Welcome to Azure Synapse at SQL Saturday Tampa 2020

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SQL Saturday Tampa is coming up again in a couple of weeks on February 29th and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be there and presenting my session Welcome to Azure Synapse. In this session, I’m planning to deliver a overview of Azure Synapse as well as demo Synapse Studio!

Microsoft’s powerful new service, Azure Synapse, brings together the worlds of data warehousing and big data analytics by providing a unified experience for ingesting, cleansing, modeling, and sharing data. In this session, we’ll discuss the basics of Azure Synapse, ideal uses cases for Azure Synapse, and demonstrate how attendees can use Azure Synapse. By the conclusion of this session, attendees will have a deeper understanding of Azure Synapse and how to begin using Azure Synapse.

So if you’re in the area and interested in learning more about Azure Synapse, this will be a great session for you. You’ll need to register for SQL Saturday Tampa here. Don’t hesitate though, this event will fill up very quickly! I hope to see you there!

See You at SQL Saturday South Florida on Saturday June 8th!

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SQL Saturday South Florida is on Saturday June 8th and its just around the corner! The event is hosted at the Nova Southeastern University campus in Davie, Florida near Fort Lauderdale and its always a tremendous event with great speakers, content, and fun with the community. If you haven’t registered then you need to do it right away by going here. But I’m also excited and please that I’ll be delivering two sessions! Continue reading See You at SQL Saturday South Florida on Saturday June 8th!

Visualizing NFL Draft History with Power BI

With the 2019 NFL Draft upon us, of course I wanted to visualize some NFL draft data in Power BI. So I put together this interesting set of visualizations based on some data I scraped from Pro Football Reference. The dataset includes drafts from 1936 to 2019 including picks through round 6 where applicable. I’ll update the dataset as the remaining rounds of the 2019 draft are completed. So feel free to take a look, interact with the dashboards, and let me know if you have any questions.

If you’re a football and Power BI fan, check out my NFL Stats Report in Power BI here.

There are three pages in the NFL Draft Picks Power BI report. Continue reading Visualizing NFL Draft History with Power BI

Power BI Governance 101 at SQL Saturday 820 in Jacksonville, Florida on May 4

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Coming up in just a couple of weeks, I’ll be presenting my session, Power BI Governance 101, at SQL Saturday #820 in Jacksonville, Florida on May 4th. The event will kick off at 8 AM with breakfast and sessions will be starting at 9 AM! SQL Saturday Jacksonville is being hosted at the beautiful University of North Florida campus. I’ve attended a lot of SQL Saturday events, and the Jacksonville event is my favorite to attend! It’s well organized, the speakers and content are top quality, and it’s always a great crowd.

But this year’s event is special! This year’s SQL Saturday in Jacksonville is a Jedi-themed event! So don’t forget to wear your favorite Star Wars gear! I know I will! You seriously do not want to miss this event!

Get Registered Here

My session, Power BI Governance 101, is scheduled for 10:15 AM in room Coruscant 51-1205. Deploying an enterprise business intelligence solution is no small task but one of the most important factors to consider in order to have a successful roll-out of a self-service analytics tool like Power BI is governance. We’ll discuss why governance is so important for a successful Power BI deployment, what are the components of Power BI that require governance, and how to govern your Power BI environment. By the end of this session, you should have a clearer understanding of governance in the context of Power BI. Check out the event schedule here.

If you’re planning to attend, leave a comment here and don’t forget to stop by and say “hi”!

Data Warehouse Design and Power BI at SQL Saturday Tampa 2019

SQLSaturday #859 - Tampa 2019

Hello, fellow data nerds! I wanted to make you aware of a fantastic event coming up this month in Tampa, Florida. On Saturday, March 23, 2019, the annual SQL Saturday event will be hosted at the University of South Florida! This is a really tremendous opportunity to engage in some quality training at little to no cost. If you’re able to be in the Tampa area Saturday 3/23 then you need to register for this event. I’ve seen the schedule and the line up is impressive! Old dogs and young dogs alike will learn something new from a host of professionals and industry experts!

I’ll be presenting two sessions during the morning of March 23 at SQL Saturday Tampa and I’d love to see you there!

Making Sense of the Power BI Ecosystem

Power BI has taken the world by storm since it’s release in mid-2015. Since then, Microsoft’s cloud analytics service has matured and grown in scope and complexity. In this session, we’ll seek to understand the moving parts of the Power BI ecosystem including Power BI Pro, Premium, Report Server, Embedded, Data Flows, and more. By the end of this session the audience should have a firm grasp on the components ecosystem and how those components work together.

Building a Data Warehouse from the Ground Up

What if you could approach any business process in your organization and quickly design an effective and optimal dimensional model using a standardized step-by-step method? In this session we’ll discuss the steps required to design a unified dimensional model that is optimized for reporting and follows widely accepted best practices. We’ll also discuss how the design of our dimensional model affects a semantic modeling technologies like SQL Server Analysis Services or Power BI and how the choices we make during the data warehouse design phase can make or break our reports.

I hope you can make it to this really amazing event and can make it to one of my sessions! Don’t forget to register! If you do, swing by and say hi to me!

Making Sense of the Power BI Ecosystem Presentation Materials

I just wrapped up my first presentation on Making Sense of the Power BI Ecosystem at SQL Saturday #755 in Davie, Florida at Nova Southeastern University. The room was full and unfortunately people had to stand or sit in the back, but the audience was great and we had lots of fantastic questions!

Download the presentation materials for Making Sense of the Power BI Ecosystem

As I mentioned during my session, you can download my Power BI Architecture Diagram hereContinue reading Making Sense of the Power BI Ecosystem Presentation Materials

Monitoring and Tuning Azure SQL Database at SQL Saturday Jacksonville and 24 Hours of Pass

I’m speaking at two upcoming events that I wanted to share with you! My topic is Monitoring and Tuning Azure SQL Database. Being able to monitor and tune the performance of your database is an important part of any database professional’s job. Azure introduces a host of new tools and capabilities designed to make optimizing your managed databases easier than ever. In this session, you’ll be introduced to using tools such as  Continue reading Monitoring and Tuning Azure SQL Database at SQL Saturday Jacksonville and 24 Hours of Pass

Converting a Power BI Desktop File from Import to Live Query

A customer of mine is in the midst of a proof of concept using SQL Server and Power BI. During the POC, all the modeling was done in Power BI Desktop. Now that the POC is coming to the next phase, the customer is ready to move the Power BI data model to Analysis Services. But the problem is that all the visualizations in the Power BI Desktop file based on the imported data model will need to be recreated in a new Power BI Desktop file using a Live Query connection to Analysis Services. If the visualizations and reports are extensive, this could be quite a bit of work.

In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through modifying a Power BI Desktop file with an imported data model to use an external data model hosted in Azure Analysis Services or SQL Server Analysis Services 2017. This isn’t supported by any stretch of the imagination but if you’re in a pinch and have to convert a Power BI Desktop file from an imported data model to Live Query then this may be helpful to you. Also, this method works as of the January 2018 release of Power BI Desktop but there’s no guarantee that this method will work in future releases of Power BI Desktop. Continue reading Converting a Power BI Desktop File from Import to Live Query

Creating a Knowledge Base Chat Bot w/ Azure Bot Service

A while back you may have caught my blog post introducing the Power BI Chat Bot 9000. Since posting that blog, I’ve received a lot of requests on the steps required to build the bot. The good new is that its super easy and really only take a few minutes to get it set up. In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through how to set up your own chat bot by creating a chat bot based on the SQL Database FAQ, which can be found here. Continue reading Creating a Knowledge Base Chat Bot w/ Azure Bot Service

Making Sense of Data Migration Assistant Assessments with Power BI

The Data Migration Assistant is a great tool developed to assess your SQL Server environment for a migration to a modern SQL Server platform such as SQL Server 2017 or Azure SQL Database. If you’re assessing a single SQL Server with only a few databases, reading the exported results (which can be in .JSON or .CSV format) may not be that difficult. But if you’re assessing dozens of environments including hundreds of databases, we need a better way to understand the results. Continue reading Making Sense of Data Migration Assistant Assessments with Power BI

Dustin Ryan is a Data Specialist interested in Azure, SQL Server, and Power BI.

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