IEBI: Immersion Event on Business Intelligence

(Retired – no longer offered as a public class)

Overview

Even with little to no knowledge of BI, this course will provide you with immediately-usable, production-level knowledge of BI. The SQL Server training course has been designed for anyone who needs to become familiar with all facets of the BI stack—Biml, SSAS, SSRS, and Excel. Are you a DBA who wants to better understand how to support BI projects on your servers? Or do you need to jumpstart your skills so you can start building solid, scalable BI solutions? This class might be the perfect way to advance your career and dig deeper into topics that don’t typically get covered in most BI classes.

Relational data warehousing – with lots of aggregate tables – helps you keep your data organized for Excel or any other type of reporting or analysis tool that you might want to use, but some types of business questions are answered more easily when you move your data from the data warehouse into SSAS cubes. Or maybe tabular models? How do you know which direction to go? In this class, you’ll learn the pros and cons of each approach and the decision points to consider before you choose.

Whether you store data in tables or cubes, you have a variety of options in the BI stack to access and analyze the data, but which is best? Learn how to choose the right tool for the task and how to manage a secure and scalable environment for reporting and analysis.Maybe you accomplish quite a bit with Excel – but how do you get the data there? Quite a few folks use cut-and-paste, or import from a CSV – but of course there’s a much better, and much more scalable and robust way using SSIS! Relational data warehousing – with lots of aggregate tables – helps you keep your data organized for Excel or any other type of reporting or analysis tool that you might want to use, but some types of business questions are answered more easily when you move your data from the data warehouse into SSAS cubes. Whether you store data in tables or cubes, you have a variety of options in the BI stack to access and analyze the data, but which is best? Learn how to choose the right tool for the task and how to manage a secure and scalable environment for reporting and analysis.

The course starts out in the 100-200 range on Day 1 but moves into the 200-300 range for the remainder of the week. For each technology in the BI stack, you’ll learn basic usage and design principles, followed by more coverage of configuration, performance tuning, and other management tasks than you’ll find in most BI end-to-end classes. The course will not only bridge the gap in your BI knowledge, but will continue on to take you a lot further. If you’ve always wanted to immerse yourself into BI, figure out the end-to-end story, and go behind-the-scenes to learn how to develop and deploy BI solutions, this is the place to be!

Instructor: Stacia Misner

Need Help Justifying Training? Here’s a letter to your boss explaining why SQLskills training is worthwhile and a list of community blog posts about our classes.

Curriculum

Day 1: Preparing Data for Business Intelligence

  • Relational Data Warehousing
    • Requirements analysis
    • Data warehouse design principles
    • Building the physical model
  • Integration Services Development with Biml
    • Problems solved with Biml
  • Tools for Biml development
    • Preparing your environment
  • Basic Biml Syntax
    • Biml Objects
    • Control flow with Biml
    • Data flow with Biml

Day 2: Preparing Data for Business Intelligence

  • Automation with BimlScript
    • Control blocks and directives
    • Biml model
    • Organizing Biml with multiple files
  • Biml and the Data Warehouse
    • Metadata for Biml
  • PowerShell automationA framework for data warehousing
  • Data access layer
  • Tabular vs. multidimensional: which model?
    • Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM)
    • Data model layer
    • Business logic and queries layer

Day 3: Building a Business Intelligence Foundation

  • Analysis Services Development
    • Techniques for developing data source views
    • Dimension and cube development
    • Storage modes
    • Processing options
  • Designing Aggregations
    • User hierarchies and attribute relationships
    • Aggregation Design Wizard vs. Usage Based Optimization
  • Optimization
    • Tuning aggregations
  • Using MDX to Enhance a Cube
    • MDX fundamentals
    • MDX calculations
    • MDX Script

Day 4: Building a Business Intelligence Foundation

  • Managing Analysis Services in Production
    • Scalability options
    • Securing cube access and dimensions
    • Using deployment tools
    • Working with XMLA scripts
    • Using Integration Services to automate database processing
    • Backing up and restoring an analysis services database
  • Building tabular solutions
    • Importing data
    • Enhancing the model
    • Deployment considerations
  • Getting Started with DAX
    • Usage
    • Characteristics
    • Data types
    • Functions
    • Queries

Day 5: Developing the Presentation Layer

  • Introduction to Reporting Services
    • Report design tools
    • Report items
    • Tablix concepts
    • Using expressions
    • Configuring parameters
    • Creating data visualizations
  • Managing Reporting Services in Production
    • Reporting services architecture
    • Report server management
    • Report deployment
    • Securing reports
  • Business Intelligence in Excel 2013 and Power BI
    • Pivot tables and pivot charts for analysis
    • Power Pivot
    • Power View
    • Power Map
    • Power Query
    • Options for self-service vs. collaboration

Questions?

If you have any questions not answered by our F.A.Q., please contact us.