I just did something a long time coming, and I’m not talking about going to the gym.

Last year while still in grad school, I used some available student loan money to buy my own ticket to the Professional Association for SQL Server 2011 Summit.  Why did I pay out of my own pocket?  Because the earlier I signed up, the cheaper the rate, and I couldn’t know for sure if my future employer would cover the cost. I wasn’t even sure that I’d have the time off to attend.  I could have rolled the dice, but I wanted to make absolutely sure, since I had heard how valuable it was (in terms of both learning and networking).

So the event was last week, and let me tell you…it was everything it’s cracked up to be.  My emotional batteries have been running pretty low lately, and this event helped immensely.  I finally had a good baseline to gauge where my knowledge level is (and how far it’s come), and that gave me a lot more confidence.  I remember that in one session, the speaker said “Show of hands…who here thinks they’re the dumbest person in the room?”  A tiny voice in my head said “Oh hell no, I’m not raising my hand, even if I think it applies”, but I saw about 25% of the room ‘fess up.  I was shocked.  I mean, here are people that…well…uh…that are more like me than I thought.  At least in terms of confidence, or whatever it is that made them raise their hands.  Where we differed is in how honest we were about our insecurities, I guess.  I bet a good chunk of those people would be considered some of the smartest people in the room, in fact.

I did some networking as well, in between sessions where I watched in awe at some demos, and met a lot of great people.  I have to admit though, when I shelled out an additional $400 for a 7-hour deep dive class on MDX, DAX, and DMX (in addition to the $1000 I paid last year), plus $18 per day for parking, plus gas…it hurt.  Was it worth it, yes.  Would I do it again?  If I can save up the money, I sure would.  It was the best use of my time that I’ve done in ages.  But yeah, it was more than a little disheartening to hear people at dinner say things like “yeah, I’m going to expense this dinner…”  Kind of wanted to say, “Me too.  I expense it to Mastercard”

I’ll probably later share more details about PASS.  Specifically, I want to address some of the uplifting things I heard during the Women in Technology luncheon.  Then, for my geek friends, I’ll post some details on what I saw and learned.

I guess my main message here is…do your damndest, to the best of your ability, to beg/borrow/steal to invest in yourself.  If you don’t, who will?  Seriously, do you know of a personal development fairy?  Because I sure don’t.  If I’ve learned anything these past few years, it’s that you have to be your own fairy godmother.  YOU.  Not your spouse, not your family, but you.  If you’re at a point in your life where you don’t think you’re worth the investment (especially if other people are in your life are telling you that too), pretend that you are.  Do some sort of “Tawanda!” moment like in Fried Green Tomatoes.  Think you don’t have the money?  Can you maybe take out an extra $10 every time you’re at the grocery store, and sock it away?  Don’t laugh, it adds up — that’s how I was able to buy a used copy of a GMAT prep book.  Little by little, you have to do something. 

“Get busy living or get busy dying” –Shawshank Redemption

I was at the PASS Summit this week, and one of the many revelations that I got was that I need to change the focus of this blog. I don’t often blog about technical BI things because I’m not yet at a point where I feel confident enough to do so. So…why am I not blogging about workplace confidence and work/life balance instead?  I need to start where I’m at, and go from there.

I’ve never really mentioned here the hardships that I’ve had to overcome to get to this point, and how I still struggle every single day to make progress.  I’ve had so many curve balls thrown at me that I must be living in a batting cage or something.  In fact, you know those Holmes and Rahe stress tests where you list all the major life events in the past year, and it quantifies your level of stress?  A score of 150 is moderate/elevated stress, a score of 300+ is listed as “You have a 90% chance of developing an illness due to stress”.  I just took it and scored a 530.

So, here are the things I’ll probably blog about from now on, and hopefully it’ll help someone out there know that they’re not alone…and offer input for me as well:

• Starting a new career after many years out of the traditional workforce (in my case, being primarily a stay-at-home mom)
• Breaking into a new career
• Proving your value in the workplace when you’re new
• Carrying yourself with confidence, despite limited experience in your field
• Trying to be a good mom, without ticking off the childless younger folks in your office when you say that you can’t work late
• The usual “being a woman in a male dominated field” stuff…not because I feel that I’ve ever been discriminated against, but because of how I feel intimidated around males
• Building your life after catastrophic events
• Finding mentors, helpful resources, and building a “personal Board of Directors” (a term I heard Yanni Robel mention at the WIT lunch)
• Keeping yourself healthy so you can deal with what comes at you
• Volunteering and networking with limited time
• Personal development and training while on a tight budget
• Time management and organization to pull it all together, even when you feel like it’s all falling apart

I’ll still write about data nerd stuff, but I think it’s time to start opening up a bit more so I can share my story.  Sometimes it’s best for me to view the world in rows and columns implying a calming sense of control, but other times it’s all just mental “free text fields”.  I’ve got to synthesize it all and make it work.

So…looks like I’ll be working this weekend. Yay. Remote access isn’t working apparently, so I’ll need to trot in to the building and work until things are done, since this is a hard deadline.

But you know what? I’m thankful. I’m thankful for a job. I’m thankful that I’m making enough to support my family and even save a bit. I’m thankful that I get to live in a beautiful part of the country, with people I love around me. I’m thankful that my work allows me to learn new things in my chosen field.

Just wanted to say that

Tomorrow I’ll be at the Eastside Net Tuesday meetup, volunteering my time to help nonprofits with tech issues.  If you’re in the area, drop by and say hello!

And on a somewhat random note, I heard about this Wikipedia Vandalism Detection with Text Mining challenge and I think I have it in the bag…just search for “Stephen Colbert” in the entry.

You know that sinking feeling you get when you get an error code, enter it in google, and…no one else has apparently had that same issue?  My day was spent wrestling with a SSRS data source credential error; it’s apparently somewhat common when using regular old remote servers, but every google result had something akin to “It works perfectly on my local machine, but when I go to deploy it on the reporting servers production server…”  Well that’d be great…if it wasn’t for the fact that I was working exclusively with my local server to sandbox all of this.  Add to this the fact that I had an impromptu LiveMeeting scheduled for the afternoon, where I was supposed to do a handy dandy screen share demo, and I now had all the makings of a stress headache.

As it turns out, the demo was rescheduled so I buckled down and vowed that, god as my witness, I would use this extra time to prepare a really excellent demo to knock their socks off.

And to never go hungry again, but that's another story.

So after toying with it all day, I finally found the solution.  I’m posting it here mainly to remind my future self how I did this, but to also provide help to anyone that’s ever searching for this problem themselves.

The facts were these (sorry, a Pushing Daisies reference):

I had successfully deployed a reporting project to my local host server, but when I clicked to view a report I got the message: “The user data source credentials do not meet the requirements to run this report or shared dataset. Either the user data source credentials are not stored in the report server database, or the user data source is configured not to require credentials but the unattended execution account is not specified. (rsInvalidDataSourceCredentialSetting) ”

Eh?

I toyed with the security settings of the data source, the data set, the reports, the server as a whole…nothing.  Finally what I did (and would I do this in production?  No, but I don’t anticipate this being a problem since we’d all be using windows authentication) was add an execution account.

Ta dah.

From your start menu, go into Reporting Services Configuration  Utility and click on Execution Account.  Add an existing account (in my case, domain\username.  I kept all this information the same as my windows login, lest that make a difference).  Note:  I did *not* use the “Credentials are not required” option under the Dataset properties, although I did choose “Impersonate the authenticated user after a connection has been made to the data source”.  I also used “Credentials stored securely in the report server”.

Anyway, this seems to have done the trick, so I hope this helps anyone else out there with the same problem.

The reason I haven’t posted here lately is because I’ve been busy with my new job, moving, and much more.  It’s been hectic, and so worth it.

I don’t have time to go into too much detail here, but I wanted to touch on two new things I learned in just the last week.  First off…why didn’t anyone tell me about CTEs???  I learned about them from a colleague that was kind enough to help me out with some questions I had, and it’s been a huge help going forward.  I try as much as possible to turn situations like that into “teach a man to fish” moments, by learning all I can from the tips I’m given.  As it so happens, I’m blessed with great coworkers that I learn quite a lot from.  That brings me to my second new skill this week, which is the pivot function in 2008 R2.  I had already figured out a way to piece through a messy solution when a coworker asked what I was working on.  After giving him a 10 second overview, he said “look up pivot, it’s what you need”…and sure enough, it cut down my implementation time drastically.

My goal for the foreseeable future is to work hard at what I know, learn what I don’t, and do my best imitation of a sponge to soak up any other tidbits I find.  I also have a goal to get MS certified, by setting aside a bit of time each night to read the prep manuals and other resources in my field.  It might prove to be too much of a stretch goal, but it still helps me keep perspective on where I want to grow.  In the coming weeks I’ll also hit my first professional meetings on topics like semantic search in Denali, and mobile BI.  I’ll admit that I don’t focus much on mobile issues, but it’s something I at least want to hear more about.  Can’t wait for the semantic search talk though, that should be fun.  Not as much fun as the Cars concert I went to this past month, mind you, but…

(Short post since I’m technically on vacation and will be in the process of beaching myself near a saltwater pool within the hour)

If there’s one thing I love, it’s the insights into my brain that Amazon’s book recommendation algorithm comes up with.  Even when it at first seems way off the mark, it can become a philosophical exercise.  I find myself thinking “You know…I had never thought about it, but yeah…maybe that would interest me…”  Other times, I just think “What in the world did I buy/view/wish list that made them think I’d want that???”

So it was with great joy that I checked my email this morning and got my newest recommendation…

“How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack: Defend Yourself When the Lawn Warriors Strike (And They Will)”

I can’t tell you how awesome that is.  And it’s totally going on my wish list.

Let’s assume you’re in the BI field (I’m being incredibly general here, because I want to cast a wide net), and money/time is no object…what certifications would you be interested in pursuing and which would you feel just aren’t worth the effort?

In the same vein, what conferences would you want to attend, and what professional organizations would you join?

BSchool has put out a great list of “40 Fascinating Blogs for the Ultimate Statistics Geek” that I wanted to pass along.  I’m pleased to see that they included Kevin MacDonnell’s Cooldata blog, since that’s one of the few that pertain to nonprofits (my original background).

And now…back to filling out job applications, which is a job in and of itself.

After graduation, I allowed myself the 2-week holiday period to lounge around and sleep late…which, since I have 3 kids that were all home on Christmas break, meant maybe an extra 5 minutes in bed and rewatching Firefly DVDs.  At least I no longer have to fight for a parking space on campus.

The new year is here, however, and I’ve structured my days to make sure my job search is a full time occupation, and I’ve included plenty of opportunities to keep learning new skills.  In school, I was a graduate assistant with a professor that was incredibly helpful (developing on an Access database for a local nonprofit, and some basic grant writing work), and she was in the process of reviewing 2 books to use as a textbook for a new course they wanted to offer in the spring.  They were Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2008.  I went ahead and purchased them myself, and now I finally have the time to read them.  Anyone have other book recommendations?

I also talked to a guy that was in my data mining class (the one I took via the computer science department), since I knew that he had taken the machine learning class the semester before, and I asked him what they used for a textbook.  As it turned out, he sold me his copy and now I can add Machine Learning to my reading list.  It has a companion website with sample quizzes, and downloaded all those as well.

Taking a page from my good friend David Stein, I’ve paid for my own registration to the 2011 PASS Summit being held in Seattle this October.  He’s raved about all that he learned from the last one, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.  It’s pretty hard on my budget, but it’ll be worth it.

Finally, I have a pet project that I’m working on (a PHP and MySQL project with a large predictive modeling component).  It’ll keep me busy for a good long while, and will eventually involve an Android app (then later I’ll do iPhone…but sorry, Android takes precedence)   I don’t want to give too much away though…it’s my baby.

I might bid on some VWorker contracts to get a little extra money, but for now, this sums up what I’m up to.