Data Mining with SQL Server 2005 and 2008

Well this is a surprise one! The original session I had planned on BI has been canned and this put in place! This has been happening a fair bit this week and a few of the BI/Analysis Services ones have been cancelled very last minute! Ah well on with the show!

Wow apparently Data Mining is the exact opposite of cryptography! Legal Hacking!!!!

Oh yeh its Rafal again so more Microsoft failures may be posted!

Not only for Business Intelligence but mining can be used for database logs and server logs to explore the hidden answers that exist within any data.

For those who dont know what Data Mining is....

• 
  
  Technologies for analysis of data and discovery of (very) hidden patterns.
  
• 
  
  Uses a combination of statistics, probability analysis and database technologies
• 
  Fairly young (<20>

And this is what it does...

Explores your data --------> Finds Patterns--------> Performs Predictions

OLAP and Data Mining is PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS!

We can apparently even use Data Mining to correct and improve the ETL Process for the Datawarehouse! It works out if things are missing! Surely this is the best thing since sliced bread!

Sorry Im running out of photos now.

Create Mining Model (Sytanx)

CREATE MINING MODEL MyModel

(

[CustID] Text KEY,

[Gender] Text DISCRETE,

...

[Home Ownership] TEXT DISCRETE PREDICT,

...

) USING Microsoft_Decision_Trees

PREDICT is what you want the Mining Model to predict. You can PREDICT Multiple items.

A demonstration followed showing the steps involved with creating a Mining Model and starting to drill!

Next Generation Networking in Windows Server 2008

An excellent talk by Rafal Lukawiecki who surprise, surprise doesn't work for Microsoft so his view was completely unbiased! He pointed out some serious issues with the Networking stack in Vista as a starting note and continued on to some of the excellent new features in Server 2008.

There have been some improvements in the way IPSec is managed in 2008 as apposed to how it is currently done in 2000/2003. I won't bore everybody with the details here.

He also showed us how IPv6 has been implemented within Server 2008 which brought memories of Computer Science 2nd Year lectures come flooding back to me!

NG TCP/IP (Next Gen) also has some really cool features that allow bandwidth on a network to be throttled down to the level of individual applications. This would allow multiple applications to reside on one server and to be able to customise how to share out the available bandwidth between these. Obviously this may not be something that we worry about at the moment but as more and more applications are introduced within the institution this may be a handy feature!

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) : Zero to Hero

This was an excellent talk on Integration Servcies for SQL 2005/2008. Integration Services is the new DTS and should be easier and quicker to use.



The Business Intelligence Development Studio





SSIS solutions are designed within part of the BI Dev Studio which is a variation of Visual Studio. The graphical approach used for DTS has been brought to SSIS but has a more Visual Studio drag and drop approach where you can just drag a connection from the toolbox into your SSIS Project.





Components of SSIS

• Control Flow - Specifies the logical flow of a package, defines the steps in a package and defines precedence amongst steps.


• Control Flow Maintenance Plan Tasks - Behind the scenes of Database Maintenance Plans.


• Control Flow Tasks (eek thats smaller than I was expecting)
• Control Flow Containers - Loops through datasets/file systems and links items and tasks together in sequences.
• Data Flow Items - Defines how data flows from source to destination and defines transformations.
• Data Flow Sources - Defines the source of data.
• Connection Manager - Defines source, destination and auxillary connections.

Converting DTS 2000 to SSIS 2005

There is a SQL Updgrade Advisor for this process and the biggest problems seem to be with encapsulation.

Execution of Packages

SSIS packages can be executed from:-

• Execution from within BIDS
• Execution using DTEXECUI
• Execution using DTEXEC
• Execution using SQL Server Agent Jobs

Each of these have advantages/disadvantages over one another. One big advantage I can see of execution through BIDS (Business Intelligence Dev Studio) is the ability to Debug your SSIS projects. This is new and should be really useful when designing and testing your SSIS projects.

DTS is dead long live SSIS apparently...

Windows Vista Service Pack 1

This as expected was a very busy session. No seats were remaining so I had to sit on the floor at the back.

(It's amazing how an application crashing and burning can attract so many numbers!!!!!!!!!!!!)

From past experience in Vista I know how terrible the newly written audio stack and the awful driver support which leaves you with blue screens which frustrate the everyday user can be.

SP1 therefore is of coure the solution............

Noooooo...

Instead Microsoft seem to have focused on improving the speed of unzipping a zipped folder to the desktop. Awww bless. If only I had the courage to stand up and say "Yeh but WinRAR is still quicker and it needs sooooooo much less resources than the out of the box solution.

And think of all the time they have spent on this!!!! They probably forgot about the fact that if people with a Medley Serial ATA 133 RAID PCI adaptor upgrade their driver through the Windows Update Service as reccomended by the speaker in the presentation they can say goodbye to their pc forever. (This is true, I've tested it!)

In my opinion Vista was never ready to RTM (Release To Manufacturer) and it still is not! SP1 focuses on some performance increases that already existed in Windows XP but does not fix the critical errors that have been made with Vista.

TBH I don't believe Vista will be ready for a long time! Yes it looks cool and it's got some see-through stuff but so does Leopard OS-X and that doesnt let you down when you try play an MP3. Maybe when we get to about SP4 it will be useable.

This is a bit of a dissapointer for me and maybe this is why I have posted it last thing but I don't see a lot of encouragement to upgrade to Vista. The specs of machines Microsoft are saying are minimum specs are 800mhz with 512mb or ram. This may sound like just some figures but when entire Microsoft projects are based on these statistics which in my opinion (I have tried Vista on 512mb laptop which was fine until I wanted to do something) are wrong, they need to have a rethink. I don't think there is anything wrong with saying PC's should have at least 1gb of ram but pretending that Vista will work with less is being cruel!

I think I'm whinging so....

Server 2008 however is another story!!!!

Now that's a product we can really use to improve our Microsoft Based Servers.

UK Education Special

Software As A Service

Live @ Edu (Email For Life?)
Logging into Microsoft Live Services with CardSpace. Students are given an email address which can be branded as lancs.ac.uk.... But it isn't hosted by Lancaster's servers. One advantage of this is the whole "email for life" idea is taken out of our hands and Microsoft looks after it! So the Alumni department would not lose track of the students once they leave the University.

Office Live Workspace
Paid for via ads but the ads will only appear when the users searches using "Live Search". This can be thought of as SharePoint Lite or (SharePoint for Students). It acts as a) a place for students to organise events with each other, b) a place for students to share documents when working on projects together etc.. I am not sure on its integration with SharePoint but I must admit it looks very similar! It would be nice if it had the ability for lecturers who keep their slides in SharePoint to push these down to a lecture/seminar group via Office Live Workspaces but this unfortunately was not demoed if it is even possible! It was advertised though as not the "Best Student Experience" but as the "Cheapest to implement"! Remembering that this is a free service it involved some nice ideas especially with the addition of CardSpace to log in to the service. This means you don't actually have to enter a username and password at all if you have your card with you!

It was a very odd way of advertising things but as a very recently graduated student I must admit the idea of being able to have Hotmail type facilities supported by the university is a good idea! Maybe this is why WING was such a let DISASTER!!!!!

Well in true student fashion after obtaining a reliable source of red wine and discussing the finer points of "terroir" with a certain French Man, the following picture (Wey hey a piccy at last!) shows the the UK Party at a place called Opium!

This involved very little speaking but a lot of eating small nibbles and several bottles of red wine! "Terroir" eat ur heart out!

For anyone who is thinking, "My god what the hell is this guy on about!" Terroir is a French word of which there is no direct translation. It is in fact a combination of where the grapes are grown, what conditions they were grown in and what Mother earth has given to the wine.

Wow I wasnt actually just drinking beer! How sophisticated!

This ended at 9:20 which was a bit too early so a night cap of strong lager of course had to follow!

Oh yeh I forgot about the last session!

Deploying Windows Server Update Services 3.0

We are now running WSUS 3.0 within CIS but thought this talk would give me a better overall knowledge of the way Microsoft deploy and use WSUS 3.0 to get the best potential from it. One of the main differences from WSUS 2.0 is the loss of its web based interface for a MMC Snap In which seems to be the way Microsoft wants to go for future server management applications.

WSUS
Provide a simple, low cost, solution for distributing Microsoft Updates within a corporation. Does not natively allow updates from 3rd party software to be pushed out through WSUS but there are ways round it to allow this to happen.

WSUS 3.0 Features

• Initial configuration wizard
• MMC-Based UI, with advanced filtering and sorting
• Email notification of new updated (and/or compliance summary)
• Multiple, more granular, auto-approval rules
• Integrated reporting rollup
• Cleanup Wizard
• Native x64 support
• Vista BITS peer-caching
• Scalability Improvements
• Access to more content - import from the MU catalogue site
• MOM Pack
• Improved logging and audit logging
• NLB and SQL clustering
• Read-only administrative role (WSUS reporters)
• Enhanced targeting
• Upgrade to SCE or Configuration Manager 2007
• A single machine can be added to more than one group.
• Ability to have more than one WSUS Server and manage them all from the same MMC
• Snap-In.
• Lost support for SQL 2000!!!!
• Can manage Windows Server 2008.
  

Guidance For Running WSUS 3.0

• Always ensure WSUS sits behind a firewall.
• Always use SSL
• Windows Internal Database recommended as it does not require a SQL CAL and gives you good performance without an install of SQL 2005.
• Only use Network Load Balancing for WSUS 3.0 if it is required as it is easy to just rebuild a failed WSUS server.
• Cleanup wizard should be used fairly frequently to remove superseded updates and archived updates from more than 12 months ago.
• Any SQL Server 2000 Databases need to be Upgraded to 2005 as these servers will not currently be receiving any updates for SQL 2000.
• Use the WSUSUtil checkhealth option to ensure finished deployment is working correctly.
• The Windows Update log file gives a very verbose audit trail of what has occurred on the WSUS server and from the WSUS server and connected clients.

Service Pack 1 Release

• Added support for Windows Server 2008 release.
• Better support for Partner Products.
• Integration with Server Manager.
• Computer Detailed Status reports to Excel now works!
• Bulk approval of updates now does not overwrite existing approvals.
• Additional APIs added to support Mobile Devices and Richer publishing of drivers within the enterprise using vendor provided catalogues (e.g. Dell, HP, IBM etc...)
• Available at launch of Windows 2008 release.
• Seamless upgrade from RTM.
• Can later upgrade to System centre Essentials or configuration Manager 2007
  
  

New Software and Hardware Capabilities : Next steps in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

Well I had high expectations for this one as thought this would key in quite nicely with the ProClarity and Analysis Services stuff we are working on. Rachel and Andrew will back me up here I think when I say this was the biggest advertisement for AMD Processors thats ever been made under the title of BI!

All I can really say on this one is that we now know that AMD Quad Core CPUS are ace and Intel are just crap in comparison! This had nothing to do with BI at all but hey it's AMD!!!!!

I think I've been brainwashed!!! If you suddenly see a big increase in the number of servers in CIS and ICT Focus running AMD processors you can blame IT FORUM!

Really sorry but I don't think this Session improved my knowledge of BI at all!!!!

If u wanna know the advantages of Opteron Quad core on a socket F board tho, feel free to contact Rachel, Andrew or myself who will be able to help you out!


And no Picture! Sorry!

However I did find...

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOzKtMtAlHo

You can almost hear the screams from Chris Dixon!