Agile Development – Agile BI

You Don’t Have Time for Testing?!

jwelch — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 16:51:22 +0000

I wrote a post for the Pragmatic Works blog that I thought would be interesting for my readers, so I’m posting a teaser here. If you want to read the whole post, go here.

I’ve been a big advocate of testing for applications, databases, data warehouses, BI and analytics for a while now. Not just any testing, but real tests that help you truly verify the state of your code, applications and data. I like Test Driven Development, but really any approach that focuses on automated, repeatable tests that verify meaningful functionality I find hugely beneficial. And almost no one I’ve ever talked to about this topic has disagreed with me. (There was that one guy, but he was a FoxPro developer, so…) But there’s often a point where the conversation goes sideways.

Follow Up for Continuous Delivery Presentation at CBIG

jwelch — Thu, 07 May 2015 19:43:45 +0000

I presented Continuous Delivery for Data Warehouses and Marts at the Charlote BI Group Tuesday night. They have a great group there and I look forward to going back.

This is one of my favorite topics, and I always get good questions. CBIG was no exception, with some great questions on managing database schema changes when using continuous delivery, how continuous delivery and continuous deployment differ, and how to manage this in a full BI environment.

One question came up that I needed to verify – “Can you call an executable from a post-deployment script in SSDT?” The scenario for this was running a third-party utility to handle some data updates. I have confirmed that the post-deployment scripts for SSDT can only execute SQL commands, so you can’t run executables directly from them. However, as we discussed at the meeting, you can add additional executable calls into the MSBuild scripts I demonstrated to manage that part of your deployment process.

I promised to make my presentation and demos available, so here they are. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Where’s John These Days?

jwelch — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:47:27 +0000

Apologies for the lack of updates to the blog recently. It’s been a very busy time, but hopefully things will settle down a bit now.

Exciting news today (for me at least)! It was my first day as a Pragmatic Works employee. I’ve joined their product group, and will be helping manage the development of their BI tools. As I’ve commented on this blog before, one of the things I ‘m really passionate about is enabling BI developers to create solutions faster and more easily, and I’m looking forward to the opportunities that Pragmatic Works presents to continue doing exactly that. I also get to work with a great group of developers and some really sharp BI people, so it promises to be a lot of fun.

My excitement is tempered somewhat by sadness at leaving another great group of developers at Varigence. I enjoyed working with everyone there, and wish them success in their future endeavors.

In other news, I have a number of presentations coming up. I’ll be at SQLBits in London on March the 29th, presenting a precon with Matt Masson on SSIS Performance Design Patterns (space is limited, register now!). I also have a session on SSIS Unit Testing at SQLBits.

On April 14th, I’ll be presenting at SQL Saturday #111 in Atlanta, which is always a great time. I’ll be presenting on Tuning SSAS Processing Performance.

Last, but definitely not least, I was thrilled to find out that I’ll be presenting the Tuning SSAS Processing Performance session at SQL Rally in Dallas on May 10-11 as well. Please vote for one of my other sessions in the community choice options, if you see one that appeals to you. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of my friends from Texas again.