Riccardo Perico
BI & Power BI Engineer @ Lucient Italia
Bergamo, Italy
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Back in 2010 I began my career in IT.
After a brief stint as ERP Consultant, I transitioned into Data Realm.
Over the years, I explored the world of data from various perspectives, working both as a DBA and a BI Engineer.
I'm a Microsoft Certified Professional at different levels in databases, BI and Azure areas.
Microsoft MVP for Data Platform category from 2021 to 2024.
I'm one of the leaders of Power BI User Group in Italy and I'd been speaker during the Power Platform World Tour and Global Power Platform Bootcamp stops in Italy.
You can find me speaking at Azure Saturday, SQL Saturday, Data Saturday, and other community events across Europe.
I served as a technical reviewer for the books “Extending Power BI with Python and R”, "Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide" and “Power BI Cookbook, 3rd Edition”.
Last but not least, Hard Rock and Heavy Metal addicted!
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
SQL Database Projects deep dive
In an Agile world with constantly changing scenarios and requirements, all of our software needs to adapt quickly, and DevOps tools are crucial for releasing reliable applications.
Databases are also applications, and the same principles should be applied to them.
If you work with SQL Server, DACPACs are your Swiss Army knife for DevOps. They allow you to put your databases under version control, speed up development with schema comparison, and simplify and automate deployments, even in the cloud.
No more altering, updating, inserting, or deleting directly in production with SSMS.
Power BI CICD, 1 anno dopo
Durante WPC2023 abbiamo parlato del supporto nativo al CICD introdotto in Power BI grazie all'avvento dei Power BI Project (.pbip).
A distanza di un anno la funzionalità è ancora in preview, ma è stata arricchita grazie al supporto per TMDL (Tabular Model Definition Language), che permette di versionare il modello semantico in maniera estremamente chiara ed intuitiva.
I miglioramenti non sono stati apportati solo dal punto di vista del modello, sarà infatti possibile approcciare il versionamento in maniera più chiara anche per quanto riguarda il layout del report, grazie all'introduzione del Power BI enhanced report format (PBIR).
In questa sessione vedremo i PBIP in azione con TMDL e PBIR, per scroprirne il potenziale ed eventuali punti di debolezza.
Deep Dive into Database Projects for Fabric Warehouse
Fabric is a team sport, and teams need tools to work better together.
SQL Database Projects are the Microsoft de-facto standard for authoring, building, debugging and publishing a database (even offline), and they supports Microsoft Fabric Warehouse as a destination.
Let's see how Database Projects and Fabric Warehouse work together, best practices, pitfalls and how you can insert DACPACs (Database project build outcome) into your DevOps pipeline.
Demystifying Power BI enhanced report format
The Power BI enhanced report format allows developer teams to version their reports from a visual perspective in an easier way.
Changes are more understandable and time-spending manual tasks can be addressed faster and with a "code-first" approach.
Transitioning from Azure Data Factory to Data Factory in Fabric
Azure Data Factory had been the de-facto standard for ETL/ELT projects in Azure based data platform architecture for years. Now that Fabric has come do we need to learn everything from scratch? Data Factory is a workload in Fabric SaaS offer so we can leverage previous skills but we need to be aware of the differences between the two offers. As of now, ADF and Data Factory in Fabric are not the same thing. Let’s dig in.
Fabric: I love you, I love you not
On May '23 data professionals from all around the globe felt like a kid on Christmas day eager to unbox the new toy: Microsoft Fabric.
The new kid of the block generated a lot of reactions on the internet, and Fabric became the only topic to speak of.
Anyway, being a consultant obliges not to be overwhelmed by the hype and to study a product carefully in order to tailor solution on customer needs.
Moreover Fabric is not a tool it's an entire ecosystem.
Studying Fabric for more than one year, since private preview, I had the possibility to see aspects that I truly love (the concept of "The Great Unifier", Direct Lake, Shortcuts and more), but I also found things that I don't like and should be improved IMHO (few artifacts supported by CI/CD, different behaviors on Delta tables according to the workload, busting and smoothing like a black box and more).
In this session I'll try to show you many different aspects that I loved and I hated explaining pros and cons and how I would apply them in a real world scenario.
I won't expect participants to find answers in this session, I expect them to find the right questions :-).
Power BI CICD where are we? Where are we going?
Ability to natively perform CICD in Power BI it's been one of the most demanded feature forever.
During 2023 Microsoft announced new features that promise to close the gap.
From modelling perspective there's a new sheriff in town called TMDL (Tabular Model Definition Language) that simplifies model development, management and versioning replacing JSON-based TMSL with a new more-readable YAML-like standard.
In the meantime huge applauses at Microsoft Build 2023 when Power BI Developer Mode had been revealed. This feature allows natively version control over Power BI Desktop files with a native integration between Azure DevOps git repos and Power BI Workspaces.
Each of these technologies promises to close the gap, but they can't work together yet and they're still in preview with some limitations.
They both have pros and cons so let's dig in and find out what we can do and what we can't do.
Table Distribution in Dedicated Pool: That is not "a simple table"
Dedicated Pool refers to the enterprise data warehousing features that are available in Azure Synapse Analytics.
Its engine is based on SQL Server's one and working with it will be very familiar for SQL Server people.
Do you need a table? You can start with CREATE TABLE command but, be aware that Dedicated Pool is a distributed engine and that table could be Replicated or Distributed over multiple nodes.
Distribution, Data Skew, Data Movement are "new concepts" you must be familiar with to get better performance in a Dedicated Pool.
Integrating Power BI with realtime API calls
Power BI natively supports external API calls, but what happens if your customer asks to ensure real-time interaction between a report and an API? Can we guarantee that a user can interact with an API without leaving a Power BI report?
In this session, we'll revisit a real customer use case, analyze all the different options we had, and explain why we discarded some of them. Finally, we'll reveal the working solution.
Spoiler: Something has been recently announced that could improve the working solution.
Power BI dataflows deep dive
Power BI dataflows allow to centralize and to standardize data preparation phase using Power Query and M language in the cloud, without leaving your browser.
In which scenarios are they suitable?
Which best practices do you need to keep in mind?
Which is the new frontier they're drawing?
Let's try to answer these and other questions with practical examples.
On-Premises Data Gateway monitoring strategy, why do I care?
You have carefully prepared your fantastic reports with Power BI Desktop and the time has come to share them with your colleagues. Obviously you don’t want to simply show the visuals frozen at the release state, but you want the underlying dataset to be refreshable so that the data visuals show up-to-date information. Therefore, after publishing the report on Power BI Service, you will certainly take care to install and configure an On-premises Data Gateway in Enterprise mode on a machine from which the data source is reachable, so that you can schedule a dataset refresh appropriately.
Whenever you are dealing with a Data Gateway no matter how powerful your sources and Power BI capacity are, the Gateway is a crucial part of your architecture and you should be ready to react if problems arise.
During this session we'll see how to establish monitoring and troubleshooting strategy accordingly leveraging default logging and building a comprehensive solution.
PBIRS for dummies
360° overview of Power BI Report Server looking to the "on-prem version of Power BI".
Let's see how to install and configure it and let's take also a look to the engine and how it works behind the scenes.
In the end we will compare PBIRS and Power BI Service in order to do the best choice when designing our Power BI ecosystem.
An introduction to Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Factory v2 è un servizio di integrazione dati nel cloud flessibile, scalabile, sicuro.
Grazie ad un'intuitiva interfaccia visuale ed a più di 60 connettori nativi creare, pianificare e gestire attività di trasferimento dati non è mai stato così immediato, sia che essi si trovino nel cloud oppure on-premise.
Il nuovo Integration Runtime, inoltre, consente di trasferire con semplicità i propri pacchetti SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in Azure.
In questa sessione vedremo alcune delle possibilità offerte dalla piattoforma ed i servizi con cui essa si integra nativamente.
PBI modeling at warp speed with Tabular Editor Advanced Scripting
Well designed model is core aspect for any successful BI project regardless the technology you are using.
Microsoft oriented BI solutions tend to use SSAS Tabular, Azure Analsysis Services and Power BI nowadays, and Microsoft provides its own tools to develop solutions for these products.
Designing model according to best practices and following standards is a must but sometimes could be an annoying and long process due to some lack in functionalities of the standard tools, because of this new "Community's Tools" born and they're used more and more.
Since 2020 Power BI is embracing "External Tools" to make developers' life easier, one of them is Tabular Editor.
During this session we'll se how to leverage "Advanced Scripting" feature in order to create model at the speed of light always following best practices and making BI development agile.
Working in the (Azure Data) Factory the right way
Azure Data Factory is a fully managed, serverless data integration service.
It's super easy to start developing powerful pipelines to move data in and out cloud and on-premises services, but there're many features that could be useful to get the best out this tool that you may not be aware off.
This, full of demo session, is a collection of lessons learnt and tip and tricks collected implementing real world scenarios in Azure Data Factory.
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