Call for sponsors

We at IntelliCape are currently looking for sponsors.
Below is the current state of play.

Progress made 

We have begun the registration process to become and official PASS chapter. All that remains is for us to hold a meeting and provide proof thereof to PASS

We have also opened a meeting place. Which can be found here.
Please go and register.

The things we are lacking

• A venue or two. 
• Give-aways in the form of books,software,training,cube goodies etc
• Potential attendees and or speakers.

If you or your company can assist it would be a great help.

Some things to keep in mind.

The group is technology agnostic but does have Microsoft leaning.
It is important to be clear that these events will be PASS events and as such not a way to showcase a specific company but rather a way to grow awareness within the community.
any sponsor that comes on board would be acknowledged and afforded the following.

• A space to display a banner at all UG events identifying said company as a sponsor.
• A logo on all official UG newsletters or outgoing mail.
• A logo placed on the IntelliCape website identifying said company  as a sponsor.
• Should an employee of said company present a session they may identify themselves as such and promote their work as a solution developed by their company.

If you are interested please drop me an email matt@zenmedia.co.za

SQLSaturday Johannesburg

SQLSaturday  Johannesburg

Just a quick post to say THANKS to everyone who attended my "I wish I knew hat yesterday!" session as SQLSAT244

The scripts can be found here.
The Slide deck is here.

Please drop me a line if you have any questions about the presentation.

Introduction to PowerBI

Deeper insights through Power BI

Written by Geoff Smith for Aphelion Software

Microsoft’s hottest new business intelligence (BI) solution Power BI is the latest and greatest self-service BI offering from the software giant, delivered through Excel and Office 365. It opens up new data analysis and visualisation capabilities allowing business users to discover deeper insights from their local data as well as cloud data – all of this is made available from within the familiar tool that they already use, Excel.

A brief touch on the existing Power Pivot and Power View tools before we get into the magic of Power BI. Power Pivot is an add-in that extends on Excel’s built-in pivot table capabilities by allowing the user to import data from multiple sources and enabling the processing of much larger data quantities thanks to the VertiPaq engine.

 No specialised BI Skills

The intention here is to allow users with no specialised BI skills to develop effective data models and calculations. Couple to that, Power View is an interactive data visualisation tool also provided as an Excel add-in or as a feature of SharePoint. Power View gives users the muscle to explore their data intuitively and create meaningful visualisations, further emphasising the idea and power of self-service BI.Toolkit

Keeping these two tremendously useful tools in mind, I want to bring your attention to the new kid on the block and potentially one of the biggest game changers in self-service BI history: Power BI. Announced on 8 July 2013, Power BI is a cloud-based BI solution that falls part of Office 365. It comprises of the aforementioned Power Pivot and Power View, and introduces Power Query and Power Map which I will expand on shortly. 

I believe that this little toolkit will prove to be an invaluable companion to business users, providing them with completely new insights into their data and enabling them to make better decisions based on these. 

Power Query

Power Query (formerly Data Explorer) is in the simplest of terms, a data search tool. It enables the user to search for data and returns relevant data sets from local data sources as well as any other data source publically available online. The various new sources accessible by Power Query include OData feeds, Hadoop distributed file systems and even Facebook. 
After retrieving a set of data, Power Query is also able to apply different filtering and shaping functions in order to clean the data, merge datasets, or apply transformations such as from formatted text to JSON.

Power Map

Power Map (formerly Geoflow) is a 3D visualisation tool specifically for use with geographic and chronological data. The user has the ability to plot data across a three-dimensional globe within Excel. By including the time dimension, temporal changes in data can be animated over a period creating a dynamic and insightful presentation for the user. The map is also interactive, similar to Bing maps, putting the user in the driver seat and making exploring the data feel natural. The user can choose the metrics that they want to see and even zero in on points of interest for more detail.
Familiar

From the tools I’ve just mentioned, it’s easy to see how Power BI will allow business users to leverage the data around them in a way that is familiar. In addition to this, the integration with Office 365 offers a complete collaborative experience. Users can establish Power BI sites that allow for sharing of new insights with colleagues. Everything is connected, data is kept up to date, and reports are viewable across mobile devices.

If you want to get your hands dirty, visit the Power BI website and download the add-ins for Excel now! I will be spending some time getting familiar with the tools, so look out for my next article where I’ll walk through my experiences with the Power BI.

SQLCape presentation on Management Data Warehouse

SQLCape is the Cape Town SQL server user group held on the 2nd Tuesday of every month.
I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at their last event.

I presented a talk on the Management Data Warehouse (MDW).
The talk covered setting up the MDW as well as how to extend its functionality to allow for custom data collection.

Many DBA's do not know about this great free tool or have fallen foul of a few GOTCHA's which render it cumbersome.The presentation also covered some of these.

The slide deck can be viewed on SlideShare  and the White Paper can be found here

Thanks to everyone who came to hear this talk.

SQLSaturday Cape Town

SQLSaturday Cape Town schedule announced

The SQLSaturday Cape Town schedule has been published.

We are privileged enough to have the opportunity to see sessions by legends in the field such as Christina E Leo and Niko Neugebauer

Among the heavy hitters in the line up are Aphelion software's Mark Stacey, Jody Roberts and in a surprise move by the selection committee, Yours Truly!.

Bigger and better

This year the organisers have opted for three tracks to entice even the most reluctant of conference goers,

These being BI, DBA and SQL DEV with each having a niche focus and promising to broaden the knowledge and understanding of all who attend.

Why you should come

There are many reasons why you should attend this event. the most important one being that it shows support for the community that supports you. other  less important reasons (IMHO) are :

It's FREE!
Awesome presenters
Opportunity to network
They feed you!
Did I mention ITS FREE!!


Spoil yourself on the 7th of September with this fantastic opportunity to learn from the best and be a part of the community.

Business intelligence in the Cape

My name is Matt Horn. I am (was) the co-lead of BIDN in Johannesburg. I've been in the Cape a little over 3 weeks and I am itching. Itching to start a community as vibrant and friendly as the people I have encountered here so far. To this end I am attempting to put together a Business Intelligence User Group with the dual purposes of knowledge sharing and networking.

Why attend a User Group

In the past I've been asked why it's a good idea to attend User Groups and the obvious answer is free beer!

(mostly).

In an attempt to answer the question in a more mature manner I read Niche Software's blog post on the topic. What follows is a summary 

• Cheap Training

  In the current economic climate many companies are hard pressed to find budget for training.
  User Group meetings are generally free and likely to give you a good grounding on relevant topics.
  
  Other attendees may have encountered similar issues to the ones you are facing and may be able to offer insight into solutions. Most leaders would be delighted to receive a request for a specific topic as there are often local experts willing to speak if asked.

• Networking

  It is always a good idea to meet other people working with the same technology stack. different viewpoint can be valuable. Such discussions can give you a fresh perspective, new ideas and increased motivation. 

• Community

  We all owe a debt to others in our industry and what better way to pay that debt than to give back to the community as a whole. help make better developers better DBA's and a better standard of work that gets delivered by all of us?

These are but a few reasons to attend and to get involved in user groups  for your Technology stack.