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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Presenting at Vancouver DevTeach

This post should have been made a couple months ago so that my legions of rabid fans could have lined up to... yeah, OK - I'm not fooling anybody, I know.  But for those that are signed up to DevTeach in Vancouver, you should definitely put my sessions in your schedule.  I mean, if you read my blog, I know you're interested in Integration Services, and that's what I'll be talking about.
I'll give you the first day to get warmed up to the conference experience.  I'll be hanging around from midday onwards, picking up a few sessions and hanging around in between poking at my computer. 
But first thing on the second day, come bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to hear some good solutions for common application pattern problems in SSIS.  I mentioned in the abstract that we'll look at processing files in date order, and upsert patterns.  I've got five other topics I can cover - flat files with headers and footers, deduplicating data, emailing resultsets, calculating running totals, inserting parent/child rows, and zipping files.  The good part is that the audience decides what we spend our time on!  If nobody there cares about some of those topics, we don't have to waste time listening to it.
On the third conference day, if you touch Excel spreadsheets with Integration Services, you can't miss my afternoon session.  Scratch that - if you use SSIS, you obviously have spreadsheets as a source.  Be there.  There aren't any foolproof techniques, but there's a great big bag of excellent ones that should get you through the minefield of Excel flexibility and user inconsistency.  The big reveal will be a sample of using OpenXML to read data from a spreadsheet.  I don't think I'm a fan of OpenXML yet - but it'll be hard to resist if it continues to work this well.  (I'll be blogging about that soon.)
DevTeach is a very cozy and informal conference - I have no doubt that those of you who are attending will love it.  Don't hesitate to take advantage of that environment - the speakers are all willing to sit down with you about any topic.  I know I am, so if you have an interesting SSIS problem, or just want to moan about the weather, post a comment here, or mail me at <myfullnamewithnospaces>@live.ca.  Look forward to seeing you all there.
UPDATE: Presentation materials on SkyDrive.

2 comments:

  1. Hope to see your Excel talk some day. Canada is so far away from Atlanta.

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  2. +1 for rabid fan. Quality contributions on MSDN, really top notch stuff. Love your work.

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