My.First.SQL2005.Job

I have been recently deployed to a customer's place together with a fellow senior consultant in a SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence engagement. It was supposed to be one of our QuickPlan offerings but we tailored it to our customer's needs so that they can apply what they learned in their environment immediately.

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) has come a long way since its debut in SQL Server 7.0. Back then, it was known as OLAP Services and I was one of the early adopters who implemented it for a customer. Since I went into .NET Development, I have not look at it but these two weeks had created an opportunity for me to see it in action again.

I'm glad to be assigned to this engagement as I have gained a lot of new practical knowledge. So far, I have learned a fair bit about SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) by helping the customer to Extract, Transform and Load their data from their systems. I have also picked up some basic Multi-Dimensional Expressions (MDX) skills by helping them with their exercises. *HeHe*

Apart from learning new stuff, I also presented topics which I have knowledge in. The following are the topics which I had presented throughout the course of the engagement:

1) Business Intelligence Overview - an overview of why business intelligence is important in today's marketplace and how SQL Server 2005 offers a cost-effective Business Intelligence solution.

2) Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) - the new data model that brings the best of relational and multidimensional data models. I have also spoken a little on Proactive-caching.

3) Partitioned Table and Indexes - a new feature in SQL Server 2005 that allows tables and indexes to be partitioned horizontally across filegroups (or in a single filegroup). I also talked about the Sliding Window concept and did some demos on creating partition functions and partition schemes.

4) SQL Server 2005 Relational Database Enhancements - I did the first half of it where I introduced some of the new features in SQL Server 2005 Database Engine (i.e. overview of Notification Services, Service Broker etc.) and demonstrated some new T-SQL enhancements such as Common Table Expressions (CTE), ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK and NTILE. I also demonstrated CLR Integration and Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS).

I should be talking about SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) tomorrow morning and followed by Report Builder in the afternoon. If I have the time, I may also talk about Managing and Administering SQL Server Reporting Services.

As you can see, most of the topics that I presented (or will be presenting) are very developer-oriented. *HeHe* The topics that my senior presented (or going to present) were all very sophisticated - SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Designing and Building OLAP Cubes, Multi-Dimensional Expressions (MDX), Advance MDX Programming, SQL Server 2005 Security and SQL Server 2005 Data Mining. Scary huh? ;)

I feel quite sad that the engagement will be ending this week as I really enjoyed it. I will be deployed to a .NET engagement next and I really hope that it will be as good as this one.