Next Meeting: May 16, 2012

 Department of Health
   310 Israel Road SE
 Tumwater, WA 98501 

Agile Data Warehousing Made Real

Agile data warehousing is becoming a mainstream approach to overcome the traditional disconnected development approaches that led to high project failure rates.  A key component of agile development is collaboration with the user community.  Collaboration allows developers to work with users to define, refine, prioritize and test during development – the outcome is a better, more useful solution.  To maintain engagement with users the project needs to continually move forward – and this needs project velocity.  Data warehousing projects include several different development disciplines needing several products, which slows development and makes changes difficult.

 In this talk we will show agile data warehouse project phases, talk about team roles, and show how the data warehouse processing architecture can help.  Agile projects concentrate on the delivery part of the data warehouse, but this should not be at the expense of longevity, complexity and support. 

 For the demonstrations we will use WhereScape RED, which is an agile data warehouse development environment.  It enables a data warehouse developer to do more, quicker – and this has implications beyond productivity.  It enables agile development.  Better still it is done without “black boxed” technology – it leverages the Microsoft platform so there are no support or troubleshooting mysteries.

 WhereScape is data warehousing company.  It is a global company with more than 500 customers and offices / resellers in US, Europe, Australasia and Africa.

PRESENTER: Douglas Barrett is a veteran consultant specializing in BI and data warehousing with more than 14 years of experience.  Already working on database applications Douglas started in data warehousing at a retail bank on Oracle 7 and Microsoft OLAP Services in 1998.  Later in 2000, Douglas joined Microsoft as a consultant specializing in data warehousing and BI.   Then Douglas was introduced to WhereScape and WhereScape products where he became a consultant and then architect.   During his time as a consultant Douglas has led projects at banks, airlines, telcos, retailers and manufacturers to deliver data warehousing and BI solutions.  Douglas regularly talks at SQL Saturdays and DAMA events. 

Call for Speakers

 Greg Larsen is trying to put together a 6 month calendar of speakers and topics. Greg would like to start having two presentations per meeting. One topic could be a short 15 minute presentation and then the other could be a 60-90 minute topic. 

 If you have done something you think is noteworthy that others could benefit from, Greg would like to hear from you. Greg is willing to help you turn any ideas you have into a presentation. OASSUG is a user group, provided and supported by local area SQL Server users.

  Remember you don’t have to do a full-blown 90 minute presentation; even just a short presentation would be a great way to support our local SQL Server user group.