Wird Tabular Mode langsam erwachsen?

Wer sich mit Analysis Services Tabular Mode bereits in den Versionen 2012 und 2014 befasst hat, musste sich mit einigen Kinderkrankheiten und fehlender Funktionalität herumschlagen. Speziell für erklärte Anhänger der multidimensionalen Welt war die neue Option nicht viel mehr als ein unausgereiftes Spielzeug.
Doch mit SQL Server 2016 und 2017 hat sich dieser Eindruck massiv geändert.
Was sind die wichtigsten Veränderungen in den letzten Versionen? In welchen Bereichen sind noch Wünsche offen? Und welche Faktoren spielen heute noch eine Rolle bei der Wahl zwischen Tabular Mode und Multidimensional?

What does Microsoft Purview offer for Power BI?

Due to its purpose, Power BI as a service is already built to be transparent, easy to use and informative. Options to identify meaningful content, information about lineage and ownership and offerings to integrate into other parts of the IT landscape are core to this service.
With this in mind, you might wonder if Microsoft Purview is delivering any additional benefit on top of what Power BI is already offering. Let's look into Purview's goals and functionality and find an answer to this question.

Was haben wir gelernt? Erfahrungen aus 2 Jahren Azure Synapse Analytics im Betrieb

In den letzten Monaten konnten wir verschiedene Data Platform Projekte mit Azure Synapse Analytics bei unterschiedlichen Kunden erfolgreich umsetzen. Auch wenn die einzelnen Projekte bezogen auf Ihre Größenordnung oder den Business-Anforderungen sehr unterschiedlich waren, so hatten sie auch einige Gemeinsamkeiten. Hierzu zählt der Einsatz eines immer noch recht jungen Produktes, welches regelmäßig umfangreiche Aktualisierungen erhält. Ein Data Lake / Lake House Konzept, welches bisherige BI Architekturen drastisch verändert oder aber auch eine Cloud Infrastruktur, die in Enterprise Umgebungen Ihre eigenen Herausforderungen mit sich bringen kann.

In dieser Session sprechen die drei Microsoft Data Platform MVP Gabi Münster, Oliver Engels und Tillmann Eitelberg von der oh22 über Ihre gemeinsamen Erfahrungen und Lösungen aus Ihren verschiedenen Kundenprojekten.

Synapse SQL - Big data für SQL Entwickler?

Mit Azure Synapse Analytics bietet Microsoft ein integriertes Set an Azure Diensten um ein Modern Data Warehouse in einem Rutsch zu erstellen. Das gesamte Konzept basiert auf dem Azure Data Lake als Kernspeicher und umfasst ein Set an Big Data Technologien. Und genau das könnte für gestandene SQL und Data Warehouse Entwickler abschreckend wirken. Aber Synapse SQL kann doch genau diese Einstiegshürden überwinden... oder nicht?
Lasst uns gemeinsam diese Frage betrachten und uns anschauen, was Synapse SQL schon zu bieten hat.

Power Hour

Power BI Aggregations in a nutshell

Aggregations are a powerful feature, that allows for a speedy analysis of large to very large amounts of data using Power BI. As you can imagine, there is a certain level of complexity to this feature and we can spend hours on talking about the details of this feature. But let's try together and use ten minutes to cover the most important information you need to get started...

Power BI Aggregations

Microsoft released a major feature to enable the high-performance analysis of large amounts of data in a manageable way by implementing Aggregations in Power BI.

This feature is well known and used as an important performance optimization feature of Analysis Services Multidimensional. Compared to this the Aggregations available in Power BI offer a much more user-friendly and intuitive way of approaching this goal. But is this feature as powerful as the "mighty brother"? And is the handling still as easy under some closer inspection?

During this session, we will compare Aggregations in different Analysis Services engines and will highlight similarities and differences. In addition, we will dive into architectural approaches for implementing Aggregations in Power BI. We will point out strengths and weaknesses of different services and components to achieve a holistic analytical solution.

One day of BI in the cloud

Get new ideas based on real-life experiences to find reasons and inspiration for your cloud or hybrid BI strategy. And use the hands-on part of this full-day workshop to gather practical experience and build your own BI landscape in the cloud.

Motivation over hardware?

If you need somebody with a hardware as Ben has, I am not the one you need. But I can offer passion, wit and patience.

Moderator wanted?

I'll also gladly volunteer as moderator :-)

Microsoft Fabric : Top tips for Metalheads

Raise your horns and march with us on a brutal journey to go from Rookie to Metal warrior, dominating the main stage and conquering the data revolution with Microsoft Fabric. Our top tips will empower you to unleash deadly riffs of insights, survive the relentless Wall of Data, and create a moshpit of data fury.

Microsoft Fabric - What should you know coming from PBI?

Microsoft Fabric is here, and it offers a full BI & Analytics SaaS offering in a Power BI style. And even more, Power BI will be a part of it. But what does this mean for the current Power BI users? What does change for Power BI? What is out there you might be interested in?

Let's try to get a good overview in 45 minutes. Feel free to bring questions and let make this interactive.

Mentor wanted?

I'll gladly volunteer as Mentor for New Stars of Data

Mentor from experience

If anybody nows by heart how not to prepare a session, it's me!

Impressions from a new hire

After a long time working as a BI consultant, Data architect and whatever was needed in a small/medium sized and very familiar company I joined the Mothership a few months ago. And let me share with you what this did to my life. ;-)
This session will deal with some personal experiences in regards to leaving one's own comfort zone, taking on new challenges and dealing with personal concerns.
But being a techie at heart, I will also incluce some of my technical tidbits.

How mature has SSAS Tabular mode become?

SSAS Tabular started out as a kind of playground in SQL Server 2012. How serious is this service nowadays? Did it really become market-ready?

From Data Lake to DAX Query

Collecting data from and combining data out of different data sources is the essential requirement for BI. In times of cloud services this is getting a lot easier.
Azure offers a variety of services that work hand in hand and can be fully automated using PowerShell or.NET.

In this session we will show an example of how data from various sources such as FTP, databases or streaming data can be loaded via ADF and processed in Azure Data Lake.

But getting the information out of Azure Data Lake still requires a special scill set and doesn‘t allow for usage by the broader audience or standard visualization tools. This is a typical requirement of Azure Analysis Services.

But how to implement the model ? Can this even be automized in a way?
We will present you one approach to accomplish this.

From Azure Synapse Analytics into Power BI

Azure Synapse Analytics is the most exiting development in the Azure cosmos in terms of BI architecture. And a strong integration with Power BI has been promised...
But how does this look like?
Let's start with a quick overview of the Azure Synapse Analytics workspace with all it's features and integrations and let's dive into the offerings for Power BI and the possibilities you can gain for your reporting landscape.

Dummy session

No valuable contribution

Daten, Digitalisierung und (soziale) Verantwortung: Gibt es da einen Zusammenhang?!

Daten, Digitale Technologien und Software stehen im Zentrum der großen Innovationen unserer Zeit - und damit geht große Verantwortung einher.

Aber was bedeutet eigentlich "Social Responsibility"? Wie vielfältig ist dieses Themengebiet? Und warum ist das ein Thema welches alle von uns angeht? Insbesondere aber Data Professionals, Softwareentwickler und in besonderem Maße auch alle diejenigen, die als Führungskräfte in der IT Branche tätig sind oder sein wollen.

Kostja diskutiert diese Fragen mit Gabi und behauptet: Echte Digitalisierung als Motor für Innovation braucht soziale Verantwortung und eine Veränderung von Unternehmenskulturen.

Data integration in Power BI and Synapse

Luke and Gabi are members of the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform team that works with customers and partners to make Power BI and Synapse adoption more successful. Both are dealing with requirements for Data Integration workloads. Some are met, some aren’t (at least fully).

And both are dealing with biases about the two products and solutions. Synapse is the pro tool, more powerful but also more complicated. Power BI is the citizen developer solution, but not up to enterprise workloads. And this might be how everything started. But is that still true?

Let’s compare the Power BI and Synapse data integration offerings; what are their strengths? What are the gotchas? And why – citizen developers and pro developers should be aware of both!
And the weaknesses you might want to ask? Let’s see if between the two products and their offerings any weaknesses remain… 😉

Continuous Intelligence... What's this all about?

Continuous Intelligence combines the terms of Continuous Integration and Business Intelligence and aims for defining and implementing processes to keep your implementation and deployment processes for your BI applications flexible and as seamless as possible.
Even in the near past support for CI processes of BI projects was almost not there. But the last few years brought some changes to the perception of this topic and shifted the mindset.
Let's look at advantages and challenges for CI in BI and at possibilities to implement such a process for Analysis Services.

Continuous Integration für Analysis Services

Speziell im BI Bereich sind die Themen Continuous Integration und Continuous Deployment immer noch stark vernachlässigt. Warum ist das der Fall?
Neben der mangelnden Unterstützung durch Softwareanbieter gibt es noch weitere Faktoren, die wir in dieser Session gemeinsam erarbeiten wollen.
Doch welche Lösungsmöglichkeiten gibt es denn heutzutage? Und warum könnte Azure hier eine wichtige Rolle spielen?

Caught in a Mesh

Data Governance is an important topic and faces growing interest from especially enterprise customers. One of the biggest challenges is to avoid data duplication while still allowing different teams and departments to make use of the same data in their own contexts.

The current main stream approach is Data Mesh. But is it only main stream, or is it really quality? Let's try and find out if getting caught in a Mesh is worth a try for us Metal Heads, or if we stick to the good old mosh instead.

BI in the cloud on the menu – Select your dish of the day

Get new ideas based on real-life experiences to find reasons and inspiration for your cloud or hybrid BI strategy

Azure Analysis Services or PowerBI - Which service fits you best?

Creating a semantic layer is a not a requirement that asks for cloud services in particular. But Azure already offers a set of different services for this task.

With PowerBI Pro and Azure Analysis services the classical self-service and enterprise BI niches were served. But PowerBI Premium already smeared out the typical boundaries of those perspectives.

Let's recap the development of those services in the recent past and have a close look at the known road map. This will help in identifying business scenarios that ask for one service or another. By this, we can create a kind of decision matrix that will help us for strategic decisions in the future.

Azure Analysis Services - Nur ein Service unter vielen?

Im April 2017 hat mit Azure Analysis Services ein weiterer Service im bereich BI in der Cloud den Status "General Available" erreicht. Aber was zeichnet diesen Service eigentlich aus? Welche Besonderheiten machen ihn zu einem wichtigen Aspekt für BI in Azure? Ist es überhaupt ein wichtiger Service oder nur einer unter vielen?
In dieser Session wollen wir uns Azure Analysis Services genau unter diesem Aspekt anschauen. Was kann der Service und wie tragen diese Funktionen zur Verbesserung der Cloud-BI Optionen bei. Ein Überblick über die wichtigsten Funktionen als auch über die speziellen Anforderungen von BI an die Cloud sind dafür essentiell. Apropos: Was verstehen wir hier eigentlich genau unter BI?

Azure Analysis Services - An important step for BI in the cloud?

Since April 2017 another fascinating PaaS in the Microsoft Cloud reached general availability: Azure Analysis Services. But why should you switch from your existing on-premise solution to the cloud or plan your new approach with it? What are the big advantages of Azure Analysis Services? And what actually are the differences to PowerBI? Why is Azure Analysis Services an important step to enhancing the possibilities for BI in the cloud? This session offers answers to your questions and provides insight to support the positioning of Azure Analysis Services in your Business Intelligence strategy.

Analysis Services - And the journey goes on...

Throughout the past few months some very promising announcements have been made regarding the future of Analysis Services. Let's start with a recap of the journey so far and look into the future based on those announcements:
Which new features are to come?
Which modes are affected by changes?
What does this mean in regards to strategic positioning?

Amazing Insights: Add Analytics to Power Apps and Dynamics projects

Most Dataverse implementations, whether they be Power Apps or Dynamics 365 CE on the front-end, contain amazingly valuable data for the end-users and for the organizations' leadership.
Additionally, most Dataverse-based apps would benefit from additional data to enrich the '360-degree' view of an entity.
Learn the surprising options and best practices (and potential pitfalls) of connecting Power BI with Dataverse.

10 minutes to Serverless SQL pools

The Azure Synpase workspace is a powerful approach to enable data warehousing in Azure by combining the potential of different technologies in an easy-to-create and easy-to-manage environment. One of those technologies, and my personal favorite, is Serverless SQL pools. Let me give you a quick introduction to this technology and share some of my personal experiences.