10th September, 2009
User Group Meeting: SQL Server 2008 Update and BI Overview.
** Presentations are now available in the Member Area --> Repository.
Agenda:
6.00 p.m. Introduction, current news, events etc.
6.15 p.m. What's SQL Server 2008 Got for You? (Simon Sabin, SQL Server MVP)
7.30 p.m. Refreshment and networking break
8.00 p.m. What's new in SQL Server 2008 for BI (Ashwani Roy, MCTS MCITP MCAD MCP)
9.00 p.m. Close
Presentation Details:
What's SQL Server 2008 Got for You?
Presented by Simon Sabin, SQL Server MVP
Do you want sexy? of do you want the stuff that makes the Financial Director happy.
There are 3 classes of features in SQL 2008. Those that apply to all and you get for free, like the tools, query enhancements, those that you have to do some work to implement but you don't need to change your app, like partition improvements, compression and then there are the features that allow you to do a whole new world of things, like spatial querying.
In this talk we will cover some of the killer features in SQL 2008 that would make your financial director want to implement SQL 2008 and then we will cover some of the new features that allow you to add a whole new world of functionality to your application.
We will cover compression, paritioning, high availability, language changes, spatial data and hierarchical data.
What's new in SQL Server 2008 for BI
Presented by Ashwani Roy, MCTS MCITP MCAD MCP
SSAS 2008 has improved Dimension and Aggregation Designer, new Attribute Relationship Designer, Optimize performance with block computations mode and dynamic management views for enhanced resource monitoring.SSRS 2008 reports has the unique data format of Tablix which allows writing reports with combined advantage of Table and Matrix formats. It can integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for central delivery and management of business insight. It also enables users to quickly gain insight into complex sets of data by displaying data graphically with enhanced visualization capabilities. Performance has improved drastically for situations where you are generating large reports.
SSIS Pipeline is optimized to enable more parallel loading of data. You can write script components in C# now. It comes with improved scalability with thread pooling and enhanced lookup transformations. It also performs more functional and scalable data transfers with the improved SQL Server Import and Export Wizard.
Other engine features that you need to be aware of are, improvements to partitioning, change data capture to enable easy extraction of changed data from a production system, backup and table compression which enables better performance and less storage space utilisation. It also comes with optimized Star-Join, improved lock escalation handling, Merge statements and other advanced T SQL enhancements.
We are looking for fellow members within this community to suggest topics and make it successful, so if you’re interested please send us an email: mhowden@nyx.com or mark.eastwood@bankofamerica.com