Two Weeks of #SQLAwesomeSauce Over - With More To Come

What a stellar two week jolt of SQL Server goodness.  SQL Connections in Las Vegas the first week of November, then the "big kahuna" of SQL conferences - the PASS Summit in Seattle.  It was fantastic to run into people I'd met at the last Summit (in both places!) and meet some new people interested in SQL Server and Integration Services.  It's taken me this long to recover and get back (almost) on top of "regular" work.

SQL Connections Fall 2010

Of course, the main reason I was in Vegas was to do some presenting, and overall was very pleased with the turnout and participation of the audience.  My third session (on Script components) really felt too rushed to me - and it won't surprise me at all if that's my lowest rated.  For those of you who do want to see the slide decks and sample code from those sessions, here they are:

• Data Warehouse ETL with Integration Services: slides, sample
• In-Depth with the SSIS Script Task: slides, sample
• In-Depth with the SSIS Script Component: slides, sample

PASS Community Summit 2010
The following week was the pinnacle event of the SQL Server world, and was my "best Summit ever."  Among a ton of things, some highlights for me were the Birds of a Feather lunch, and building towers with the SSIS Dev team with post-it notes.  Of course, it wasn't all play, or that's what they tried to tell me.  I had a chalk talk on debugging SSIS packages, and participated in a very fun Lightning Talk session with six other fabulous speakers, including the comedian of the SQL world, Rob Farley.  Kendal Van Dyke was also very gracious in letting a bunch of us "help him out" with his speaking and blogging session.  I hope we didn't derail him too much...
The chalk talk has a slide deck with a few suggestions on it - we only got to investigate a very few - 40 minutes is SHORT.  Take from it what you will, it's not your typical deck.  Also very atypical was my lightning talk deck - 23 slides, seven words... I guess you had to be there.
Coming Up Next...
This Tuesday, November 23rd, the BI Virtual Chapter of PASS is hosting my session on Loading Dimension Tables with SSIS.  Very similar to what I did at SQL Connections, but focusing only on dimension table loading.  Brush up on slowly changing dimensions before you attend - I'm presuming you've experienced the joy and pain of loading them prior.  I'll walk through alternatives to the SCD Wizard, giving you a good feel of what you should try to get by its limitations.  (UPDATE 2011-11-30: the recording is now available on their website.)
Just around the corner from that - SQL Saturday #65 in Vancouver on February 26th!  I don't have any sessions submitted yet - but I'll get to that.  It's looking like a very special SQL Saturday - Scott Stauffer brilliantly picked the weekend before the MVP Summit in Redmond.  Just a couple weeks after announcing the date, MVPs Bill Pearson, John Welch, Denny Cherry, Gail Shaw, and Aaron Bertrand have submitted multiple sessions each, as well as MCM Robert Davis from Microsoft.  I expect that there will be many more MVPs and Microsoft folks presenting and attending, not to mention the fantastic speakers that don't (yet) have those letters to tag after their names (but ought to).
See you on a monitor, or in-person soon!