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Alan:
If you are going to be working with Microsoft SQL Server, you
are going to need the right tools. To have the right tools, you must
have the right training. Our
guests, today, are Craig Jensen, CEO & President and Martin
Schaeferle, Vice President of Product Development with AppDev.
Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, guys.
Craig:
Thank you for having us.
Alan:
Martin, why is training for Microsoft SQL Server so
important? Is SQL Server
that complex?
Martin:
SQL Server has grown over the years and has become more and
more complex because of new business needs the companies have.
One of the fastest growing areas of SQL Server right now is
called Business Intelligence. Business
Intelligence stems around a common business challenge: How do I get the
right information to the right people at the right time?
SQL Server has historically been a great tool for collecting data
–- indexing data and presenting data, but businesses are finding now
it’s very difficult to really get at information quickly or to
organize information in such a way that it’s easy for company
employees to get information from it.
Alan:
Just setting up SQL Server is not the hard part; it’s
managing or the analysis that you have to do with Microsoft SQL Server;
the reporting that you have to learn how to use.
Those all take training or you will just be "flying
blind”, won’t you?
Martin:
Exactly. It’s quite overwhelming, the first time you jump into SQL
Server; there’s a lot of information and it’s not just a repository
for data anymore.
Some of the new
technologies that go into the Business Intelligence include: Integration
Services – SSIS; Reporting Services– SSRS; and Analysis Services –
SSAS.
Alan:
Any time that Microsoft comes out with a new version of SQL
Server, they throw in all these new buzz words that you have to learn
and each one of them is complicated beyond belief; if you don’t get it
right. And you have a suite
of products, SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Learning Suite that
helps us get past this first learning curve, don’t you?
Craig:
We have SQL Server training for the main SQL Server 2005
product and also we have a course in each of the Business Intelligence
areas of Reporting Services, Analysis Services, and Integration
Services. Each one of them
includes eight sessions, between 9 and 12 hours of media run time and a
course book of 500-plus pages. The
courseware is thorough. It is
easy to follow your way through it.
We try to make
the learning experience very effective for the developers.
As Marty said, the real key is to get our training to the right
people at the right time. We have
really phrased our training as “just-in-time training”, where
somebody that has a question can go right to a module and learn it -- or
he or she can take the entire course from start to finish.
Alan:
Marty, why are the Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence
tools so great for developers and how do you work with them?
Martin:
To answer that first, let me kind of break it up into the
three components. We Start with
SSIS or Integration Services. One of the key challenges in businesses is dealing with all of the
information that a company organizes.
That’s not limited just SQL Server.
Perhaps another database like Oracle or Access, maybe they are in
flat-files or XML even Microsoft Excel files.
All that information is important.
SSIS is a set of
tools that a developer can use that very efficiently pulls all of that
information; converts it if necessary into whatever the data warehouse
needs it in and then imports it and organizes it within SQL Server.
Kind of the first piece at getting at the wealth of data exists
within a business.
The next tool is
SSAS, or Analysis Services. Once
we have all this information, how do we organize into a way that we can
actually get relative information out of it?
One of problems
with databases, historically in their typical format of rows and
columns, it’s very difficult to create relations between tables and
it’s also difficult to actually get performance, so that you can
collect from various sources, quickly so the information doesn’t
become stale by the time you receive it.
And so, SSAS is
a set of services and API’s that allows developers to take all this
information and through the use of algorithms, put it into a format that
is very easy for business users and non-technical people to actually get
a it and create queries and also provides the performance so they can
get information, aggregate it quickly and efficiently for them.
Alan:
And you cover things in the Analysis course, like data mining
– why it’s so important; online analytical processing.
You go into the meat and potatoes of what SQL Server Analytical
Services are.
Martin:
And we really have a “watch and learn “ model in or
training. When you watch
our training, you will see a developer working with these tools.
You watch it on the screen; you see them interact with SQL
Server, interact with the Analysis Services, so you can watch them build
these OLAP cubes and ways of viewing information; watch them create the
end result. They use
real-world business scenarios within the samples, so as a student,
watching these instructional videos - you can actually see the process
from start to finish, (and you’re not kind of left like in a book or
perhaps other means), where you’re not quite sure exactly what
they’re describing. It is very
good information.
Alan:
And then, of course, you have the Reporting Services.
And the Reporting Services – how does that help people?
Martin:
Reporting Services is the great enhancement to SQL Server.
It’s something that Microsoft introduced shortly after 2000
came out. But it was
answering the needs of developers, which was, “How do I get this
information in format that business users can use?”
They just can’t get a page with a bunch of raw data on it; they
need it put together either through pie charts or bar charts, plus they
also want to empower their business users so they can do their own
filtering and their own sorting, their own analysis on the data, without
needing to bring in a developer.
SSRS or SQL
Reporting Services is a powerful set of API's, giving a developer to
create reporting templates or reporting models that then, regular
business users can use and they can then enhance or they can manipulate
the information, without the need of a developer.
A fully
web-based solution, it also provides, right of the box, the ability to
take these reports and render them as HTML or PDF, Excel, flat-files,
it’s a very powerful tool.
Alan:
You can go away to a school and you can learn how to use
Microsoft SQL Server or you can do it on your own time.
And this is where your course really shines, because we can do it
any time; anywhere we want to do it.
Craig:
Our training really is put together as “just-in-time”
Learning. Some one can take
a look at the course as an introductory developer and take it from
beginning to end or they can specifically go into a topic – look at
that topic and learn what they need to know, then.
It really is
like an instructor-led training class on your monitor.
You have an expert that is walking you through demonstrations;
you can practice what you have seen by doing Labs; and then you can take
exams to take a look at how you have done within that area.
The other real
advantage of our training materials is our course books.
With each course, we have a comprehensive course book that, if
someone learns best by reading, they can utilize that; if some one
learns by watching it on the screen, they can do that.
Alan:
How many CD’s or DVD’s do you get with your typical
course of Business Intelligence?
Craig:
With each of the Business Intelligence courses that we have,
if you are purchasing it on CD’s, there’s 8 CD’s.
If you would like it on a DVD, it’s on one DVD.
Total training time -- materials including the labs, the
run-time, the exam -- is in excess of 27 hours for each one of the
courses. So, they are very
comprehensive courses.
Alan:
The beautiful part about it is that you can take these any
time that you want. If you
start training at school and you have to miss a day – because life
happens – then you get far behind and it’s hard to catch up,
especially on a subject that is so detailed such as Microsoft SQL Server
– you can go back and you can review any time that you want to.
What kind of
statistics do you have so far on people that like the just-in-time
training?
Craig:
We have 100% money back
guarantee with our all of our courses and we have really found that
people look at our coursesas just-in-time training.
We have won many awards by readers of magazines.
We really strive to put out the highest quality product that we
can.
Alan:
To me, the trainer makes a lot of difference.
Have they been in the trenches or are they just a talking head?
Martin:
The trainers for SQL BI Suite are individually chosen as
experts within that particular technology.
So, you will see in our suites, there are actually 3 different
presenters that do these series.
Paul Litwin is
the presenter in the SSRS. He
is very well known in the Reporting Services area.
He speaks on them at industry conferences and also works directly
with Microsoft as a tester and White Paper Article writer.
Lynn Langit who
did our SSAS Course. She
was one of the internal trainers within Microsoft that actually teaches
SSAS to Microsoft employees.
Chris Randall
who did our SSIS course. He
runs a successful consulting company and does a lot of integration
consulting work; he works with very large companies in setting up
systems and was originally with Lynn Langit.
It is very
important that the instructor that you get be someone that’s a
practicing developer; someone that’s been in the trenches; someone
that knows kind of the “pain points” that you run into.
To have that person present and to walk you through it is very
powerful. You are kind of
working one-on-one with some one who is very successful in that
particular technology.
Alan:
I’ve been reviewing the AppDev training courses for years
and one of the things that I really appreciate is the lab sessions.
Because, yes, you get all the training and all the knowledge, but
working with the lab sessions, when I get finished, I have something
that I can use over and over again in my business and it’s something
that you can’t get anywhere else.
Martin:
Exactly. All of the files that the instructor uses during the
presentation, you have access to; also at the end of each chapter within
the course, there are hands-on labs.
So, you can actually perform what you just saw while you were
watching the instructor. By
going through it step-by-step, so you even get some kind of handholding,
early on. You can walk
through these labs; they guide you through it; you get a tactile
experience with them. You
get all the files that go with those, as well.
The labs are a
very important piece. It is
very rare that you find those in any other training series.
They are also great for reference material.
Even today, I find myself going back to courses that are 2-3-4
years old, just to get at labs and think, “Hey, remember we did this
or I remember working with this technology.”
You pull it out, you run through and it all comes back and you
are on your way.
Alan:
And of course, you can get each of these courses separately.
What are we looking at as far as the price?
Craig:
You can get each of them separately.
Each of the BI Courses has a suggested retail of $1,295.00.
You can buy it individually or we have packaged them together in
a suite. If you buy all
three of them – your cost is $2,995.00.
If you are a
large shop with many developers, a good way to do it is through our
KSource Online Learning, which is a tool that delivers the learning via
media server. That can be
installed behind your firewall or hosted over the Internet.
That can be used for anywhere from 10 developers up to hundreds
or thousands of developers.
Alan:
To will find information about your great training suites and
courses, where would they go?
Craig:
There are a couple of ways you can go to take a look further
at our award-winning products. One is to call of our Sales Executives at 1-800-578-2062.
The other way is to go up on our website at http://wwww.appdev.com.
Alan:
Craig and Marty, again, it’s been our pleasure to have you
as our guests on Let’s Talk Computers and we look forward to having
you back on the air again, real soon.
Craig:
Thank you for having us.
Martin:
Thanks, Alan.
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