From the tweets, it looks like there will be about 800 attendees sitting in on 11 different tracks with 5 or 6 sessions on each track. This will be the largest SQLSaturday event I have been a part of. It will be my first time at a SQLSaturday event in Atlanta. There are also 5 different pre-conference sessions today (Friday) from some great speakers – Bill Pearson, Denny Cherry, Stacia Misner, Eddie Wuerch and Adam Machanic.

I get to present 2 different sessions. DW ETL with SSIS 2012 was a session I did at the PASS Summit last year and Attributes and Hierarchies is a new session I presented to the local Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group a month ago.

Using SSIS 2012 for ETL in a Data Warehouse

This session will go through some old and new features of Integration Service 2012 to help with loading data into a Data Warehouse/Mart. The GUI has been improved visually during design and execution. The storage of packages has been update with Integration Service Catalogs. The Change Data Capture task helps with incremental updates. Logging has been improved for debugging. A demonstration of creating your own Slowly Changing Dimension with current Tasks will be shown with some design hints.

Attributes & Hierarchies in Analysis Services 2012

The session explains Attributes and Hierarchies in Analysis Services 2012 Semantic Model. They are used to slice (filter) and dice (group) measures and dimensions used to view analytical data. The slicing and dicing of data involves fields, columns, or whatever you want to labeled them. But, in SQL Server Semantic model these are called Attributes and Hierarchies. The configuration of these slicers and dicers are important in SQL Server Analysis Services. This session will demonstrate the difference between an attribute and columns in a hierarchy in the dimension as well as the configuration of these for best performance and viewing.

Hope to see ya’ll all there if you are local to the area.