Dec 8th, 2009 ITA BI Roundtable Presentation

On Dec 8th, I was fortunate to present an overview of SQL Server 2008 Integration Services to the Illinois Technology Association's Business Intelligence Roundtable. The actively-involved participants had many questions. Here are links to all of the prerequisite, supplemental, and follow-on resources we discussed:

Dimension Design (aka Star Schema) Methodology:

• The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (Second Edition), Kimball/Ross - This is the book that describes many of the best techniques to model "star" or "snowflake" schemas. As I mentioned, this book should be on any BI practitioner's bookshelf, regardless of platform.
• The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset - This book contains a some of the content of the above book, but focuses on the specific implementation with Microsoft tools. It also describes techniques to handle many of the BI-related issues we discussed such as
  
  
  
  • logging
  • restarting long running processes
  • bookmarking
  • configurations
  • late arriving dimensions
  • lineage/auditing
  
  
  
  

Code Examples:


While these examples are in SSIS 2005, they can be easily ported to SQL 2008. Most of the main techniques employed are still valid in SSIS 2008.

• Project REAL: Technical Overview
• Project REAL Reference Implementation
• The white paper dealing with ETL practices specifically is here

Development Utilities:

• Please see this blog entry

The Presentation:

• There were only a few slides since I wanted to focus primarily on demonstrations, but you can find the PDF linked here:

If you attended and I missed posting something, please add a blog comment or email me via the contact information in the PDF.

Tom

Creating great courseware

I was recently surveyed by Microsoft about the Microsoft Learning: Microsoft Certified Trainer program. One of the questions was about the Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC). I've been using MOC in one form or another for about 15 years. Although I was only answering a question in the moment, I grabbed my comment about how to create courseware into a text file, and it seemed worth keeping. Rather than keep it in a text file, I'll "keep it" on my blog. My comment was: 

Creating great courseware is hard work, but not impossible: 1) Decide on learning objectives 2) Vet learning objectives with MCT's and experienced practitioners 3) CREATE LAB EXERCISES FIRST 4) Test lab exercises 5) Test them again 6) With lab exercises complete and FROZEN, composed supporting slides and course materials

I actually started writing courseware a few years before my first exposure to MOC. The method described above was how we did it. It makes sense because you want the practical exercises to support the learning objective and these are the hardest to get correct. Isn't it irritating when you are learning a new technology and the lab exercises don't work as designed?


I have noticed that there seem to be more problems with MOC courseware lately, especially with how labs work. I wonder if they follow the above methodology.


Don't get me wrong - the MOC courseware is not terrible - I still think there are a lot of good things to be learned and valuable experiences to be had in the courses I teach. But it seems to me that the overall quality used to be higher, and I'd really like to see the quality of the MOC improve. 


BTW, I don't teach every single MOC course. The above comments apply to course: 2778, 2779, 2780, 2784, 2790, 2791, 2792, 2793, 6158, 6231, 6232, 6234, 6235, 6236, 6317 and maybe a few others.