Thoughts from Microsoft Data Platform MVP and RD – Dr Greg Low
One of the conferences that I enjoy speaking at each year is the Data Science Summit that comes out of Warsaw.
Once again, the speaker lineup looks excellent, and there are early bird discounts available now. I'm always amazed at how low cost these Eastern European conferences are.
https://dssconf.pl/user.html?lang=en#!/login
I was pleased to see Reza Rad's latest book Pro Power BI Architecture: Development, Deployment, Sharing, and Security for Microsoft Power BI Solutions: Rad, Reza: 9781484295373: Amazon.com: Books now out the door. Reza is an old friend, fellow Data Platform MVP, and fellow member of the Microsoft Regional Director program.
I was pleased to have been a technical reviewer for this book, and I hope that, along with the other reviewers, we have improved what was already a good book.
This is version 2 of the book that Reza produced in 2019 but it is not a book with minor updates. Most of the book is rewritten.
Reza is a book-writing machine. In this book, he has covered so very many aspects of architecture for Power BI. He has provided an emphasis on reliability and ease of maintenance. In particular, I was pleased to see a discussion on environments as that's often omitted in Power BI related books. And a discussion on how to save money by using the right licensing. Once again, that's a topic that's often not discussed.
The book is really for anyone who needs to build Power BI reports (often analysts and developers), but with a view to the bigger picture of how to structure a project so it continues to be usable as it (or the team) grows in size.
I like Reza's conversational style and it shines out in his writing. When I read it, I often feel like I'm sitting in a room listening to him talk. That's a tough skill and Reza does it effortlessly.
Great book and well-written
8 out of 10
I had the great pleasure to get to spend time today, talking with Josh Caplan about OneLake.
Josh Caplan serves as a Principal Group Product Manager at Microsoft, where he's now leading product management for Microsoft OneLake. He has a strong background in managing products like Power BI, SQL Server Analysis Servers, and Azure Analysis Services. Before his current role, Josh contributed to enhancing developer tools for Power BI and worked with Bing to harness its vast data resources.
OneLake is a foundational aspect of all things Fabric.
In the show, Josh provides a solid introduction to OneLake, and then we delved into many aspects of how it works, and what it means for organizations.
You'll find it here: https://fabricdownunder.com
I hope you find it useful.
I've mentioned in a previous post how important I think Microsoft Fabric is going to be.
So, in addition to our existing SQL Down Under, and Cosmos Down Under podcasts, we have a brand new podcast called Fabric Down Under.
In the preview for Microsoft Fabric, one of the key participants from the product group has been Pawel Potasinski. I've known Pawel for many years and he's been the driving force behind many important things. It was great to see him driving community around Microsoft Fabric in preview.
So he was the obvious choice for the first podcast in the series.
I hope you enjoy it. You'll find all the shows and details on subscribing at our site: https://fabricdownunder.com
We have so many great tech friends in Poland. I was pleased to see they are running the MS Tech Summit, and pleased to be speaking at it.
Looks like a great set of sessions : https://mstechsummit.pl/en/ They tell me there are more than 100 sessions spread over 8 tracks.
Not in Poland? Not a problem. It's running in-person and online, and with video on demand.
The early bird discount is still available but about to end.
Love to speak with you at the summit.
Over the last year, I've come to know Alex Kolokolov more, through involvement with his data visualization challenges. I was really pleased to see he'd written his first book Make Your Data Speak (Creating Actionable Data through Excel For Non-Technical Professionals).
I really liked the conversational style of the book. It's all structured around an approach of "Let's see how this happens by example". The tone was really refreshing and should be good to hold people's interest.
I also really loved the approach of starting with a (believable) mess and cleaning it up. The level of the book would probably work best for the "not really comfortable with pivot tables yet" audience but I could see it being useful for people who've worked with these types of problems before, and who have probably made all the mistakes that Alex talked about in the book. Alex did say it's for non-technical professionals and I think that's spot on.
Having QR codes for linking to sample code was a simple but nice addition.
I found myself chuckling a bit when reading the colours and theming parts. When I see demonstrations of material like this, people often demonstrate truly awful colours, and I think "no-one would do that". Alex has chosen examples that are nasty but believable. I've seen worse in the field.
Similarly, the section on choosing visualizations was detailed and well-argued.
The book finishes with a section on improving data-driven culture in the organisation. That's a good way to end.
Not much. It's great!
It's important to note that the book focusses on Excel. I did keep thinking about how I'd do it in Power BI instead, but there is a very, very big audience for Alex's take on how to tell data stories using Excel.
I was concerned about how the English would be, from a non-native speaker. Some was a little odd, but Alex has done an outstanding job. In fact, it's so much better than so many books I've recently read from native English speakers. I really did not notice errors apart from a few things that sounded grammatically odd to me. As an example, the chapter "Dashboard Assembling" really should be "Dashboard Assembly" or perhaps better "Assembling Dashboards". Some sentences like "Assembly according to the layout is faster and easier…" is strictly correct but sounded a little odd.
I'd have to say though that nothing really grated on me. And that's quite an achievement. I hope one day I can do the same in Mandarin, but I fear I'll be far short of the level of what Alex has achieved in English writing.
If you need to learn to tell a story with data and using Excel, this would be a worthwhile addition to your library.
7 out of 10
I'm always excited when I can get involved in conferences with our Polish friends.
Coming up very soon is the Data Science Summit 2022: https://dssconf.pl/en/
For this summit, I'll be presenting a quick (around 40 minutes) session highlighting what's changed in T-SQL for SQL Server 2022. I'm always so glad to see T-SQL enhancements in SQL Server and SQL Server 2022 has more than what we've seen in other recent versions. There are a number of very important enhancements that will take a little while to get our heads around, on the best way to use them.
I've also seen the list of people presenting and the range of topics for the conference, and it really looks quite fascinating. There is content in Polish but the majority is in English so it's completely accessible for us English speakers.
I'd really love to see as many of you as possible attending, to support the Polish data community.
It's been a while coming, but my latest book is now out. Implementing Power BI in the Enterprise is now available in both paperback and eBook. The eBook versions are available in all Amazon stores, and also through most book distributors through Ingram Spark distribution.
I've had a few people ask about DRM-free ePub and PDF versions. While the Kindle version on Amazon is their normal DRM setup, you can purchase the DRM free version directly from us here:
https://sqldownunder.thrivecart.com/implementing-power-bi-ent-ebook/
It contains both the ePub and PDF versions.
Power BI is an amazing tool. It's so easy to get started with and to develop a proof of concept. Enterprises want more than that. They need to create analytics using professional techniques.
There are many ways that you can do this but in this book, I've described how I implement these projects. And it's gone well for many years over many projects.
If you want a book on building better visualizations in Power BI, this is not the book for you.
Instead, this book will teach you about architecture, identity and security, building a supporting data warehouse, using DevOps and project management tools, learning to use Azure Data Factory and source control with your projects.
It also describes how I implements projects for clients with differing levels of cloud tolerance, from the cloud natives, to cloud friendlies, to cloud conservatives, and to those clients who are not cloud friendly at all.
I also had a few people ask about the table of contents. The chapters are here:
I hope you enjoy it.
One of my favourite conferences each year is SQL Day. It's run by an enthusiastic group from Poland, and when I've attended in person, I loved it. This year it's virtual, and the upside of that, is you can attend from anywhere.
As part of the conference, I'm running a pre-con workshop. It's a low cost one day course on How I Implement Power BI in Enterprises. You'll find info on it here. The course is running on Poland time, but it looks to me like the times will suit a pretty wide variety of people, including from here in Australia.
More info here:
I'd love to see you there.
If you haven't already heard, there's a global Power BI summit coming up. It's 19th to 23rd April and details are here:
https://globalpowerbisummit.com/
I'm presenting a session "Enterprise Power BI: Do I still need a data warehouse?"
It's being replayed across different time zones and each time though, I'll be there for a live Q&A. Would love to see you there.
