Announcing the Fabric Down Under podcast – Show 1 available now

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

MS Tech Summit 2023 – Discounts running out

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.

Book Review – Make Your Data Speak – Alex Kolokolov

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).

Things I Liked

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.

Things I'd Like to See Improved

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.

The Verdict?

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

 

Data Science summit 2022 – Warsaw (and Hybrid) – SQL Server 2022 T-SQL

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.

Book: Implementing Power BI in the Enterprise

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.

Book Details

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:

  • Power BI Cloud Implementation Models
  • Other Tools That I Often Use
  • Working with Identity
  • Do you need a Data Warehouse?
  • Implementing the Data Model Schema
  • Implementing the Analytics Schema
  • Using DevOps for Project Management and Deployment
  • Staging, Loading and Transforming Data
  • Implementing ELT and Processing
  • Implementing the Tabular Model
  • Using Advanced Tabular Model Techniques
  • Connecting Power BI and Creating Reports

I hope you enjoy it.

SQL Day 2021 is on, and I'd love to see you in my Power BI pre-con

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.

 

Power BI: Join me at the Power BI Summit !

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.

Fix: Power BI – Couldn't publish to Power BI

I saw the above message when working with one of my clients today. The error says Only users with Power BI Pro licenses can publish to this workspace. And that would make sense if they hadn't already purchases Power BI Pro licenses for the user.

I checked online, and there were a number of comments about people seeing this error. There were the usual suggestions of logging out and back into Power BI. There was even one who'd quoted a Microsoft support person who said that Pro licenses don't work for up to 24 hours after you purchase them. (That sounds dubious to me).

We checked that the license had been assigned to the user. I was concerned that perhaps the licenses were purchased but not actually assigned to the users. All was good with the license assignment.

But then we noticed something odd:

Note that the user still had their Free Power BI license assigned to them, and for some unknown (and not very sensible) reason, that was the one that the system was using when they logged in.

We removed the free license assignment and all was then good.

I hope that helps someone else.

 

 

Power BI: 5 Minutes to "Wow" and for enterprises, what's next?

Power BI is amazing. And it's starting to appear all over the place. Many enterprises don't know what to make of it though. Some are scared that it'll be the "next Access" where stores of uncontrolled data end up all over the organization. Power BI's mantra of "5 minutes to Wow" is spot on. It's easy to be impressed. But enterprises are often struggling with "what comes next after that 5 minutes?"

We've been implementing many enterprise-level projects that use Power BI, and I'd love to spend time showing you what we do.

Amit Bansal and the DPS team in India are hosting a virtual summit later this year. There are three days of data-related conference presentations delivered 24 x 7. If you can't find something of real interest to you, and in your time zone, you aren't looking. And the price? At present it's $89 USD. Yes you read that right. And it includes a year of access to the recordings of all the normal conference sessions.

As part of their Data Platform Virtual Summit  event, there are also pre-cons and post-cons. Again they are amazing value.

I'm presenting a pre-con over two half days. At the current discount, it's $129 USD and if you use the discount code GREG@DPS, it's even cheaper. I'd love to see many of you attend. Let's talk about Power BI in the enterprise.

Now, this isn't a session about how to make great visuals, etc. I'll leave that to someone else. But if you want to really get into what makes a good underlying data model, how to integrate properly with security, how to structure projects, how we use Azure Analysis Services and/or Power BI Premium and more, this should be the right session for you.

You can book here.

Fix: Unexpected error in Analysis Services Power Query designer in Visual Studio 2019

I was editing using the Power Query editor in an Analysis Services project, hosted in Visual Studio 2019. When I tried to use "Add column by example", I received the error shown above:

Unexpected Error

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.DataIntegration.TransformDataByExample, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad34e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

The problem is that the assembly had not been deployed with the Analysis Services Designer.

Fortunately, the same assembly is used by Power BI Desktop. Because I had that installed on the same machine, I was able to copy the assembly:

Microsoft.DataIntegration.TransformDataByExample.dll

from the folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Desktop\bin

to the same folder as the devenv.exe program from VS 2019:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\

If that path doesn't exist on your machine, it might be here instead if you're using the Community edition:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE\

After that, it was back working again. I hope that helps someone else.