It's almost that time of year again. PASS Summit 2012 will be held Nov. 6-9 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA. Although this technical training conference for SQL Server and business intelligence (BI) professionals starts the evening of Nov. 6, there are pre-conference sessions on Nov. 5-6 that you won't want to miss. These full-day training seminars are delivered by leading experts in the SQL Server community, including Davide Mauri and Itzik Ben-Gan.

Mauri, a SolidQ mentor and member of the board of directors of SolidQ Italia, is presenting "Building the Agile Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012" on Nov. 6. Mauri will begin the daylong seminar with a discussion about what a data warehouse is and why it's needed for a successful BI solution. The latter is important because there's a myth about data warehouses making the rounds: With the in-memory technology available today, you can create a BI solution by connecting directly to data sources rather than taking the time to build a data warehouse. "That idea may sound attractive," said Mauri, "but it is like going to a car dealer and asking to have all the individual parts of a car so you can put them together yourself, just because you don't want to wait for your car to be built by the manufacturer. It doesn't make sense."

After dispelling the myth, Mauri will cover well-known data warehouse models and design patterns. He'll also cover the best approaches and tools you can use to build and maintain a data warehouse that's flexible enough to support today's fast-changing business needs. "Attendees will understand the theory behind everything we’ll talk about," said Mauri, who is the co-author of Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008. "Understanding what lies behind the curtain lets attendees personalize what they see, so they can best fit it into their own organizations."

"Of course, theory and practice must go hand-in-hand, so we'll also spend a lot of time solving real-world problems," continued Mauri. "By the end of the day, attendees will have a deep understanding of a data warehouse, how it's made, and how it works because we'll have built one using SQL Server 2012."

Ben-Gan, a SolidQ mentor and the co-founder of SolidQ, will also cover both theory and real-world practices in "T-SQL Querying and Query Tuning Enhancements in SQL Server 2005-2012" on Nov. 6. In this all-day seminar, he'll discuss and demonstrate such T-SQL enhancements as window functions, sequences, the ORDER BY clause's OFFSET and FETCH options, MERGE operations, grouping sets, the APPLY operator, pivoting and unpivoting, common table expressions (CTEs), columnstore indexes, filtered indexes, and date and time types and functions.

"Significant querying and query tuning improvements have been added the last few releases of SQL Server," said Ben-Gan, who is the author of Microsoft SQL Server 2012: T-SQL Fundamentals. "The earlier the feature was added, the more you keep discovering about it. People keep finding more creative ways to use the features that were added earlier, as well as best practices for their correct and efficient use. With the features that were added later, the focus tends to be more around learning how to use them."

"In this seminar, I cover querying and query tuning improvements of all kinds," continued Ben-Gan, "I discuss creative uses and best practices where relevant, and introduce you to the most recent improvements as well."

If you're interested in attending either Mauri's or Ben-Gan's pre-conference seminar, see the Pre-Conference Sessions web page. There you'll find registration information as well as a list of the other pre-conference sessions being offered.

SolidQ will be an exhibitor at PASS Summit 2012. Look for a discount code on the SolidQ landing page to get $200 off the registration fee for the three-day PASS Summit.