I will be heading to Houston on Friday afternoon to visit with other Microsoft technology geeks and speak/attend Houston Tech Fest. Patrick LeBlanc ( Blog | Twitter ) and William Assaf ( Blog | Twitter) from Baton Rouge will be on the same track together giving the tech event some SQL Server sessions. It looks like there are some other SQL Server sessions from Tim Mitchell, Trevor Barkhouse and Geoff Hiten.
It is great to be able to share the experience I have gained over the years, and network with others that have similar interests in SQL Server. I always meet one or 2 people in the industry to help with me in learning more tricks and tips.
Then, starting Sunday, I will drive to Kanuga, North Carolina for the 3rd year in a row to See The Leaves. This is a week of vacation away from the busy days of work and life to read, pray and meditate.
I plan on reading Richard Foster’s book on Spiritual Disciplines and Phillip Yancey’s Soul Survivor. The wood carving has hooked me for arts and crafts for the week and I plan of updating the walking cane and making a gift for Alex and Janet.
This past couple of weeks I have dove into Dimensional Modeling and using SSIS to ETL data from a supposedly Relational Database, but more and more looking like a database created by Object Oriented developers. Lots of inherent looking transaction tables as well as lookup tables.
I am still using the Kimball Methods (and books) to create and populate these Data Marts. I seemed to have a good feel for Dimensions, but the Fact tables I am struggling to hang on to the normalized structure just cause I know how to report off them. Other contractors seemed to do the same thing with the Facts – they are just transaction tables.
A little more practice and reports should get me out of the normalized only mentality.
God Bless,
Thomas LeBlanc
