This is very late – I know.  The meeting was held on December 8, 2011 and I haven’t yet shared my recap/thoughts about the meeting.

We hold the SQL Server Society of Las Vegas user group meeting on the second Thursday of every month.  We have decided to hold the meeting as both a physical and a virtual meeting.  This decision was made to try and encourage better attendance and to allow people like myself to attend and participate.  Since I moved back to Utah and am trying to continue to help the group thrive – it has been helpful to have the virtual meetings.

But let me share another reason that I like to do it virtually.  Having lived in Las Vegas, it seems that a lot of the membership end up working during the meeting.  I know there were several times that I had to work during the meeting.  I know several people have expressed that concern to me as well.  By having the virtual meeting, they can sometimes join the meeting while fulfilling work duties.

As the announcement for the December meeting showed, I had the opportunity to present a new topic that I have been working on a lot of late.  The topic was on getting better functionality out of SSRS reports for mere DBAs such as myself.  I talked on topics that I needed to figure out in order to meet business requirements.

Some of the items touched included dynamic sorting and dynamic grouping.  These dynamic abilities were setup in a fashion that multiple reports could use the same datasets and tables within a database.  Furthermore, changing the sort or group would be as simple as changing a value in a table rather than editing the rdl and uploading the changes into SSRS.  This was all included in the demos.

Unfortunately, I focused too much on getting demos done.  I still need to go back and flesh out the slide-deck.  Yeah, I did a no-no.  I gave the presentation without a slide-deck.  It is far better to have the deck available to help control the flow of the presentation.  I’ll get that fixed.  You can see the presentation (gaffs included) here.

In addition to this presentation, I have been planning on writing up a few articles/blogs to also detail the various topics covered during the presentation.  Those should be out soon.