Speaking at Lincoln SSUG

A week from now, I'll be speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Lincoln SQL Server User Group. There are plenty of self-deprecating comments I could make, but I'll leave that to my fine friends in the Lincoln area. Instead, I'll be sincere and thank them for the opportunity and do my best to deliver a great presentation. I was hoping to revisit my "45 new language features in 45 minutes" presentation from SQL Saturday 66 but there were requests for an SSIS talk and that's definitely an area I've been wanting to get out and talk on. My original title was lacking "SSIS Do's and Don't's: A guide to loving ETL or a handbook to hell." One of the best teachers I had at college, Dr. Bogan, said "Never underestimate the power of a catchy title." I liked the guidebook concept and thought of one of the more famous guidebooks is easily the Kama Sutra. Thus, the "Kama Sutra of SSIS: A guide to loving ETL" was born.

I'm sure everyone has their own way of doing things. Whether it's a new project, presentation or anything where I have lots of stuff floating about in my head in no discernable order, I fire up FreeMind and just start jotting things down. It doesn't really lend itself to long developed ideas like I tend to box myself into when I fire up my text editor to write. It's a great tool, free (in both senses) and works on most any operating system out there.

This is an export of where I was 15 days ago in terms of my SSIS brain dump.

This is what my mind map looks like as of today. I think that I've found a logical enough ordering for delivering the content I want to talk about. I chose to keep the branches intact and copy the salient points out into the Presentation branch (lower left corner)

I want to thank John Danley, Twitter, for the opportunity and for the all the folks that have gotten the Lincoln area's SSUG organized. I hope we can get a good speaker exchange set up in the near future. Once Brad McGehee (Blog|Twitter) gets the Springfield SSUG up and running, we could get some serious cross-pollination going.