Agenda

18:00 - 18:30 Meet & Greet + pizza

Meet up and socialise with your friends, meet new people, find out what other people are doing with SQL Server.

18:30 - 18:45

Round Table Discussion - Q & A from and to the audience

Bring your SQL problems and hopefully somebody within the room will be able to fix or advise you. There is always a wealth of experienced people at the user group meetings.

18:45 - 19:45

Chalk and talk on HA/DR/Scalability
Tony Rogerson, SQL Server MVP
http://www.sql-server.co.uk; @tonyrogerson

Tony will chat through considerations and options for developing and implementing a Disaster Recovery plan for SQL Server. He will talk about and demonstrate Mirroring, Log Shipping and general backup/restore options and talk about other HA options.He will also look at scaling considerations.

19:45 - 20:00 

Break

20:00 - 20:30/21:00 

An overview of using SQL Server and Symphony Analytic Server to create a demo site used in pre-sales efforts.
Chris Hillman

Explanation of how the data is loaded into SQL Server and the dimensions, hierarchies measures identified
Using Views to create Dimension and Fact Tables while investigating how the cube should be structured
Finding and Cleansing the problems found in the data
Creating the final Star Schema
Building a ROLAP model on the Schema (equivalent to a cube)

Looking at the role of BI Architect and what would be required
Questions to go back to data supplier with.
Issues to pass on to ETL designer / developer
Database design
Estimated database sizes / partition schemes
Server architecture ( if number of users are known)
Model design (cube structure)
Report specification for report designer
Rough timings for project plan
Statement of Work – A sales tool used to get sign off from the client of what work we are going to complete, assumptions, out of scope etc.