Of the many emerging technologies I’m currently using, there’s nothing that excites me more than Biml.  If you’re not familiar with it, Biml (short for Business Intelligence Markup Language) is a language that allows business intelligence developers to programmatically create and document SSIS packages.  I’ve found this to be incredibly useful in environments that have a large number of packages, multiple steps of staging of data, or frequent changes to the ETL pipeline.  Biml helps to eliminate through automation much of the mundane work of package creation and maintenance.

If you are interested in learning more about Biml, I’d like to invite you to join Andy Leonard, Scott Currie, and me on Tuesday, October 15th in Charlotte, NC for a full day workshop to discuss the awesomeness that is Biml.  Scott is the CEO at Varigence, the company that developed Biml, and Andy was an early adopter and pioneer of Biml.  In this workshop, we’ll review the Biml syntax and basic usage, as well as demonstrate some Biml design patterns we’ve picked up along the way.

The cost for the workshop is $69, which includes breakfast, lunch, and snacks.  For the next 2 days (until tomorrow at midnight EDT), you can still get early bird pricing of $49.

So if you’re in town for the SQL PASS Summit and aren’t planning on attending a Tuesday precon, I’d encourage you to consider joining us for this workshop.  We hope to see you there!