I am excited about being selected to speak and attend the May 3rd SQLSaturday BA Edition in Dallas, TX. There are a number of sessions I want to attend including Eric Mezell’s An Introduction to Hadoop, Andy Egger’s Applied Predictive Analytics, David Browne on Enterprise Business Intelligence (for lunch) and Garrett Edmonson – Measuring Data Warehouse Performance. The full schedule is here - http://www.sqlsaturday.com/305/schedule.aspx.

I hope to create some time to visit with old friends in the Dallas area like Brian Smith (MS) and Tim Costello. I hope this is a precursor for Dallas to host a PASS Business Analytics week long conference in the future. California was a little to far to travel this year even though I should have went.

I am presenting one of my first BI presentations I have ever given – Dimensional Modeling 101. When I move over to Business Intelligence, I had a strong background in Data Normalization. Transitioning to a Dimension Model was quite difficult and I wish I had someone to explain like Warren Thornthwaite did at a pass PASS Summit before I started. He did a great job using PASS registration data to great a simple Data Mart and Analysis Services cube while previewing in Excel. That hooked me.

Thanks to all the sponsors for helping make this a free event for all attendees.