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Atlanta MS BI Group 5th Anniversary

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Our next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting will be on August 31st. This happens to be our 5th anniversary! Thanks for everybody who contributed to the group success! We’ve come a long way since our first meeting with a dozen people to the attendance we enjoy today of 60-70+. Come and join the festivities and learn about sentiment analysis with Big Data & Machine Learning.

 

Presentation:

Tone/Sentiment analysis with Big Data & Machine Learning

  

Level: Intermediate

Date:

Monday, August 31th, 2015

Time

6:30 – 8:30 PM ET

Place:

South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346

Overview:

People’s sentiments and opinions are written in social networks. There are tweets, Facebook posts, book reviews, forum discussions, and more. These attitudes and feelings are communicated using text, with format depending on the social network. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters and use hash-tags and Facebook messages can be longer.

 

This session reviews the different Natural Language Processing, text mining, and data mining techniques you can use for sentiment and tone analysis. Organizations can use the extracted knowledge for brand reputation, market predictions, and automatic learning. We’ll look at, Hadoop, data mining, Microsoft Big Data Hadoop distribution HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning.

Speaker:

Paco Gonzalez, a SolidQ Mentor, is the PASS Big Data Virtual Chapter Leader, SQL Saturday Barcelona Organizer and assistant at the PASS Atlanta BI User Group. He is finishing his PhD thesis about: “Analyzing Social Data with Machine Learning.” He is an MCT and MCP on BizTalk Server and SQL Server. He is coauthor of Microsoft Training Kit 441. Paco is a frequent speaker at large and small conferences. SQL Saturdays, TechEds, PASS BA, PASS Summit, DevWeek London, and PAW Chicago and London.

Sponsor:

TEKSYSTEMS is a subsidiary of Allegis Group, the largest private talent management firm in the world. Our longstanding history and industry-leading position speak to our success in providing the IT staffing solutions, IT services and talent management insight required for you to actualize ROI and sustain a truly competitive advantage in a fast-changing market.

 

 

Introducing the Reimagined Power BI Platform

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Come and join us for an information-packed meeting of the Atlanta Microsoft BI Group on February 23th. You will learn about Power BI vNext and Panorama Necto. Our sponsor will be Panorama.

  1. Introducing the Reimagined Power BI Platform by Jen Underwood, Microsoft
    You have seen glimpses of the new Power BI platform during the Public Preview reveal. Although it may not be apparent, Microsoft has totally reimagined the Power BI platform and user experience for BI professionals, developers and business users. In this new release, Microsoft has added Power BI Designer, developer APIs, custom templates/apps, hybrid direct connectivity to on-premise data sources without data copying, a native mobile BI app and other top secret enhancements that we can dive into by the time of this session. Please join me to further explore all these great changes and enjoy a fun demo-intensive session.
  2. Panorama Necto – Panorama Necto is advancing Business Intelligence 3.0 to the next level, bringing together the very best of Enterprise BI with Visual Data Discovery, providing enterprises with new ways to collaborate and create unique contextual connections.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting Tonight

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Come and join us tonight for last 2014 meeting of the Atlanta MS BI Group. In the spirit of the season, I’ll revisit its most important tools and their role in a holistic and modern data analytics environment. Then, for each tool, I’ll discuss its indented use, as well as its pros and cons. We’ll discuss self-service and organizational BI, on-premise and cloud, emerging technologies, and how they complement each other in the context of Microsoft BI. And, Mark Tabladillo will do us a cool demo of the Azure Machine Learning Web Service. $60 Pizza Hut gift card and other cool door prices from Aspen Brands will be given away. Kudos to our fantastic sponsor TEKSystems for buying us food and drinks!

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on Oct 27th

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Join us on Monday, October 27th for our next meeting of Atlanta MS BI Group to learn about predictive analytics and how to actually do it.

Presentation: Mine Craft
  Level: Intermediate
Date: Monday, October 27th, 2014
Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place: South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview: Why you should be mining your data and how to actually do it. Every company needs a rock star. We want it to be you. This session will give real world examples of data mining successes as well as walk you through how to get started down the path of data enlightenment, so that you too can say “I Am A Data Miner℠”.
Speaker: Mark Tabladillo provides enterprise data science analytics advice and solutions. He uses Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining, SAS, SPSS, R, and Hadoop (among other tools). He works with Microsoft Business Intelligence (SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, SharePoint, Power BI, .NET). Mark has a national leader in analytics and data science (data mining and machine learning) through conference speaking and instructional leadership since 1998. He connects with people on LinkedIn and Twitter @marktabnet.

David McFarland is a Senior Manager Business Intelligence with RentPath, Inc. David spends the vast majority of his day trying to get out of useless meetings. He has no certifications whatsoever and is pretty sure Microsoft has no idea who he is, except when it’s time to renew enterprise software agreements.
Sponsor: Tegile
With demand growing for bigger data and faster service, your data storage choices can make or break your business. Accelerate your business with Tegile’s all-flash and hybrid storage solutions.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on Sep 29th

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Join us on Monday, September 29th for our meeting of Atlanta MS BI Group to learn about DAX – the programming language of Power Pivot and Tabular.

Presentation: DAX 101
  Level: Beginner
Date: Monday, September 29th, 2014
Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place: South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview: In this session, we will look at the new BI query language for PowerPivot and Tabular – DAX. This session will give you an introduction to PowerPivot and Data Analysis eXpressions (DAX) and will provide you the necessary understanding to start using DAX in your environment for data analysis. No prior experience with DAX is needed to attend this session.
Speaker: Damu Venkatesan is a Business Intelligence Consultant with over 25 years of IT experience. His experience includes architecting solutions in Business Intelligence using SQL Server, SharePoint & data management. He is the founder of Healthcare SQL Virtual Chapter for PASS. He has successfully delivered several BI/DW solutions and data migrations to various clients in Healthcare, Financials and Government applications using Microsoft technologies. He is on the board of DAMA Georgia chapter.
Sponsor: TEK Systems

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on Aug 25th

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Join us tonight for a knowledge-packed meeting of Atlanta MS BI Group to learn how to optimize and automate your ETL.

Presentation: Making your SSIS Fly Beyond the Sky
  Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Date: Monday, August 25th, 2014
Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place: South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview: How fast can an ETL package be? How big of a dataset is too big causing us to wait several hours to load data? Do you know those properties that you never touched because you were afraid to break something else? Well, let’s try them. In this demo-rich presentation, we’ll focus on some 101 tips that will maximize your package throughput. We will also go deeper toward a 200-300 level, when we will walk through some very interesting database design patterns that will ultimately affect the performance of your SSIS.
Speaker: Carlos Rodrigues has more than 15 years of experience, and most of it with Business Intelligence. Adept in implementing state-of-art Business intelligence and Data warehouse solutions using the entire Microsoft BI toolset, he currently manages onsite, offshore and remote teams but he remains technical and hands-on, and up to date with new technologies. Carlos delivered a few presentations for the Atlanta BI Group and Atlanta SQL Saturday. He follows Ralph Kimball’s school of thought.
Sponsor: Halo BI is dedicated to the simple principle that data is dumb; it’s people who provide the intelligence. No software package, no matter how fast it collects, processes or displays data, will ever deliver “business intelligence”. We are about developing technology to enable real business intelligence — the human kind.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on Jun 30th

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Join us for our next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting tomorrow, Monday, June 30th, to learn about implementing BI for financial reporting. You’ll also get a glimpse of the newly announced Microsoft Azure Machine Learning. Spread the word and invite your coworkers but RSVP on our website so we can plan food accordingly.

Main Presentation: Microsoft BI for Financial Reporting
  Level: Intermediate
Date: Monday, June 30th, 2014
Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place: South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview: Using a Finance data mart in SQL Server 2012, I will demo how to use SSAS 2012 and Excel 2013 for Financial Reporting. This will include the basic DW model for Financial Reporting, how to configure the key dimensions in SSAS, how to setup writeback functionality in the Finance Cube with Security, and how to use Excel for the Reporting and writeback execution to update Budgets within the Cube.
Speaker: Justin Stephens began working with SQL Server 2000 (DW, DTS, and SSAS) in the fall of 2000 for a small software company in Texas. Early on, he became the SME for MDX Reporting using ASP and later ASP.NET. He was given a few projects using DTS/SSIS that expanded the reporting capabilities. In 2005, Justin spread my wings and began a long exodus from Texas that led him to Atlanta. Over the last 13 years, he has worked for/with some notable companies (Wal-Mart, McKesson, Dell, AMD, BCD Travel, Barclay’s) in various industries (Retail, Wholesale Distribution, Finance, Travel, and Education). During this time, he achieved MCITP in Business Intelligence using the 2008 R2 BI Stack. Justin is a die-hard proponent of the MSBI stack.
Sponsor: At TEKsystems, we understand people. Every year we deploy over 80,000 IT professionals at 6,000 client sites across North America, Europe and Asia. Our deep insights into IT human capital management enable us to help our clients achieve their business goals – while optimizing their IT workforce strategies. We provide IT staffing solutions, IT talent management expertise and IT services to help our clients plan, build and run their critical business initiatives.
Prototypes with Pizza Microsoft Azure Machine Learning by Teo Lachev
With machine learning, computers can approach human performance in perception and understanding across vast amounts of data. Expensive and disconnected tools stood in the way of this innovation, but today Microsoft is democratizing machine learning. Get a glimpse of the Microsoft new cloud-based predictive analytics offering.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on May 19th

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Join us for our next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting tomorrow, Monday, May 19th, to learn about Power Query. Spread the word and invite your coworkers but RSVP on our website so we can plan food accordingly.

Main Presentation: Power Query
  Level: Intermediate
Date: Monday, May 19th, 2014
Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place: South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview: So much data is stored on the web, yet merging it with our enterprise data can be a challenge. In this session we’ll use Power Query to quickly harvest historical data about SQL Saturday from its site, combining event, session and speaker details with other publicly available data sets. We’ll create custom functions with Power Query’s M language to collect and transform the data from multiple web pages. We’ll then move the data into Power Pivot and explore our results with Power View and Power Map. We’ll even cleanse the data without leaving Excel, leveraging DQS (Data Quality Services) through the MDS (Master Data Services) Excel add-in.
Speaker: Julie Smith is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP and a BI consultant for Innovative Architects in Atlanta, GA. She’s implemented increasingly complex ETL solutions for over a decade at various organizations. She’s also worn many other database “hats” in her career – production DBA and database developer–but ETL is her true passion. Julie is an MCTS in SQL Server 2008 BI and holds a BA from the University of South Carolina. She and Audrey Hammonds co-created The Datachix.com blog.

Rob Volk is a SQL Server DBA in the Metro Atlanta area since 2001. An MCITP, he also moderates and answers the forums on SQLTeam.com. While an old-time cranky DBA, he no longer considers “business intelligence” an oxymoron and is delightedly dipping his toes into the BI ocean, and loves to do things in new and unusual ways.
Sponsor: Since 2005, Innovative Architects has been serving industries to help solve business and technology challenges. Led by our great associates, we specialize in a wide array of cutting edge Microsoft technologies that we leverage to help our customers achieve the highest level of success with their technology solutions. We provide business consulting, development and implementation services for Microsoft platforms which include BizTalk, SharePoint, .NET, Business Intelligence and much more.
Prototypes with Pizza Power BI Forecasting by Teo Lachev

Building a Custom ETL Framework with SSIS 2012

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Even though the SSIS catalog and the new project deployment mode in SQL Server 2012 take care of many of the mundane monitoring needs, a custom ETL framework is still important for handling features such as restartability and parallelism. Join our next Atlanta BI User Group meeting on Monday, March 31st when Aneel Ismaily will talk about this subject in his “Building a Custom ETL Framework with SSIS 2012” presentation.

“ETL Frameworks are the foundation of any data warehouse/data mart implementation. In this session we will discuss building a heavy-duty enterprise ETL Framework and will talk in detail about some major ETL enhancements available in SQL Server 2012. Topics include auditing, logging, designing for fault tolerance and recoverability, handling orchestration, parallelism and finally scheduling.”

X-IO will sponsor the meeting and present their Intelligent Storage Element fast storage product.

Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on February 24th

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Atlanta BI fans,

Join us for the next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting on Monday, February 24th. Lance England will present “introduction to MDX”. Computer Associates will sponsor our meeting and show us the latest Erwin release. I’ll also talk briefly and present Power BI now that it went live. Spread the word and invite your coworkers but RSVP on our website so we can plan food accordingly. Also, don’t forget to register for the SQL Saturday precons that will take place on May 2nd, the day before SQL Saturday Atlanta.

Main Presentation: MDX Fundamentals
  Level: Intermediate
Date: Monday, February 24th, 2014
Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place: South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room)

115 Perimeter Center Place

Atlanta, GA 30346
Overview: MDX is a powerful language, but the price of that power is a higher degree of complexity. The key to understanding MDX is to learn the fundamental concepts and have a mental model of how it works. This presentation is for anyone who has struggled with the MDX learning curve, or is interested in starting down the MDX path.
Speaker: Lance England is an Atlanta-area data professional specializing in data warehouse and business intelligence with a Microsoft-focus. He welcomes learning and networking with others. His blog is at http://lance-england.com and Twitter-handle is @lanceengland.
Sponsor: CA Technologies

CA Technologies’ portfolio of software and services helps our customers speed time to value, ensure critical application performance and simplify security and operations so they can drive innovation and quality for their customers. CA ERwin Data Modeler is an industry-leading data modeling solution that provides a simple, visual interface to manage your complex data environment both on premises and cloud.