Well, this fall has been crazy. As you may have noted from a couple of my previous posts, link to speaking and pass attack, I have been busy this fall. With multiple speaking engagements and additional travel for work, I have been on the road more than I have been home. Rather than handling each event independently, I will give some synopsis here.

SQL Saturday #235 – New York City 2013

This was my first trip to New York City which is kind of ironic since I was born in Avoca, New York and lived there for five years. I spoke on Building BI Solutions with Excel 2013. During the presentation, we had an energetic conversation about pushing more of the BI work to business users. My take is that those users know how to interpret the data better than the technology staff. Ironically, they are doing it already thanks to the prolific “Export to Excel” functionality available in most BI tools. The event was a lot of fun to participate in.

SQL Saturday #238 – Minnesota 2013

This was the first SQL Saturday in Minnesota that I did not have a lot of other responsibilities beyond speaking. I felt a little guilty, so I brought my sixteen year old son, Alex, and he volunteered in my place. Turns out he did awesome and had a great time as well. I spoke in back to back sessions to open up the day. The first session, Beyond Power Pivot – Building Tabular Model Solutions, covered the development of tabular model databases using SQL Server Data Tools and the “enterprise“ features only available in Analysis Services. The next session was “Power to the User: a Look at Power BI”. This session was a lot of fun and is a whirlwind demo of the Power BI features in Excel 2013. This was a huge event with around 400 attendees and 8 tracks. Kudos to the organizing committee for a job well done.

PASS Summit 2013

Summit this year was a good event. Due to a myriad of work related crisis, I was unable to enjoy the conference as much as I had hoped. We discussed the role of the user groups in SQL Saturdays during an organizer’s meeting. I hope that we begin to see the control of these events go back to user groups rather than treated as unrelated to user groups. As the event progressed, I was able to attend a few sessions. I am still asking for the single button install of SharePoint BI, but for now I will live with the 80 page install doc. One thing I like was having the vent in a warm location. That was definitely more enjoyable than a cold, damp Seattle fall. I still look forward to the next Summit and hope to see many of you there next year.

SQL Saturday #237 – Charlotte BI Edition 2013

Immediately following Summit was this SQL Saturday. There were a lot of big time speakers that came from the Summit and they still let me talk. This session was on using Power Pivot and Power Query to test ETL processes built with SSIS. The best part was when my computer died during the demo. When I got it restarted, an error message came up on SSIS and a number of people in the room gasped. We all knew that I would not be able to fix that right away, some moved on with half of the demo working. It all turned out okay as I had screenshots in the deck to show the changes. Overall, it was a good event and gave me a chance to see some peers one more time.

CodeMastery – Atlanta

This was the first of two CodeMastery events within a week of each other. This was a lot of fun for me as I was the keynote speaker and had the opportunity to speak about the Changing World of Business Intelligence. Having been trained as a preacher, this was the closest to that type of speaking I have done in some time. We had a good, interactive audience for this event. I also presented on Power BI at this event, once again introducing a lot of people to what Microsoft is doing with BI these days.

CodeMastery – Minneapolis

Back home in Minneapolis, I participated in this CodeMastery as a speaker as well. At this event, I once again discussed the power of Power BI and Microsoft’s strategy. We had about 80 at this midweek event which was great.

Live 360 – Orlando

At Live! 360, I had the opportunity to speak at two of the 360 events – Modern Apps Live! and SQL Server Live! This event was a lot of fun to participate in. I had the opportunity to speak five times between the two events. The part that made all of this interesting was losing my harddrive that weekend. I had to rebuild demos and recover presentations all week long. Through it all I was able to get all but one presentation’s demo up and running. Funny thing though, I tweaked the demo, and it worked partly during the presentation. Nice job by 1105 to put this together. I look forward to being at the Vegas event in March.

CodeMastery – Boston

This event was also supposed to have happened by now, however, it was rescheduled to next week. If you are in the Boston area at the time, register for the event and join us for some free training. Hopefully, I will see you there.

As I wrap up this post, I have to say a big “Thank You” to my family who has had to put up with a lot of travel over the past few weeks. Without their love and support this would have been a really rough time.

Turkey Image Source: http://bit.ly/1bBFIF4