So the next 24 hours of PASS is going to be for the birds chicks!  They are looking for a selection of all female speakers in honor of Women’s History Month: “I need more women!”

Being a witty WIT, I have been debating whether or not to submit.  But I fall into the traps that have been outlined here in an excellent blog post by Karen Lopez, namely that I am not enough of an expert, or my usual excuse: I don’t feel I have anything new to say.

This is also a reason why I probably don’t blog as much as I should.

Rationally I know that most of the blogosphere and conference presentations are NOT new material.  After all new people are entering the field every day who need to know the basics and hey, it’s new to them!  But how do I decide that I can do it better?  Also, I hate PowerPoint.

I suppose I should throw my hat into the ring.  But, I need your help.  What do you want me to talk about?  What would you like to hear?

Some ideas bopping around my head:

1: Creative Queries: MDX in Reporting Services (obviously I like that I already have a title)

-Most of my MDX writing has been for report datasets.  Given the limitations that MDX faces in SSRS (namely that you can only have measures on columns) sometimes I have to do some creative tweaking of my queries to get what I want.  I could showcase some of those tweaks.  Potential excuses for not doing this session?  Tablix eliminated a lot of the tweaking I HAVE to do so I may have fewer examples.  Do I have enough examples for an hour session? Potentially too advanced for beginning reporters while being too novice for advanced reporters?

2: Generic Reporting Services Tips and Tricks

-Everyone loves reporting services (or at least they love going to sessions on it).  There’s a lot that can be done with it.  It looks pretty (or should if you do it right).  Excuses?  What can I say that is new?

3: Visualizing MDX: A Set Theory Primer

-I just did this session remotely for the St Louis BI Group.  I feel like in order to understand MDX, people should have a basic knowledge of Set Theory, but I may be biased because I was a math major that loved (and aced) my set theory classes.  Excuses? New content and I really don’t know how to phrase it.  It ended up only being about a half hour long.  It’s hard to do via PowerPoint (if it was a chalk talk I’d be ALL over it.  But again, I’m a mathematician.  Chalk is like crack to me).

4: Something with PowerPivot

-I figured out how to do some correlation/rollup stuff despite the lack of stat functions and hierarchies in PowerPivot.  So that could be one long demo.  I also did that whole post on the ALL() function.  Excuses:  A lot of people are better at PowerPivot than me (read: powerpivotpro, Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari).  Plus, the stuff I figured out will likely be obsolete once the new version of PowerPivot comes out since they are adding hierarchies and stat functions (yay!)

5: Dynamic MDX/mixing MDX and SQL/Analysis Services Stored Procedures

-I’ve had to do a lot of this for a project.  Excuses: Is it too niche?  Positive:  I can steal some of my mom’s slides from her talk on ASSP’s while adding (what I think) were some omissions in her examples of usage of ASSPs (namely being able to call SQL stored procs using your ASSPs to return data in your MDX query omgomgomg useful)

So those are my ideas and excuses.  I am also open to any other suggestions – What do YOU want to hear?  And also – what is the level you are at?  Do you want more intro stuff, more intermediate stuff, or advanced deep dives?  Help a sister out!