Well, March Madness is quickly coming to a close.  I was very happy to see Xavier not go to the Final Four this year.   I am a Huggins fan.  I attended UC during the golden era of our Final Four days.  It's just been bred in me to, and I'll be nice here, "dislike" Xavier.  Think Crosstown Shootout.  If you've had a chance to browse any of my other posts you should realize I'm a nerd.  With that being said I was also in the Pep Band and attend all home games.  Ah, the excitement.

If you also felt the sweet revenge watching UCLA as they wiped the floor with Xavier please feel free to leave a comment.

I attended my second meeting on 03/25/08 and the guest speaker was Chris Barth. Chris gave a great presentation on tuning and troubleshooting queries in SQL Server 2005.

Topics

• Steps in determining when a stored procedure should be tuned.
• Seek or Scan? How to read query plans.
• System tables that will help you determine what transact-sql is performing poorly.
• Overviews of SET statements that will assist in troubleshooting transact-sql.
• The negative performance effects resulting from poor performing update or delete queries and stored procedures.
• Steps for writing better performing queries

This was a really good meeting in regards to what we’re doing with our database. I was able to learn a lot about when and when not to tune queries. The biggest lessons I can take from the meeting is to really know your system tables and think pages.

The Central Ohio Day of .NET is quickly approaching. This years meeting is in Wilmington, OH on 04/19/08. The Central Ohio Day of .NET is a joint venture between the Dayton .NET Developers Group, Central Ohio .NET Developers Group and the Cincinnati .NET Users Group.

Please visit http://cinnug.org/cododn for more information.

I attended my second meeting on 03/12/08.  The guest speaker for this meeting was Miguel Castro and the topic was extensibility designs and patterns.  This was over my head in ways but I was able to grasp the overall concept and can see the benefit of creating your own providers, modules, plug-ins, etc. (time well spent).

Instead of connecting to a specific text file to get data you connect to the source that contains the file to retrieve the data.  This gives you the ability to easily point you module to different data sources when changes are needed instead of modifying the application.  Efficient!

The initial setup may be time consuming but sounds like it's well work it. For more information on this topic please visit Miguel's site.  For those in the Cincinnati area interested in .NET programming can visit CINNUG for meeting dates and times.

I attended a special interest group on 03/11/08 (first timer) on Business Intelligence.  Really interested stuff.  Performance Point Server 2007 was the topic and the guest speaker was Craig Utley.  Now this is the way to create reports!

PPS2007 allows businesses to monitor their performance through easy-to-use Scorecards and Dashboards. The most common data source for the monitoring service is cubes.  Users can view data across multiple dimensions. They can drill down or across dimensions with just a click.

The actual setup is time consuming and involves the business decision makers of the company and those with the financial background to analyze and create the plan.  Your job as the programmer is to create the application and once set up the plan can easily be modified if/when necessary.

The application can handle just about any size business but is pricey, $20,000 and $195/user.  This price includes 2 servers, PPS2007 and ProClarity.  You publish your applications with Sharepoint.  However, it was brought to our attention the next release of Performance Point Server may no longer work with the free version of Sharepoint.

My company could use some sharp looking reports and graphs to identify sales, trends, forecasting, etc.  However, I don't see us purchasing PPS2007 any time in the near future.  I've recently been appointed to incorporate BI into the company and I'm looking forward to the opportunity.