Dustin is a Data Platform Solutions Architect on the Education team at Microsoft. You can find Dustin blogging and speaking at events like SQL Saturday, Code Camp, and SQL Rally. Follow Dustin on Twitter @SQLDusty.
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!
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→
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→
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→
At some point this weekend, the Microsoft Power BI folks turned on the drill-through feature in the Power BI service. Then the following week, the September release of Power BI Desktop included the new drill-through action feature. This is the same drill-through feature that demonstrated during day 1 of the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, which you can read about here. So I thought it’d be good to quickly walk through how you can set up the drill through action. Continue reading Setting Up a Drillthrough Action in your Power BI Report→
Late last month Microsoft released the certification exam for Power BI, 70-778: Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power BI. The exam is currently in beta and will likely remain that way for the next eight to twelve weeks. If you were lucky enough to snag one of the 300 uses of the voucher code, you’re already registered for the exam. If not, you’ll be waiting until the certification exam’s beta period is wrapped. And then everyone will be able to complete the exam. Thankfully I was able to take the exam a couple of weeks ago but am still waiting on the results for the next few weeks.
So I’ve been working on a fun little project over the past couple weeks. A lot of my customers have questions related to Power BI and I spend a lot of my time answering those questions. So I said to myself, “Self, why don’t you build a chat bot that can help field some of those basic questions?” Thus was gloriously born the Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000!
The Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000 uses Azure Bot Service leveraging a knowledge base created using QnA Maker. Later I’m going to do a write-up on how exactly I created the Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000 (it only took me about 10 minutes), but for now I just want to share the bot with you. Start with “Hello” and then try Continue reading Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000 lives!→
Thank you to everyone that attending my session today at SQL Saturday #649 in Jacksonville, Florida! It was a packed room with over 70 people attending my session and the audience was lively! We had lots of great questions and tons of awesome interaction! If you want to download my slide deck from today’s presentation you can do that right below. Continue reading Building Your Brand and Becoming a Thought Leader Session Materials→
The What If Parameter feature allows you to dynamically perform what-if type analysis by using a slider bar to visualize changes to a calculation. This becomes a very flexible way to perform all kinds of different “what if” type scenarios.
