All posts by Dustin Ryan

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.
Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer

Power BI Desktop May 2016 Update Info: Conditional Formatting and Quick Calc

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*Update: The Power BI team has finally published a blog post with all the new features and its glorious! Read about all the new enhancements and changes to Power BI Desktop right here.

So it appears that the May 2016 update to Power BI Desktop has dropped without any notification from the Power BI team on their blog or  a notification within Power BI Deskop. So I figured I’d take a moment to point out of the new enhancements to Power BI Desktop.

New to Power BI Desktop? Get started here.

1. Conditional Formatting on Tables

This one is awesome and has been a feature that we’ve all been waiting on for a while. Continue reading Power BI Desktop May 2016 Update Info: Conditional Formatting and Quick Calc →

Data Warehouse Design, SQL Server, SSAS

10 SQL Server Data Warehouse Design Best Practices to Follow (Part 1 )

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This past Saturday I had the pleasure of speaking at SQL Saturday #552 here in beautiful Jacksonville, Florida. My good friend, Mitch Pearson (blog | twitter) and I presented our session, Designing a Data Warehouse from the Ground Up. We had a great crowd and lots of great questions from the audience!

Watch Designing a Data Warehouse from the Ground Up Webinar Recording

With all the talk about designing a data warehouse and best practices, I thought I’d take a few moment to jot down some of my thoughts around best practices and things to consider when designing your data warehouse. Below you’ll find the first five of ten data warehouse design best practices that I believe are worth considering. This list isn’t meant to be the ten best “best practices” to follow and are in no particular order. Of course, each design scenario is different so you may find that some of the best practices listed here aren’t optimal in your specific situation.

Continue reading 10 SQL Server Data Warehouse Design Best Practices to Follow (Part 1 ) →

dataviz, Power BI, Power Query

Power BI and the Bing Maps API

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This week I was working on a project for a school up North. This customer wanted to use Power BI and map visualizations to view the locations of the various school buildings in the district. The problem for this very large school district was that they were missing the street address information for some of the buildings and for other buildings they were missing the latitude and longitude.

New to Power BI? Start with these 5 tips!

The good news is that Power Query in Power BI is flexible enough for us to take advantage of the Bing Maps API so that we can lookup the missing pieces of information we need. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can use the Bing Maps API to look up an address based on a latitude and longitude or use a street address to find a latitude and longitude for the location. Continue reading Power BI and the Bing Maps API →

Community, Excel, Free Training, Power BI, SQL Server, SSAS

What’s New in Power BI Webinar Recording is Available

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Thank you to everyone that attended my webinar with the PASS Excel BI Virtual Chapter today! I’d also like to thank Thomas LeBlanc for having me to present. I had a great time presenting on the newest features of Power BI and what features you will see in the near future. Continue reading What’s New in Power BI Webinar Recording is Available →

Community, DAX, PASS, Power BI

View Getting Started with Power BI and Time Calculations with Dustin Ryan is Now Available!

Earlier today I had the pleasure of speaking with the PASS Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter on getting started with Power BI and time calculations! There were a bit of audio issues on my end but thankfully we were able to still have a great event with lots of great questions!

If you missed the webinar, have no fear! You can still watch the recording right here. Just jump ahead to minute 11 as I had some unfortunate connection issues!

If you have any additional questions or feedback, please leave a comment down below.

Additional Resources

Download my PowerPoint slide deck here.

The PASS BI VC is a great group with tons of free, quality training events! I highly recommend you connect with this group so you can stay up to date on all their great events!

The PASS BI VC also has all their previous webinar recordings hosted on YouTube so definitely check that out!

If you’re new to Power BI, I suggest you start here.

Read more about Getting Started with R Visuals in Power BI

Read more about 10 DAX Calculations for your Tabular or Power Pivot Model (Part 1)

Read more about 10 DAX Calculations for your Tabular or Power Pivot Model (Part 2)

Feedback

I hope you enjoyed the webinar and that you maybe even learned a little something. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please leave it down below! Thanks for reading and watching!

Uncategorized

Power BI Publish to Web for Anonymous Access is Here

Earlier this week on Wednesday the Microsoft Power BI made an incredibly exciting announcement and released Power BI “publish to web” as a preview feature. This is HUUUUGE news! This was probably the top requested feature and its finally here thanks to the hard work and dedication of the Microsoft Power BI team! Continue reading Power BI Publish to Web for Anonymous Access is Here →

Community, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer, Rstats, SQL Server, SQL Server 2016, TSQL

Microsoft & R Programming Session Materials & Resources Available

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Last Thursday night I had the pleasure of speaking with Gregory Kramer and his friends at the Madison, WI Power BI User Group. We took an introductory look at how Microsoft’s acquisition of Revolution Analytics is making serious waves across the Microsoft data platform. We also walked through leveraging R in Power BI and SQL Server 2016.

New to R & Power BI? Start here.

R visuals in Power BI

Continue reading Microsoft & R Programming Session Materials & Resources Available →

Dashboard Design, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer

Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram

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Download the latest version of the Power BI Architecture Diagram here!

As a Data Platform Solution Architect for Microsoft, one of my jobs is to help teach my customers what our amazing tools can do and how those tools work. Interest in Power BI is blowing up and I’m seeing most of my customers express huge interest in this awesome tool. To help facilitate the conversation about how Power BI works and how it can help my customers, I put together this diagram.

Also, each text block in the black area to the right includes a link to the documentation on PowerBI.com for the specific component. So if I’m looking at the diagram and I want to gather more information on the Power BI Gateway – Enterprise, just click the text block or point #2. Continue reading Download the Power BI Architecture Diagram →

Azure, dataviz, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer, Rstats

Getting Started with R Visuals in Power BI

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Thanks to the December 2015 update released for Power BI, we can now use R to visualize our data in Power BI! Make no mistake, this is huge news and in this blog post I want to walk you through how to use the new R Script Visualization in Power BI and get you started with using R to create your first visualizations.

Read These Top 5 Power BI Tips

Not only can we create and download custom visuals from PowerBI.com to extend the capabilities of Power BI, we can use R to create a ridiculous amount of powerful visualizations. If you can get the data into Power BI, you can use R to perform interesting statistical analysis and create some pretty cool, interactive visuals.

Getting Started

If you’re new to R, like myself, R is a programming language for statistical data analysis. The R programming language is Continue reading Getting Started with R Visuals in Power BI →

Azure, Azure ML, Excel, Power BI, Power BI Desktop Designer, Power Query

Sentiment Analysis & Key Phrase Detection w/ Power Query & Power BI

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Recently I worked on a neat little POC with Patrick Leblanc for a customer in Education who wished to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on surveys completed by students regarding classes and instructors, which brings me to this blog post.

Using Azure ML and a free subscription to the Text Analytics API, I’m going to show you how to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on Continue reading Sentiment Analysis & Key Phrase Detection w/ Power Query & Power BI →