I attended the inaugural Triad SQL BI PASS User Group last week hosted by Inmar in Winston-Salem NC. DataMasters provided the pizza before the meeting and Wayne Snyder [twitter] from Mariner USA was the guest speaker that talked about the top 10 reasons to upgrade to SQL Server Denali. Melissa Wittner [triadsqlbi@gmail.com] is the Chapter Leader for the new group and did a wonderful job getting the group start and the meeting organized. You can visit the chapter’s website here.
Future meetings:
- October 23rd Performance Point
- November 29th Dashboards
- December 8th Social @ Foothills Brewing Company
Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade List:
- SSIS Enhancements
- Master Data Services Enhancements
- Data Quality Services
- Column Indexes
- SSRS w/ SharePoint
- SSRS Data Alerts
- PowerPivot Enhancements
- DAX (Data Analysis Expression) Language
- SSAS Tabular Model
- Project Crescent
Wayne spent the next hour doing a deep dive demo for some of the items in the top 10 list. Wayne has spent the last 9-12 months working in Denali and it shows. He was able to show the group all aspects of SSIS, column store indexes, and PowerPivot. This has energized my interest in Denali and trying a few of these new features in my lab. I’m looking forward to attending this user group on a regular basis.