknight. I’ll make the first tweet about these on Tuesday and I’ll have to give away all my remaining cards by 4/30.

-- Brian Knight

I’m excited the announce that the schedule for SQL Saturday #15 in Jacksonville has now been posted here. Thanks to all the great speakers who have volunteered their time to come to Jacksonville. You can register for SQL Saturday for free by going to the SQL Saturday event page.

Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 has now officially released and can be downloaded here.  This is primarily a roll-up of previous cumulative updates, quick fix engineering updates and minor fixes made in response to requests reported from the SQL Server community. There is however no new features so there’s not a lot to really report. There are however some rather large issues in Analysis Services and Integration Services that I’ve personally experienced that are fixed in this release so it makes me especially excited about this one. I’ve been running it for the past week on a number of servers with no issues.

Brian Knight

The final reason to manually migrate DTS packages to SSIS. You can see the entire series by Dustin Ryan at Pragmatically Speaking.

:) Another cartoon in our series by Dustin Ryan at Pragmatically Speaking.

One of my favorite presentation tool is Zoomit 3.03. It allows for a presenter to zoom in to a section of the screen and draw on it as he or she is presenting. It also allows you to type on the screen. The newest release 3.0.3 was released today and it has a cool feature, which allows a presenter to mark a break with a countdown clock.

If you’ve ever done a web meeting at all, this is a must have tool that happens to be free!

Download it here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb897434.aspx

The Pragmatic Works Foundation has now officially launched and our first class started today. In our first class we tried to start with a tight, smaller class. For each of the five passionate students in the class, there were 3 students who couldn’t make it in this class but were equally fantastic. In this post, you can find and follow each of the candidates through their journey.

About the Foundation

The Pragmatic Works Foundation is a non-profit foundation that was created to find passionate people who are interested in joining the technology field but cannot make the financial investments needed for training and hardware. Working with our job placement partners our goal is to place all candidates who complete training with a new career in technology. Each of our apprentices go through a intense program to ramp them up in a given technology that involves weeks of deep training and mentoring for a very focused job.

http://www.pragmaticworks.com/page1.asp?page_id=7

About the Apprentices

Each of the apprentices are passionate about joining the technical field. They have worked hard to get into the foundation program and after going through the program, are excited to get their foot in the door. Priority was given to military veterans and the jobless. Click on their names to follow their blog as they go through the program.

Cash Carter

Cash is a Navy veteran where he acted as a linguist. After his honorable discharge, he is focused on transitioning his skills into a civilian world to support his daughter.

Yanming Yang

Yanming has one of our strongest IT backgrounds we’ve seen but is new to SQL Server. He holds a degree in Computer Science but recently lost his job when the downturn in the economy affected the county IT budget.

Amity Hodges

Amity holds a double-major from UNF (marketing and logistics). She recently worked as a purchasing manager in the construction industry prior to its downturn.

Diane Cook

Diane has one of our most diverse and vast experience. She’s spent years as a trainer, consultant and project manager.

Joshua Fruen

Joshua came to us from the Wounded Warrior Project. He was an Iraq veteran who handled logistics prior to being injured. After returning, he’s been trying to support his family but was recently laid off of his job in Jacksonville. He’s focused at night on a college technical program and is an amazing hard worker.

:) Another cartoon in our series by Dustin Ryan at Pragmatically Speaking.

I’m excited to announce that over the past few months Mike Davis, Devin Knight and I have been writing a very different type of SSIS book. In this book, we focus on teaching you just what you need to know to do your job in SSIS. Our newest book Knight’s 24 Hour Trainer, is one part how-to video series and one part tutorial book. Each lesson contains an explanation of the task, transform or topic and then has a step-by-step tutorial on how to use the product. Then, if you learn better by watching, you can also play the DVD to watch us show you the topic instead.

We just finished up the last lesson this week and are now in final edits but the book is available for pre-sales on Amazon here: Knight's 24-Hour Trainer