Over the holidays and through the first week of this year, I took a journey back home to Michigan. Why did I drive you ask? Well, I wanted to take my Cockatoo Anakin with me. Sometime along the trip he decided that migrating was for the birds. We survived, but he was thrilled after we returned home.
Master O, Lady Gaga, and Myself
Anyway, on the way up, I stopped by Chicago and had lunch with Brent Ozar (Blog/Twitter). I hung out with him most of the afternoon, we discussed all things SQL Server, and he was kind enough to take the picture celebrating my iPad “Win.”
Once again, thank you Red Gate Software. I’m geeked to try SQL Monitor this week.
After I got settled in Grand Rapids, I visited with friends and family. Before traveling to the east side of Michigan I contacted Tim Ford (Blog/Twitter) and he was kind enough to have dinner with me as well. He’s a great guy that I wish I had met before I left Michigan. He and I discussed the economic climate for West Michigan, SQL Server, Community participation, and other stuff. His family seemed very taken with Anakin. In fact, when Tim and I returned from dinner, his rather large cat was staring longingly at the bird through a glass door.
Anyway, I spent time with family near the Detroit area and then spent 4 days teaching SQL Administration and SQL Server Reporting Services to a few Made2Manage companies. I won’t mention them by name because I haven’t asked permission, but I had a great time with them and learned several things in the process. What did I learn? Well, I’m glad you asked.
First, I hate to sound like a broken record, but I really love teaching. I am really in my element in that role and intend to spend more time doing it.
Second, while teaching the class and referring to my blog during it, I found errors in some of my T-SQL example code. That shouldn’t be a surprise to me since I’ve come so far in the past several years. What did surprise me is that people must not be running my code or they would have reported problems with it.
So, why aren’t you running my code? I asked several readers and got a variety of answers, most of which point to my next realization.
Made2Manage people really need SQL training, especially in writing T-SQL code. Two of the people I asked about my code samples admitted that they didn’t know where to paste the code in the first place simply to run it. I intend to focus on these basics quite a bit in the coming weeks. In my opinion, you cannot effectively use SSRS and other reporting tools if you cannot write basic free hand T-SQL code.
So, in tomorrow’s installment I’ll start at the very beginning and tell you where to paste and run the code.
Santa was geeked to take the pic, but Anakin wasn't convinced.
Since the holidays are fast approaching, along with the end of the year, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the previous year, discuss some small miracles that have happened recently, and share my New Year’s Resolutions.
My Girlfriend Missy and I at ICE Gaylord Texan
Christmas Miracles?
There have been several small miracles around me lately.
Missy has recovered from a devastating injury and illness. Without going into details, this was one of the reasons why I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like. She’s officially cured.
An unexpected Day Off. I was waaaay behind in my Christmas Shopping and on Friday our building broke a water main. Since that means the bathrooms stopped working, we were “forced” to take the day off. Not really a “miracle” but it saved my butt.
I’m teaching again. I’ll be back home in Michigan during the holidays through the first week of January. The reason I’m extending the visit is that I will be teaching three days of SQL Server and Reporting Services classes for several companies in the frozen tundra. I am so grateful that I re-discovered my love of teaching.
SQL University. In February, I’ll be teaching a week of Data Warehouse Modeling for The SQL University. I’m honored to be asked and really looking forward to contributing to that cause.
The SQL Community. Joining and participating in the SQL Community with blogging, presenting, and networking with people has been a miracle for me, both personally and professionally. While I thanked Brent and RedGate about the iPad the truth is that every one of you deserves the credit for my “win” as well. If I wasn’t involved, I wouldn’t have won that, starting teaching again, or received the multitude of other blessings that have come my way.
Happy Festivus – The Airing of Grievances
Enough of the mushy stuff, it’s time to gather around and air our grievances Festivus style. Unlike traditional the typical Airing of Grievances my grievances are all with me.
Will You Forgive Me?
I’m frustrated with myself because I’ve neglected my blogging. Partially that’s because of my personal life (mentioned above), but also because of the M-Data Analyitics and other projects I’m working on. Rest assured, I’m committed to blogging and this lapse will be rectified.
New Year’s Resolutions
Blog regularly and become better at it. I’m on the verge of posting numerous blog articles on Microsoft Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, etc and will hit the ground running in January.
Release M-Data Analytics to beta by the end of first quarter 2011. We’re currently re-working the ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) using a sophisticated SSIS Framework with built in logging. It’s not enough to get it done, I want it done right which is why this is taking so long.
Work on my presentation skills. I want to be a world class technical presenter.
Start posting instructional videos in SQL Server Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. I promise to get that set up and you’ll begin seeing videos in 2011.
Happy ChristmaHanuKwanzaakah everyone! I look forward to “seeing” you in the New Year!
This year I made a concerted effort to get involved in the community in a big way and that has benefited me in several ways. I’ve made tons of new friends and found great people who are willing to share their knowledge with me and others. To recognize others for what they do in the community, I joined other bloggers in the Twelve Days of SQL in which we spotlight people producing great content. Anyway, I was given day three so Good Day and Welcome to Day Three. Obviously, I”ve chosen to spotlight Todd McDermid.
Why Todd McDermid?
Umm.. because he’s awesome. I recently “found” Todd McDermid (blog|twitter). He is a SQL Server MVP and excellent resource for SSIS and Data Warehouse information. In fact, he created a free, performant SSIS Slowly Changing Dimension Component which simplifies Data Warehouse loading. How many people would go to all that trouble to solve a problem many of us have and then simply give it away?
I could have picked any number of his blog posts. The one I settled on was Parallelism in SSIS Multiple Lookups. The post is extremely informative, well written, and very thorough. One thing in particular I like is that Todd explains the concepts using real world examples, in this case an automobile assembly line, which makes it much easier to understand.
It’s obvious that he puts a great deal of time into his blog posts, and I just want to thank Todd for his efforts.
Great, who’s day four?
Well, you’re in for a treat folks, because tomorrow the great Andy Leonard has day four. Andy is an amazing presenter, blogger, and mentor with SSIS and you should follow him as religiously as I do. Tune in tomorrow to “hear” him wax poetic about another blogger who makes the SSIS world a better place.
I Win
When the twelve of us were talking about doing the Twelve Days of SQL we had a friendly contest about who had the tackiest ornament. After all, Brent Ozar posted a gem. Well, I assured everyone that I had the winning entry. And now, for your amusement… and perhaps condemnation… behold my tackiest ornament.
In the previous post I mentioned the use of views to simplify querying your database in general and PowerPivot in particular.
What are Database Views?
Views are virtual tables, which you can create with a SQL statement. Some of the advantages of using views are:
Simplified Data Access – The view hides the data structure from the user making reporting less complex. Also, calculations can be performed in the view for them making their lives easier as well.
Security – Through the use of views you can easily limit your users to certain types of data in your database. You can restrict them from looking at specific tables, or even certain fields or rows in a database.
Standardization/Maintainability – The table logic for views is stored in the view itself. Therefore, if a change in that logic is required or the database structure changes, which happens occasionally when you upgrade M2M, the view need only be updated once. Otherwise every report, spreadsheet, etc. based on the changed areas must be edited.
View Security
As I’ve mentioned in the past, you should use a report login for your reporting with read only access. The simplest way to do so is to add a SQL Login and assign it the db_datareader role for that database. There are clear directions with screenshots covering this here. I create report logins which I creatively call ReportsXX, where XX represents which Made2Manage database that user will primarily report from. I use separate accounts per M2M company so different companies cannot see others data.
When creating these views, you should always create them with the same owner or in the same schema. In SQL 2000 objects were owned by a database user. When you look at the M2M database you’ll notice that every object is owned by dbo (database owner). Objects created in SQL 2000 tend to default to the owner who created them and if an account is designated as a database owner the default is dbo. In my case, all objects owned by Reports01 would be Reports01.ObjectName and would need to be referred to with their fully qualified name by any user other than Reports01.
The concept of database schemas was introduced in SQL 2005. Schemas serve as “containers” for objects and are useful for enforcing security as well as organization in the database. In this case you would create a schema called Reports01 (or Reports or whatever you like), and since your report login has the db_datareader role, it can also read from your views.
How do I Create a View?
As always, please read my standard disclaimer before implementing any code from my site. Creating a view is very simple. Let’s take the following SQL statement.
SELECT ARM.fcinvoiceAS InvoiceNo,
ARM.fcustnoAS CustNo,
ARM.fbcompanyAS CompanyName,
ARM.fdgldateAS PostDate,
ARM.fsalespnAS SalesPerson,
Rtrim(ARI.fpartno)AS PartNo,
ARI.ftotpriceAS NetInvoiced,
ARI.fprodclAS ProdClass,
INM.fgroupAS GroupCode
FROM dbo.armast ARM
INNERJOIN dbo.aritem ARI
ON ARM.fcinvoice= ARI.fcinvoiceINNERJOIN dbo.inmastINM
ONINM.fpartno= ARI.fpartnoANDINM.frev= ARI.frevWHERE ARM.fcstatus<>'V'
Please keep in mind that this is a simplified invoicing script for demonstration purposes. The templates I use are much more comprehensive and bring in many other related tables such as FastForms extension tables, the Sales Person table which contains their full name, portions of the Item Master table for product details, etc.
Further, it’s important to note that if you run that script on your database it will retrieve every applicable record since you started using M2M. With my current company that’s more than a decade of records. With input from the business leaders, we agreed to limit these views to the prior two fiscal years. While you could hard code these dates in with a statement like this, you shouldn’t do so.
AND ARM.fdgldate>='1/1/2008'
Instead, construct your view so that it automatically selects the previous two years.
AND ARM.fdgldate>=DATEADD(yy, DATEDIFF(yy,0,getdate())-2, 0)-- In this case 1/1/2008
This lessens the performance impact on your server. So, how do you create a view from this? You adapt the code as follows:
USE M2MDataXX -- Replace XX with your M2M Company
Go
CREATEVIEW ReportsXX.vw_InvoicesASSELECT ARM.fcinvoiceAS InvoiceNo,
ARM.fcustnoAS CustNo,
ARM.fbcompanyAS CompanyName,
ARM.fdgldateAS PostDate,
YEAR(ARM.fdgldate)AS PostYear,
MONTH(ARM.fdgldate)AS PostMonth,
CONVERT(VARCHAR(3), ARM.fdgldate, 100)AS OrderMonthName,
ARM.fsalespnAS SalesPerson,
Rtrim(ARI.fpartno)AS PartNo,
ARI.ftotpriceAS NetInvoiced,
ARI.fprodclAS ProdClass,
INM.fgroupAS GroupCode
FROM dbo.armast ARM
INNERJOIN dbo.aritem ARI
ON ARM.fcinvoice= ARI.fcinvoiceINNERJOIN dbo.inmastINM
ONINM.fpartno= ARI.fpartnoANDINM.frev= ARI.frevWHERE ARM.fcstatus<>'V'AND ARM.fdgldate>=DATEADD(yy, DATEDIFF(yy,0,getdate())-2, 0)
Go
The view can be queried as if it were a SQL table, like so:
When run against the educational database the data returns like so:
You’ll notice that I’ve aliased the field names and replaced them with English. In programs such as SQL Reporting Services the alias names will be automatically formatted for you so NetInvoiced becomes Net Invoiced. Another advantage is that the view hides the table joins from the user as well and it looks like one object.
Now, keep in mind that what I’ve just shown you most likely violates your Consona User Agreement. You’re not really allowed to make changes to their database. The reason I say “most likely” is because I cannot get a definitive answer on this point from Consona.
Why do I need to bother with all that owner/schema stuff?
As I said before you can use them for security purposes and restrict user access only to the views you create. However, the most important reason is to make migration easier. When you migrate your M2M version, one of the first steps is a check of database objects and the installer may error out and quit if it finds objects that aren’t supposed to be there. Therefore, I document every view I create, run a script to drop all of the objects in the specific owner/schema, and migrate. After migration, I script all of my views back in, and begin testing them.
I wrote this simple script to drop all views belonging to a user in SQL 2000. Make sure to replace “ReportsXX” with the name of your report login and “M2MDataXX” with your database name.
-- SQL 2000USE M2MDataXX
Go
DECLARE @UserName VARCHAR(25)DECLARE @ViewName NVARCHAR(25)DECLARE @SQLVARCHAR(1000)SET @UserName ='ReportsXX'-------------------------- SELECT[name] ViewName
INTO #temp
FROM sysobjects
WHERE type ='V'ANDuser_name(uid)= @UserName
--------------------------DECLARE
DropViews CURSORFORSELECT ViewName FROM #temp
OPEN DropViews
FETCHNEXTFROM DropViews INTO @ViewName
WHILE@@FETCH_STATUS=0BEGINSET @SQL= N'Drop View '+ @UserName +'.'+ @ViewName
PRINT @sql--EXEC( @SQL)FETCHNEXTFROM DropViews INTO @ViewName
ENDCLOSE DropViews
DEALLOCATE DropViews
DROPTABLE #temp
For SQL 2005 and after, simply replace the code between the horizontal lines with:
SELECT[name] ViewName
INTO #temp
FROM sys.objectsWHERE type ='V'AND schema_name (schema_id)= @UserName
Stay Tuned
In the near future, I will be posting more information about M-Data Analytics which has an entirely separate database, easily understood field names, and will have a multitude of views built in, etc. That doesn’t help you now, but I assure you, it is coming.
In the meantime you can simplify your life by using Database Views. In the next article in this series I’ll put it all together and show you the steps you’ll need to follow to successfully use technology like PowerPivot with problem databases.
Also, make sure to come back Monday when I share my entry in the Twelve Days of SQL Series. Not only will I share my choice for one of the best blog posts (and bloggers) this year, but I will reveal a picture of the tackiest Christmas Ornament you have ever seen. And before I show it, let me assure you that I really do own it, it really is on my Christmas Tree, and you’ll understand why my girlfriend suggested I need psychiatric help simply for owning it.
There’s a new independent M2M forum available called M2M Talk, which is free for everyone who works with M2M. It was started by a third party solutions provider who’s been working with Made2Manage customers a long time.
It’s been running roughly two months and some of the best people in M2M are on it. It is independent, not affiliated with Consona, and could be a good place to get your questions answered.
The challenge with any of these projects is reaching critical mass. The more people participate in it, the more people will want to participate in it.
I urge everyone in M2M to use and support it, as I think it is a service that has been sorely lacking.
However, at the same time I want to be clear that I do not have any affiliation with the site either, except for visiting it regularly to look for opportunities to help other M2M “survivors.”
Anyway, I applaud the effort and hope that all of you will join me in my support of the project.
I apologize for being late to the Un-SQL party, but work related problems have kept me busy since the PASS Summit. The Summit had a profound effect on me and I’m still trying to process it all.
Never mistake motion for action. – Ernest Hemingway
Until now, my approach has been similar to Grant’s though I haven’t been at it nearly as long as he has. I got involved in various things like blogging, presenting, etc. without really having a goal in mind or a plan as to how to get there. When Brent asked the group to come up with their “three things” I was struck with the realization that I had never even thought about it. What does that say about me and what I’ve been doing the last few years? If I’ve been working hard to make career and personal progress, and after all this time I couldn’t come up with three defining words about me and this effort, how much of that effort and time has been wasted? Unfortunately, a lot of it.
Choose Your Own Adventure Books as a Career Model
There’s a reason Hemmingway didn’t write Choose Your Own Adventure Books and I shouldn’t be modeling my career after them. I’ve made progress, but I’ve been doing so in a random, unfocused way. One of the reasons I created the blog, and named myself Made2Mentor was because I was already receiving e-mails requesting help all the time. I’ve been a Made2Manage expert for a long time, but I haven’t really focused on it for years. My attention has shifted to the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform and Data Warehousing. Yet I continue to split my energy, attention, and focus with Made2Manage and all of the things associated with it. In fact, when I purchased this domain Made2Mentor, I also purchased SQLServings.com because I knew that my career would eventually move in this direction.
This past year I presented to large groups at Consona Connect 2010, the national conference for Consona’s customers including those who use M2M. I didn’t present on M2M topics; I presented on SQL Administration and PowerPivot. I’ve also been encouraging other M2M admins to advance their skills and specialize in areas such as SQL Server, .Net Programming, and network infrastructure.
It became obvious at PASS that I had been juggling too many balls at one time. Since then, I’ve been re-evaluating those balls and putting some of them aside so I can focus on others.
What does this have to do with branding?
Branding, to me, is about how others perceive me. Others perceive me based on what I do and how I act. This critical self evaluation has lead me to certain decisions about my career focus, professional community participation, and in my personal life. Branding to me is not jumping up and down and yelling to everyone how great I am. It’s about making measurable progress, helping others through the benefit of that experience, and looking forward in a focussed way.
I guess it’s all summed up in a line from The Color of Money. “He’s got to learn how to be himself, but on purpose.” – Paul Newman
It’s not about acting like something I’m not, but rather maximizing my strengths and minimizing my weaknesses. I think that’s what every one of us should strive for. When we maximize our potential others will see it and benefit from it.
Walking the Path
“Sooner or later you’re going to realize just as I did that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” – Morpheus The Matrix
I’m not going to bore everyone with my three branding words, my career plans, or some other half baked advice about branding because I am far from skillful and it wouldn’t help you anyway. Rather than tell you what I’ve decided, I’ll simply show you in the coming weeks and months. That’s what this is really all about anyway, not telling everyone what you can do, but showing them.
In my previous article about paying my own way to PASS an anonymous commenter said he wouldn’t attend because he would have to take vacation to do so. Well, let me tell you it was just like a vacation for me.
First, by my own admission, I basically acted like a tourist. Whereas someone might go to Las Vegas and say things like “Oh wow, those are the Bellagio Fountains!” I gushed things like, “Oh wow, you’re Donald Farmer, Steve Jones, Paul Randal, or Andy Leonard.
Steve Jones
It’s not that I was star struck necessarily, it’s just that until now these guys lived in the screen in front of me. Do you remember how it felt the first time you saw your teacher at a restaurant or the movies? You had a moment of realization where you realized they were actually real people? Well, these people are my teachers and I have been learning from them for several years. PASS was a non-stop series of these realizations as I met and spoke with most of the people I’ve admired for so long. I was kind of surprised just how many of them follow me as well. In fact, when Donald Farmer told me that he reads my stuff, I actually told him “Wow, I need to work harder if all you guys are reading it.”
Geoff Hiten, Grant Fritchey, and Buck Woody
Second, the entire experience was so much fun. Most of these people know each other personally so it’s like going on vacation with your friends. Sure, there’s learning going on and everyone is networking, but it’s enjoyable.
Third, speaking of fun there are all sorts of fun things to do. There are parties every night if you’re following the Twitter stream. There’s simply no excuse for being alone. To cut down on costs, I shared a room with the one and only SQL Chicken and he’s one of the most social people I know.
Tony Davis, Jorge Segara, Rodney and Karla Landrum
One of the highlights of my trip was SQL Karaoke. Rumor has it there is a video floating around of yours truly belting out Burning Love by Elvis Presley. God I hope that doesn’t surface. Another night, Chicken’s backpack was stolen outside of a Starbucks (there’s one on every corner in Seattle). So, we spent that evening walking the alleys, badgering and bribing homeless people for it. He and I are not exactly like the duo in Lethal Weapon, but I am definitely too old for this s$%t.
Andy Leonard and Joe Webb
Was I crazy busy all week? Was it exhausting? Was I working hard? Yes to all three. However, when I got home I was thoroughly drained in a good way. I felt like I had released all my stress and felt as if I had just finished a marathon.
The point of this article is this. If you have to pay your own way to the PASS Summit, even if you have to take vacation time to do it, go anyway. It’s worth it.
For me, it was the best vacation I could have taken right now.
The other day I was telling a co-worker how excited I was to be going to PASS Summit 2010 and told him it was like being a kid again at the counter of the ice cream parlor looking at looking at all the flavors and not knowing which to pick. Here’s what PASS looks like to me.
I Can't Decide
You have no idea how hard it was to narrow the list down to just 8 selections to fit the picture. After all, one of the biggest draws for me to attend the Pass Summit this year is the chance to meet and talk to the best and brightest in SQL Server, people I’ve watched, read, and followed for years. In fact, I flew in first thing Sunday morning for just this purpose.
What’s Superman Ice Cream?
That was basically the question my coworker asked me. I thought everyone had heard of Superman Ice Cream. Apparently it’s a “Michigan Thing” like so many other things from my childhood. Basically, someone took several different ice creams, with distinctive colors, and mixed them into one swirl.
Yummy!
So, at last we meet for the first time for the last time!
(Well, hopefully not the last time)
The line is at 1:30 of the video.
I’m not going to take the time to list everyone because the list is ridiculously long, and I will forget to list someone important anyway. Suffice it to say that I’m going to be ridiculously busy picking people’s brains all week.
Basically, it’s like when I was a kid. When you can’t choose, try to get a little of everything. Yep, I’m going to be scarfing down Superman.
In my presentation at Consona Connect 2010, I showed users the wonders of Excel connections through ODBC, and what you could do with PowerPivot. However, I repeatedly mentioned to that group that I was glossing over lots of things in order to fit the presentation into an hour. This is part one of the series further detailing the process.
The most difficult problem to deal with is the lack of primary and foreign keys. A primary key is a column or combination of them which represent a unique record in a table. Database tables are not required to have a primary key (obviously), but nearly all should, and a table cannot have more than one primary key.
For example, the Sales Order Master table (SOMAST), if M2M had been properly designed, would have one primary key, the sales order number (fsono). This helps to insure data integrity by preventing duplicate sales order master records from being created as well as protecting against null (or unknown) sales order number values as well.
Conversely, a foreign key is a column, or a combination of them, which refer to another table’s primary key column(s). The long and short of it is, records cannot exist in the child table that do not have corresponding records in the parent. In the Sales example, the Sales Order Item table (SOITEM) should have a primary key consisting of the sales order number and item number. The foreign key would be sales order number which corresponds to the identically named field in the Sales Order Master table. Obviously from my orphaned records post, M2M lacks this mechanism.
Suffice it to say that when you watch demonstrations involving the importation of data using Excel, PowerPivot, etc. and everything looks easy, the presenter is typically using a properly designed database with primary and foreign keys. A natural by-product of having these keys is automatic linking of the tables.
If you open a sample data warehouse database (similar to M-Data Analytics), select a sales table, and then click the following:
you’ll be rewarded with this:
… and there’s peace in the valley.
Incidentally, you can view an excellent video produced by Brian Knight on PowerPivot as part of the 24 Hours of Pass. You may need to register as a member of PASS, but it’s completely free and you should be a member by now anyway. At about the 10 minute mark you’ll notice Brian say, “Now I don’t have to pick a data warehouse, I’m just choosing that in my case. So, I’m just doing that to make things much simpler on myself…” Now in this video, he actually selects the tables manually, but also indicates that PowerPivot would pull the relationships out for him automatically as I’ve shown above. Please don’t misunderstand me, I have a huge amount of respect for Brian Knight and I wouldn’t choose a database like M2M to demonstrate with either unless I had to.
Any idea what happens when you do this with Made2Manage? It’s about as effective as Paris Hilton on Celebrity Jeopardy. That is to say that Excel has no answer, because M2M lacks primary and foreign keys.
Further, because M2M uses those cryptic, and often misleading, field names you must replace those with readable English alias names each time. Otherwise, your executives are reading reports with fsono and finumber all over them.
It’s important to note that these are some of the reasons I founded M-Data Analytics and you will not have these problems when you use it.
However, using the normal M2M Database, these problems can be partially negated using relatively simple techniques such as database Views, which I’ll discuss in the next article.
A few months ago, I wrote an article about how thrilled I was to be going to PASS this year. Some of you may have gotten the impression from that article that I was given a Golden Ticket. I should have been more clear that I had bought a golden ticket, and not just for the price of a Wonka Bar. The trip is likely to cost me around $2,500 including conference registration, flight, hotel, etc. I am still excited to go, regardless of the price and you should be too.
Shouldn’t My Employer Pay for it?
Many of the top SQL Server bloggers have written that companies should invest in their people by sending themto the PASS Summit including Brent Ozar, Steve Jones, and most recently Thomas LaRock.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I respect these guys a great deal, and I certainly wish my employer would have been willing to pay for the conference. However they, like many employers have reasons for not doing so.
Let’s face it the economy is awful. Most companies are getting by on relatively thin margins. In general, they are not investing in new hardware and technologies in these lean times.
How long does the average IT Professional stay with the same company anyway? Three or four years? If you look at it from the employer’s standpoint, what exactly are they investing in?
From the employer’s view, it’s best to keep you in your little sandbox, using their current software and assets. If they’re not spending money on upgrading to latest and greatest that Microsoft has to offer then why would they want you to be trained in it? It’s not difficult to see why they don’t want you to take a week “off” from work, network with some of the most brilliant minds in SQL Server, and learn all about new toys which your employer doesn’t own. Besides, why should your company be willing to invest in your education if you aren’t?
If perks like going to PASS are important to you, then make sure to negotiate for them when you accept a new position or make sure your new salary will cover the cost of it. I’m not trying to suggest that employers are evil, they just people like us. This article isn’t really about them anyway. It’s about you.
Why Should I Pay to go to PASS?
While I understand that going to PASS will make you a better DBA, your employer may not. In the long run, nobody is going to improve your career but you, and you shouldn’t expect them to.
I can’t tell you specifically why you should go, I can only tell you why I’m going.
To be exposed to amazing things, get inspired to try something new. This kind of format is perfect to get exposure to topics outside of your area of focus. BI guys may want to look at Administration sessions and vice versa.
To be exposed to amazing people. I can’t wait to expose myself to several people. Wait, that didn’t come out right! Where else are you going to find the best and brightest all in one place?
Make new friends, possibly even Super Friends. I’ve already a few occasions where contacts I’ve made at SQL events have pulled my bacon out of the fire.
Meet the folks who develop SQL Server. I have quite a few questions for folks on the SSRS and SSIS teams. Suggest product improvements.
Recharge your batteries. Every time I go to a SQL event I leave in a great mood. It’s like natural Prozac.
And those are just some of the reasons I’m going. If you’re a member of the community, and you certainly should be, then you’re lucky, there’s free information and education everywhere. You can and should attend SQL Saturdays, User Group Meetings, and take advantage of all the free content given away on blogs.
However, if you want the best training, networking, and experience; you must go is the PASS Summit. If you want to be one of the best, you need to go and be with the best.
To paraphrase an old joke about getting a divorce, “Why is the PASS Summit so expensive?…. because it’s worth it.”
At about the 10 minute mark you’ll notice Brian say, “Now I don’t have to pick a data warehouse, I’m just choosing that in my case. So, I’m just doing that to make things much simpler on myself…” Now in this video, he actually selects the tables manually, but also indicates that PowerPivot would pull the relationships out for him automatically as I’ve shown above. Please don’t misunderstand me, I have a huge amount of respect for Brian Knight and I wouldn’t choose a database like M2M to demonstrate with either unless I had to. 
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