Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions “Overview of Microsoft Appliances” and “Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture” at the PASS Business Analytics Conference.

Here are the PowerPoint presentations:  Overview of Microsoft Appliances and Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture.

Overview of Microsoft Appliances

Learn how SQL Server 2008 can scale to hundreds of terabytes for BI/DW solutions. This session will focus on Fast Track solutions and appliances, reference architectures, and Parallel Data Warehousing (PDW). It will also cover performance numbers and lessons learned from one of the very first production PDW deployments in the world and how a successful BI solution was built on top of it using SSAS.

Explore all the different appliances – HP Business Decision Appliance (BDA), HP Business Data Warehouse appliance (BDW), HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance (EDW), and HP Database Consolidation Appliance (DBC) – and how they can save you significant time and money instead of building on your own. If you’re involved in the decision making for purchasing one or more servers for SQL Server, this session will show you options to ordering a server and internally installing the hardware, OS, and SQL Server.

Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture

You’re a DBA and your boss asks you to determine if a data warehouse would help the company. So many questions pop into your head: Why use a data warehouse? What is the best methodology to use when creating a data warehouse? Should I use a normalized or dimensional approach? What is the difference between the Kimball and Inmon methodologies? Does the new Tabular model in SQL Server 2012 change things? What is the difference between a data warehouse and a data mart? Is there any hardware I can purchase that is optimized for a data warehouse? What if I have a ton of data? During this session James will help you to answer these questions so your response to your boss will provoke amazement and lead to a big raise. Or at least help to lead you down the correct path!