The most important one is my switch to a new employer. After almost 3 years being happily employed at Ordina Belgium, I’ll move to element61 in November. element61 is a Performance Management and Business Intelligence consultancy firm. From their website: “element61 is the thought-leading Business Analytics, Performance Management and Financial Reporting consulting company in the Belgian marketplace. Today, element61 has brought together the most experienced team in Performance Management, BI & data warehousing in Belgium. The company has grown in 6 years to about 36 senior consultants with -on average- 12 years of experience in PM & BI, totaling over 425 man years of experience”.

element61 encourages its employees to write articles – called Insights – for their website. There are really interesting pieces about various aspects of BI and PM, and they are not restricted to a single vendor. There are insights about SQL Server, but also about SAP, Cognos, Business Objects or about general topics such as data quality. You can find an overview here. I’ll probably write some insights too in the future and I’ll let you know when one is published.

The main reason for my move is the extremely talented and experienced team of element61. I’ll definitely learn a lot from them in my time there and I look forward to joining the team.

The second change is that I have started writing technical articles for two websites. The technical content is still SQL Server of course, focused on business intelligence and Integration Services in particular. The first site is the resource page of Intense School. Intense School is a training provider, offering accelerated IT trainings (classroom, on-site and on-line) from different vendors, such as Cisco, Microsoft, Red Hat and so on. They were looking to expand their resource page on SQL Server, and that’s where I came into the picture. I have already written two articles for their site. The first is a two-part piece on how to implement slowly changing dimensions in SSIS, exploring the various possibilities and alternatives: part I and part II. The second article is a collection of tips for starting SSIS developers: 5 tips to make you a pro SSIS developer. For more information about the services offered by Intense School, you can visit their website.