PASS, Microsoft, and local SQL Server communities are proud to follow up on the hugely successful event last year in Stockholm and invite you to PASS SQLRally Nordic 2012, 1-3 October, at the Crowne Plaza in Copenhagen, Denmark. This year’s event will begin with a full day of pre-conference seminars on October 1, followed by 30 top technical sessions and nonstop networking opportunities during the main conference on 2-3 October.

Join the excitement and meet top international speakers such as Conor Cunningham, Denny Lee, Tobias Thernstrom, Stacia Misner, and Silvano Coriani. Learn the latest about SQL Server database administration, database and application development, and Business Intelligence. And connect and have fun with over 500 fellow SQL Server professionals and MVPs at a special attendee party.

Register by May 31 and save up to EUR 250 on the “super early bird”!

Also there is a call for speakers open. You can submit up to two session proposals and have the chance to present them at SQLRally.

Hope to see you there!

The new T-SQL 2012 features I’m using are:

Sequence

The sequence is a number generator that is similar to an IDENTITY column, but not tied to a particular table. The main usage I see is scenarios where you want an id number that is guaranteed unique between tables. You can let multiple tables use the same sequence as default value for a column.

Format

The new T-SQL format allows you to customize the way numbers, dates, etc are converted to strings. Basically it gives you the same functionality as .NET developers have had in their format function. You specify a format, which could be something like “X03″ which then would mean hexadecimal representation with leading zeroes and 3 characters.

Iif

This is a simplified case statement, that evaluates a condition and returns either one of two arguments depending on whether the condition evaluates to true or false. It is just a shorter and more readable way of writing the case statement.

Window functions

This is in my opinion the most powerful new T-SQL feature. It would deserve a full book to explain in depth, but in a nutshell it allows us to work with a subset of rows without having to do self joins or correlated subqueries. For instance we can access previous and next row through functions lag and lead. We can also very easily calculate running totals or moving averages.

There are more T-SQL 2012 news, like the new date functions, parse, try_parse and offset that I would have liked to included if I had found any use for them in the 99 bottles of beer code. Let me know if you come up with ideas!

Below is the source code.

---------------------------------------------------------------
-- 99 BOTTLES OF BEER
-- SQL Server 2012 version. Using Sequence, Format, Iif and Window functions.
-- 
-- (C) Johan Åhlén, 2012
-- Blog: http://www.joinsights.com
-- This is BEERWARE. If you like it - send the author a beer!  
---------------------------------------------------------------

SET NOCOUNT ON

CREATE SEQUENCE dbo.Seq AS SMALLINT
START WITH 99
INCREMENT BY -1
MINVALUE 0
NO CYCLE;

-- Create XML document with 100 elements
DECLARE @xml AS XML = '' + REPLICATE('', 100) + '';

-- Create a temporary table with verse numbers from sequence
-- and use XML document to generate rows
SELECT 
  NEXT VALUE FOR dbo.Seq AS VerseNumber 
  INTO #Verses
  FROM @xml.nodes('//v') X(c)

-- Translate to text parts
SELECT
  VerseNumber,
  IIF(VerseNumber > 0, FORMAT(Versenumber, 'd'), 'No more') +
  IIF(VerseNumber = 1, ' bottle', ' bottles') + ' of beer' AS NumberOfBeers,
  IIF(VerseNumber = 0, 'Go to the store and buy some more', 'Take one down and pass it around') AS WhatToDo
  INTO #TextParts
  FROM #Verses

SELECT
  NumberOfBeers + ' on the wall, ' + 
  LOWER(NumberOfBeers) + '. ' +
  WhatToDo + ', ' + 
  LOWER(ISNULL(LEAD(NumberOfBeers) OVER (ORDER BY VerseNumber DESC), 
               FIRST_VALUE(NumberOfBeers) OVER (ORDER BY VerseNumber DESC))) + 
  ' on the wall.' AS Lyrics
FROM #TextParts
ORDER BY VerseNumber DESC

DROP SEQUENCE dbo.Seq
DROP TABLE #Verses
DROP TABLE #TextParts

SQL Server

During the two main conference days, 25 – 26 April, there will be a number of sessions about SQL Server at TechDays this year.

Introduction to SQL Server 2012

This session is presented by me and will cover the top new features in SQL Server 2012 for developers, IT pros and Business  Intelligence specialists. The session will be in room 3 on Wednesday at 13:15. Don’t miss this if you want to get an overview of the greatest new features.

SQL Server Private Cloud

The cloud is now one of the biggest so called “buzz words”, but many still feel uncertain about storing important or sensitive data in a public cloud. Peter Werdenhoff and Mikael Colliander will present how you can build  your own private cloud with the Database Consolidation Appliance, which is a joint initiative by HP and Microsoft. This session will be held in room 4 on Thursday at 9.00.

Data Quality and Enterprise Information Management

Jörgen Hasselgren and Simon Lidberg will present how to handle the whole data lifecycle with Data Quality Services, Master Data Services and Integration Services. They will show demonstrations and code examples. The session will be in room 9 on Thursday at 9:00.

Hybrid Solutions for Big Data

Big Data is one of our absolutely biggest challenges. Data volumes are exploding and are expected to increase by 44 times during the next 10 years. How can we create solutions to handle these large amounts of data? There are scale-out solutions like MPP (Massive Parallel Processing) and MapReduce, but should it all be run on premise? During this session Simon Lidberg will present a hybrid solution combining SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse and MapReduce running on Hadoop in a Windows Azure cloud. The session will be in room 8 on Thursday at 15.30.

SQL Server 2012 + SQL Azure = True

How can you make external databases in SQL Azure work together with internal SQL Server 2012 databases? Håkan Winther will present a solution using the new “Data Sync”, that can be used to make your internal data available in the cloud. This session will be in room 9 on Thursday at 15.30.

Summary

As usual, the session list at TechDays Sweden is very impressive. Apart from these SQL Server sessions, there will also be many great sessions from my M33t (m33ters on Twitter) friends:

• Alan Smith (Azure)
• Andreas Stenhall (Windows) – Killer features in Windows 8 – Dare to miss them on TechDays?
• Björn Axell (System Center)
• Cecilia Wiren (.NET)
• Chris Klug (.NET)
• Daniel Bugday (Sharepoint) – See you on TechDays 2012 Örebro #MSDN #TD2012
• Hasain Alshakarti (Security) – MEET@TechDays 2012 in Örebro
• Henrik Nilsson (FIM, ADFS, Security) – Microsoft Extended Experts Team – MEET
• Johan Arwidmark (System Center) – Networking at TechDays 2012 in Sweden – The Microsoft Extended Experts Team (MEET)
• Johan Åhlén (SQL Server) - SQL Server sessions at TechDays Sweden 2012
• Magnus Björk (Exchange) – #td2012 here I come
• Magnus Mårtensson (Azure) – TechDays.se 2012 – About Windows Azure
• Patrik Löwendahl (.NET)
• Mathias Olausson (ALM)
• Jörgen Nilsson (System Center) – Microsoft Extended Experts Team – MEET
• Ola Skoog (IT Pro Evanglist) – MEET@TechDays
• Anders Olsson (Security)
• Joakim Nässlander (Windows Server, Cluster)
• Martin Lidholm (Unified Communication, Lync)

New this time is that the event is truly international, with translation and subtitles in 15 languages.

The event starts 21 March at 00:00 GMT time (at midnight in London). Register for the event here!

Rob Farley has written a more extensive blog post about 24 hours of PASS here.

The responsible trainers will be Marco Russo and Chris Webb, two of the absolute top instructors on Microsoft BI. By the way, both were speakers at last PASS SQLRally Nordic.

More details in this blog post:
http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/ssas-maestros-training-july-9-13-2012-milan-italy/

General information about the new SSAS Maestros is available on Microsoft’s website: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/ssas-maestros.aspx#tab1

TechDays is the biggest and best Microsoft conference in Sweden with around 1900 visitors. Buy your tickets in time, as it usually gets sold out. Hope to see you there!

Reporting is an integral part of any BI solution and as the adoption of the Microsoft Cloud platform increases, it is inevitable to leave reporting out of the cloud offerings. This session will explore, what is Azure Reporting, SSRS to the cloud architecture and the integrated Windows Azure platform experience.

Key takeaways from this session:

• Learn about SQL Azure Reporting Preview
• How to build an SQL Azure Report
• Security Considerations
• Key Limitations for SQL Azure Reporting Preview.

Simran Jindal (MCTS/MCITP SQL Server 2005/2008) is a Business Intelligence Consultant with SolidQ Nordics AB in Sweden. She is an Economics major with a Masters in Information Technology and Management. She has worked as a software developer since 1999 and have implemented solutions across a wide spectrum of verticals such as Education, Retail, Finance, Public sector, Non-Governmental Welfare Organizations and Real Estate. Since 2006 her focus has been the Microsoft BI stack spanning from ETL to Cubes to Reporting.

Date: 8 March at 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (GMT-5:00) Eastern Time

Click here to watch the recorded session 

Read more and sign up here:
http://sqlug20120402.eventbrite.com/

Download here

• http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/get-sql-server/try-it.aspx
• If you have MSDN or TechNet, you can download there

Read more

• http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2012/mar12/03-06SQLServer12PR.mspx
• http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2012/03/06/sql-server-2012-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

The seminar with Bob Beauchemin is held 3-4 April in Stockholm.

Click here for more info and registration.