It seems that the next SQLBits will be larger than ever! The SQLBits 9 will take place in Liverpool from 29th September to 1st October 2011. It will be hard to get a nicer weather than in Brighton, but we will try to bring a bit of sun from Italy!
I and Alberto will deliver a whole training day on September 29th: DAX Deep Dive will be a full immersion into DAX that will be the fundamental asset for any BI developer in the next release of SQL Server. You can already use it with Denali CTP3 in BISM Tabular and PowerPivot. We will cover both features of version 1 (the current released PowerPivot for Excel) and version 2 (PowerPivot v2 and BISM Tabular). Registrations are open and seats limited: at the previous SQLBits our training day (SQLBI Methodology) was full and I think that this could sold out faster. I’m curious to see if my forecast is reliable!
I will also have a session on Saturday (October 1st), Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach, in which I will try to discuss whether the dimensional modeling (i.e. the star schema) is still the best way to model your relational data for analysis now that you have two different analytical engines, BISM Tabular and BISM Multidimensional. I know, the easy answer is “yes, of course” but it will be interesting to understand when and why this is true and when other design choices might be better.
In the same day (Saturday, October 1st) Alberto Ferrari will present the Many-to-Many Relationship in DAX. This session will show some design patterns based on many-to-many dimension relationships (most of them covered in my The Many to Many Revolution whitepaper). There will be *a lot* of DAX in this session, because BISM Tabular doesn’t support many-to-many relationships natively but using DAX we can workaround this limitation. I’ve already seen a draft version of this session and I have to say that just the Basket Analysis pattern (which is one of the many covered) justify the time you will spend attending this session.
Finally, if you are interested in a onsite course, we have an offer for DAX Training on SQLBI website.