The third and last day of the GP Technical Conference 2017 was on August 10, 2017. Like other years, the last day is a half day, allowing time for either post-conference training opportunities or for attendees to get home on the same day and not lose another day to travel.

My previous posts in this series are:

Building a Complex P&L with Jet Express

Session 1 of the day was another Belinda Allen presentation. Boy, was she busy this week! (& I didn’t even attend all of her sessions). This was a deeper dive into Jet Express with a focus on some features that she wasn’t able to show during the previous Advanced Jet Express presentation. Again, a highly useful session with a few more tips to add to my notes from the week.

Some of the things covered in more detail:

  • Using “Option” for parameters like data or company
  • How to handle consolidated reports
  • How to handle tree-like functionality and neatly splitting out departments into their own tab on refresh

Optimizing SQL Server Scripting

This was a repeat session that I missed the first time around, presented by Steve Endow. Mark Polino attended it earlier in the week and raved about it on Twitter and it was completely worth it. I can’t even do it justice but how he demonstrated simple syntax changes (many times this was all it was), that made huge differences in the number of reads, scan vs. seek index usage etc. was amazing. Talking about it is one thing but having demos to show live to compare A and B is another.

One of the big things I learned was what a Sargable query was and many tips on how to look at queries and execution plans to optimize my work. Sitting in that session, all I could think of was the many queries I’ve written for reports that he demonstrated aren’t efficient. If only I could go back and fix them all right away!

DAX 101

This too was a repeat, but the first time Belinda presented it earlier, it was a longer session aimed at consultants. This time it was an hour session for developers and I think I needed to sit on the other one to get more out of it! There was lots of good info on the difference between calculations and measures and samples of the DAX syntax. Lots to learn, someday!

PowerGP Online Partner Training

The afternoon, after the conference itself was over, I attended the PowerGP Online training at the Hilton Garden Inn. It was more in-depth info for potential partners on their entire solution. I must say though, watching GP get deployed (installed) in 6 minutes was pretty darn impressive. They’ve done some cool things and I look forward to seeing it grow to other regions outside of the US.

Evening Social

Lately, on the post-conference evening, David Musgrave has arranged a dinner at a local Indian restaurant with whoever is available, MVPs or otherwise. Before dinner, Sheila Jefferson-Ross and Leslie Vail hosted a social get-together in their suite at the hotel for us to get together and have a beverage or two before dinner. While I've gone every year so far, this year I just was "peopled-out" and ended up heading out to dinner on my own instead of going with the group for Indian. I find it very hard to concentrate when multiple conversations are going on at once and my brain just seems to shut down in those situations, so I know I should do my own thing and get some quiet time.

That's it for the conference itself, and I've had more flight delays leaving Minneapolis so I wrote all 3 days of recaps posts while sitting in the MSP airport! Go figure…