Advise on server for Business Intelligence training

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ThePoulsen

New Member
Oct 16, 2016
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Hi all

I am currently in the process of starting up at consultancy within the data Engineering / Architecture and Business Intelligence area. One leg of my invisioned business would be training in the use of SQL Server, and excel, for analytics staff in larger companies.

I would like to build a small server for training purposes (Think 10-20 people in a room learning to use some software)

Looking for a bit of advise on the software installed on this server.

My hardware is a ryzen 5 3600x machine running 16 gb RAM and 500gb SDD

Software requirements
  • Preferably Ubuntu
  • MS SQL Server including Adventureworks database
  • VPN to allow users to access my server from outside of my network
    • This would probably be through my router
  • LDAP in order for me to create users before training start
  • Software firewall?
  • Backup features?
  • Hypervisor / Virtual machines / Containers?
Coming from a corporate function where infrastructure is handled by a dedicated server team, I am not quite used to thinking about all the individual pieces of software that goes into managing users, and ensuring access outside network.

Users will access data using windows PC's through SQL Server Management Studio and Excel/Power BI respectively.

I am in the process of figuring out what I need to install on my server in order to allow users to access it through VPN and query data on an SQL Server using LDAP (Since I will be creating individual databases and linking these to LDAP user profiles that I generate before training sessions .
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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I have no specific knowledge of what you want to do, but given that you already have hardware, have a preferred OS (linux variant), why dont you simply set it up that way and test if its working as expected?

For a performance test 20 local (or networked) sql scripts running queries should be sufficient...
 

986box

Active Member
Oct 14, 2017
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Not knowing what software is involved. Popular tools now trends towards storage and compute nodes vs database engine.
 

RadyB13

New Member
Sep 2, 2021
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Hey, did you find something useful? I am also searching for something like this but for different purposes. If I will not find something which will meet my expectations then I think I will build my own site as I want. I found out that it is not so difficult to build a site nowadays. My brother built one for his business in less than a month without any special skills, he told me that he read everything on the Internet, and started with this article 8 Best Website Builders for Musicians in 2021 | SB Reviews.
 
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