PASS Summit Video Recordings

PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Summit is the largest conference for data professional working with Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence stack. Typically, PASS would have the Summit once a year (in the fall) in Seattle, Washington. PASS Summit offers a wealth of knowledge. Each year, there are hundreds of sessions on various SQL Server and Business Intelligence topics presented by industry experts and also Microsoft employees. If you are a data professional, who are working with Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence, PASS Summit is a great event to learn and network with fellow data professionals. If you were unable to attend the past PASS Summits (or if you attended the past PASS Summits and want to relive and review those sessions), you can go to SQL PASS site and watch the past PASS Summit Session Recordings for free. As of the writing of this blog post, you can view recordings for PASS Summit 2015 and older for free (you need to be a member of SQL PASS but the registration is free). Even though they might be a few years old, they are excellent learning resources.

By the way, if you can attend PASS Summit in person, I would recommend it. PASS Summit 2018 is going to be in Seattle, Washington, in November 2018. You can get more information from PASS Summit 2018 site.

T-SQL Tuesday #97 - 2018 Learning Goals

This month T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Malathi Mahadevan (blog | twitter) and it is about 2018 learning goals. Given that we are at the end of 2017, this is a timely topic. As data professionals and technology enthusiasts, we are living in an interesting time. There are a lot of opportunities to learn, so much so that we might feel overwhelmed by them. Goals can certainly help to focus our learning efforts.

Backup Analysis Services Database Using PowerShell

We can use PowerShell to backup Analysis Services (AS) multidimensional or tabular database. This is great because it offers us more flexibility in automating the AS database backup process. Typically, we might have multiple Analysis Service databases within an Analysis Services instance. As a good Database Administrator responsible for the Analysis Services, we want to backup all those Analysis Services databases.