Ásgeir Gunnarsson

Data Platform MVP

Hafnarfjörður, Iceland

Ásgeir is a Data Platform MVP and owner of North Insights ApS. He works on Business Intelligence solutions using the whole of the MS BI stack. Ásgeir has been working in BI since 2007 both as a consultant and internal employee. Before turning to BI Ásgeir worked as a technical trainer and currently teaches BI courses at the Continuing Education Department of the University of Iceland.

Ásgeir speaks regularly at events both domestic and internationally and is the group leader of the Icelandic PASS Group as well as the Icelandic Power BI user group.

Ásgeir is the co-author of Pro Power BI Administration from APRESS and the Power BI MVP book

Ásgeir is passionate about data and loves solving problem with BI.

Awards

Area of Expertise

Information & Communications Technology

Topics

Microsoft Business Intelligence
power bi

Working with JSON files in Synapse Serverless

As more and more systems become SaaS systems, more and more of the data sources for your modern data warehouse return JSON files. Azure Synapse offers many different ways to handle files in your Data Lake. You can use Synapse Pipelines, including Mapping- and Wrangling Dataflows, you can use Spark, SQL Pools or you can use Synapse Serverless.

If you are primarily modeling data for Power BI or other BI tool to import data infrequently and you want to put your SQL skills to good use, using Synapse Serverless can be a very economic option. With Synapse Serverless you pay for data volume so preparing and modeling moderately sized data that gets read, say once a day, can be the cheapest option in Synapse.

There are however some obstacles to overcome. Since the data is in the data lake and therefore in a file format SQL is not always the easiest option. Synapse helps you a great deal by offering a “right click on file and select top 1000” option to get basic SQL syntax. When you have more complex file types like JSON that can have nested structures and multiple entries in them it gets more complicated.

In this session we will look at how you can query different types of JSON files in different ways. We will use a practical example of data from the Power BI Scanner API and Microsoft Graph API so that the audience will come away with tangible benefits. We will talk about different options and the implication they have. We will particularly focus on amount of data read as that is the driver of cost in Synapse Serverless.

At the end of the session the audience will take away different methods to query JSON files as well as sample scripts so that they can get quickly started in their own environment.

Power BI Governance quick start

For many the mention of governance gives them images of massive effort and inconvenience for themselves and end-users. It´s a hindrance and waste of time. But it doesn´t have to be that way.
Yes, governance is an ongoing effort that doesn´t end and yes depending on industry it might get complicated but getting started and getting far can be done in as little as few weeks. In this session we will talk about how we can start to tackle Power BI governance. We will look at few things you can get started with very quickly that will get you far in setting up your governance strategy.

We will look at things such as documentation, roles and monitoring. The hope is that you go back to your organization with a clear picture of where to start and a better feeling on governance.

Next Step Power BI Tabular model development

Today most people use Power BI Desktop to develop datasets. While Power BI Desktop is a great tool for the citizen developer it also has limitations. If you want to take your development skills to the next level, you should consider using Tabular Editor (free or paid version) to develop your data models.

Tabular Editor is a tool for developing tabular data models (Power BI or Analysis Services). It allows the developer to be more productive by separating the model metadata and the actual data. This allows for scripting, multiselect editing and best practice analyzing. Since you are only working with metadata it allows for easier integration with source control and DevOps.

This training day will help you transition from Power BI Desktop to Tabular Editor. You will be much more productive and will (optionally) be able to integrate data model development into DevOps processes. We will start by developing a simple data model and gradually introduce advanced data modelling techniques in Tabular Editor.

In this training the following topics will be covered:
• Benefits of Tabular Editor
• Role playing dimensions
• Multiple fact tables at different granularity
• Many-to-many relationships
• Perspectives and partitions
• Best practice analyzer
• Advanced scripting
• VertiPaq storage engine
• Deployment and DevOps
• Object level security
• Calculation Groups

At the end of this training day the attendee will come away with the following knowledge:
• Why use Tabular Editor
• How to use Tabular Editor to develop tabular models
• How to further the quality of tabular models

For the best experience the attendees should have access to a Premium or Premium Per User workspace. If the user does not we will provide you with access to a premium per user workspace in our training tenant.

Working with JSON files in Synapse Analytics

More and more the sources systems we work with are becoming web services. Many of these web services return a JSON file when called. This brings both advantages and disadvantages. JSON is a fairly readable format, and many systems know how to interpret it. But there are challenges such as schema drift and deeply nested nodes.

So how do you reliably ingest and transform JSON data without learning a lot of new skills or breaking the bank? Ingesting is most often fairly simple as Synapse Pipelines are good at receiving a JSON document from web services. The bigger problem comes when you need to work with the files after ingesting.

When you work with Synapse Analytics you have (in principle) a lot of tools to work with. You can use Synapse Pipelines, Mapping Data Flows, Spark or SQL. Each of these tools offer a way to work with JSON documents after ingestion. Some offer simple ways while others offer complex ways to work with them.

In this session we will ingest a JSON document from a web service using Synapse Pipelines. Then we will use each of the tools in the Synapse toolbox to see what they can offer and how they cope with simple and complex JSON structures. We will demo the capabilities calling the Power BI scanner API and working with the resulting JSON.

At the end of the session the audience will have a good understanding of what tool in the Synapse Analytics toolbox to use and when to use each.

Power Automate and Power Apps for the Power BI Developer

Even though Power BI, Power Automate and Power Apps all belong to the Power Platform not many Power BI developers use Power Automate or Power Apps (and vice versa). In this session I want to demonstrate how Power Automate and Power Apps can be useful to the Power BI developer without them needing to be experts in using them.

For the Power BI developer there are three main areas where the Power Automate and Power Apps can be useful:

• Inside reports
• To automate development tasks
• For administration purposes

In this session we will explore each category and look at scenarios belonging to each of them. We will look at scenarios such as:

• Comment on Power BI report
• Send emails with report context
• Refresh datasets
• Report subscriptions
• Create workspace process

After this session Power BI developers will see clear examples of how they can utilize Power Automate and Power Apps without needing to be experts in them.
Prior knowledge of Power Automate and Power Apps is not necessary to get value from the session.

The Power BI Administrator and governance

In this session we will put the spotlight on the Power BI Administrator and try to answer the following questions:
• What is the role of the Power BI Administrator in the Power BI ecosystem?
• What are the main tasks performed by the Power BI Administrator?

We will then switch gears and focus on Power BI governance. What does it entail and what is the role of the Power BI Administrator in it? In this section we will try to answer the following questions:
• What is Power BI Governance?
• What is the role of the Power BI Administrator in the governance effort?
• What governance tasks are the responsibility of the Power BI Administrator

After the session you should have a clearer understanding on the role and tasks of the Power BI Administrator. You should know more about Power BI Governance and how the Power BI Administrator plays a key role in implementing the governance strategy.

Power BI Administration and Governance training class

Description
In this training session we will cover everything you need to know as a Power BI administrator or Power BI responsible. We will use theory and practice to learn concepts and apply them.
We will provision a Power BI environment; we will look at the main settings and figure out which of them are important and how they should be set according to best practices. We will then setup Power BI premium and look through the administration options when it comes to dedicated capacity. We will investigate the role of the Enterprise Gateway, set it up, configure it and talk about how to administer it. We will look at Power BI governance and see how you can set governance strategy, create processes and roles and lastly but not least how you can monitor your Power BI environment.

Who is this training for?
This training is aimed at Power BI Administrators, lead developers, governance responsible and other with interest in Power BI Administration and Governance and in the concepts and best practices of the subject.
There are no pre-requisites to join the course but ideally you have a basic understanding of Power BI. If you don´t you will be able to complete the course but some of the Administration concepts might not be as relatable.

How is the training delivered?
The training format is classroom training where theory and practice are interchanging. We will introduce topics and then do exercises to enforce the theory. If you are an administrator of a Power BI tenant, you can choose to do the exercises on your own tenant or choose to do them on our practice tenant.

What will you take away from the training?
When you have completed the course, you will have a deep understanding on:
• What a Power BI tenant is and how it´s organized
• What the Power BI Administrator can and cannot do
• How to setup a tenant and maintain it
• What the important settings are and how to maintain them
• The difference between Power BI Pro, Power BI PPU and Power BI Premium from the Administration and governance perspective
• How to administer the Power BI On-Premises Gateway
• What to focus on when it comes to governing Power BI
• What processes give value and how to define them
• What and how to monitor when it comes to Power BI

Besides the knowledge of the above topics, you will come away with examples of process documents and code to monitor your Power BI tenant.

This full day course has four parts.

Part 1 Administrating Power BI - 2 hours
We will provision a Power BI environment, we will look at the main settings and figure out which of them are important and how the should be set according to best practices.

Part 2 Power BI Premium - 1 hour
We will setup Power BI premium and look through the administration options when it comes to dedicated capacity.

Part 3 The Power BI On-premises Data Gateway - 1 hour
We will investigate the role of the Enterprise Gateway, set it up, configure it and talk about how to administer it.

Part 4 Power BI Governance - 3,5 hours
We will look at Power BI governance and see how you can set governance strategy, create processes and roles and lastly but not least how you can monitor your Power BI environment.

The course is a mix of theory and exercises that will get the attendees thinking and considering how to administer and govern their Power BI environment

Feedback link: https://sqlb.it/?7231

Power BI Administration and Governance

In this training session we will cover everything you need to know as a Power BI administrator or Power BI responsible. We will use theory and practice to learn concepts and apply them.
We will provision a Power BI environment; we will look at the main settings and figure out which of them are important and how they should be set according to best practices. We will then setup Power BI premium and look through the administration options when it comes to dedicated capacity. We will investigate the role of the Enterprise Gateway, set it up, configure it and talk about how to administer it. We will look at Power BI governance and see how you can set governance strategy, create processes and roles and lastly but not least how you can monitor your Power BI environment.

Who is this training for?
This training is aimed at Power BI Administrators, lead developers, governance responsible and other with interest in Power BI Administration and Governance and in the concepts and best practices of the subject.
There are no pre-requisites to join the course but ideally you have a basic understanding of Power BI. If you don´t you will be able to complete the course but some of the Administration concepts might not be as relatable.

How is the training delivered?
The training format is classroom training where theory and practice are interchanging. We will introduce topics and then do exercises to enforce the theory. If you are an administrator of a Power BI tenant, you can choose to do the exercises on your own tenant or choose to do them on our practice tenant.

What will you take away from the training?
When you have completed the course, you will have a deep understanding on:
• What a Power BI tenant is and how it´s organized
• What the Power BI Administrator can and cannot do
• How to setup a tenant and maintain it
• What the important settings are and how to maintain them
• The difference between Power BI Pro, Power BI PPU and Power BI Premium from the Administration and governance perspective
• How to administer the Power BI On-Premises Gateway
• What to focus on when it comes to governing Power BI
• What processes give value and how to define them
• What and how to monitor when it comes to Power BI

Besides the knowledge of the above topics, you will come away with examples of process documents and code to monitor your Power BI tenant.

This full day course has four parts.

Part 1 Administrating Power BI - 2 hours
We will provision a Power BI environment, we will look at the main settings and figure out which of them are important and how the should be set according to best practices.

Part 2 Power BI Premium - 1 hour
We will setup Power BI premium and look through the administration options when it comes to dedicated capacity.

Part 3 The Power BI On-premises Data Gateway - 1 hour
We will investigate the role of the Enterprise Gateway, set it up, configure it and talk about how to administer it.

Part 4 Power BI Governance - 3,5 hours
We will look at Power BI governance and see how you can set governance strategy, create processes and roles and lastly but not least how you can monitor your Power BI environment.

Power BI Governance Strategy

There are many things that are important when doing governance for systems like Power BI. Many people will immediately think of technical things such as Sensitivity Labels or monitoring but there are many other, often non-technical, factors that are equally important when it comes to governance.

For many the mention of governance gives them images of massive effort and inconvenience for themselves and end-users. It´s a hindrance and waste of time. But it doesn´t have to be that way.

When considering a governance strategy, it´s important to lift your perspective to the helicopter view and think about requirements and impact instead of technical solutions.

In this session we will discuss what are the main questions you should be asking yourself when designing a governance strategy for Power BI. We will also give examples of a structure and content that such as strategy could have.

The main topics covered are:
• Why do governance
• What are the key considerations for a good governance strategy for Power BI
• What are the components of a good governance strategy for Power BI
• How do you structure the document(s)
• How do you help your users understand it

Managing Power BI workspaces

Workspaces allow Power BI users to collect together datasets, reports, dashboards, dataflows and other Power BI objects and control access. As such the workspace is a central component in any Power BI deployment strategy. What is the best way to manage workspaces? The answer to that question (like so many others) is that it depends. In this session we will cover the most common ways to manage Power BI workspaces and try to uncover what method works best for different scenarios. We will try to touch on the whole lifecycle of the workspace from creation until deletion.

We will cover scenarios ranging everyone can create workspaces and manage them to automated workspace creation via a workflow which are managed by administrators.

What we will cover:

• Different ways to create workspaces
o Manual
 User can create workspaces
 Only certain users/groups can create workspaces
o Automatic
 Simple workflow without approval
 Complex workflow with multiple approvals
• Managing workspaces
o Manual
 User manages their own workspaces
 Admins manage all workspaces
 Hybrid of the above
o (Semi) Automatic
 Using APIs to manage certain aspect of workspaces
such as monitoring and deletion
• How workspace creation and management fits into the most
common content Lifecycle Management methods for Power
BI

The audience will take away knowledge of different methods to manage workspaces and ideas on how to automate some aspects of it.

Implementing a successful user engagement during Power BI rollout

When you rollout Power BI in an organization it´s important to engage user and help them so they feel comfortable using the tool.
Training is a big part of that but active user community is also very important. The end goal is to help users help each other and themselves but it doesn’t happen by itself.

In this session you will hear about how you can setup a successful Power BI community in your organization. This presentation is based on a real use case where a successful Power BI user community has been running for almost two years. You will hear about it from two different perspectives. Technical perspective presented and a organizational perspective. Both perspectives are important and it´s hard to see how a user group can be successful without them both being successful.

The technical perspective will go into how you make sure you have the right tools and the right technical know how to make sure users get their questions answered and get some technical knowledge out of the community? If the users don´t see value they stop attending.

The organizational perspective will go into how you setup the right structure for the community to succeed and prosper? It will also talk about how you manage such a community and what kind of backing is needed to make it a success?

The attendees will take away advice and concrete suggestions on how to run a successful user group in their organization.

5 Power Automate flows that could give immediate value in your organization

Power Automate is the tool in the Power Platform that often has fastest time to value in my opinion.

In this session we are going to look at 5 types for Power Automate flows that could give immediate value in your organization.

The types of flow are:
• Reminders
• Approval flow
• Monitoring
• Extra information
• Personal productivity

We will talk about each type of flow and show examples of how you can automate or semi-automate tasks that exist in many organizations.
We will demo them and show how you can use Power Automate to give value in your organization.

Power BI Administration and Governance

Power BI Administration and Governance

In this training session we will cover everything you need to know as a Power BI administrator or Power BI responsible. We will use theory and practice to learn concepts and apply them.

We will provision a Power BI environment, we will look at the main settings and figure out which of them are important and how the should be set according to best practices. We will then setup Power BI premium and look through the administration options when it comes to dedicated capacity. We will investigate the role of the Enterprise Gateway, set it up, configure it and talk about how to administer it. We will look at Power BI governance and see how you can set governance strategy, create processes and roles and lastly but not least how you can monitor your Power BI environment.

This course trains Power BI Administrators, lead developers, governance responsible and other with interest in Power BI Administration and Governance in the concepts and best practices of the subject.

Agenda

1. Introduction – 15 min
2. Power BI Administration – 1,5 hour
3. Power BI Premium – 1 hour
4. Enterprise Gateway administration – 30 min
5. Introduction to governance – 15 min
6. Governance strategy – 15 min
7. Governance Best practices – 1 hour
8. Monitoring – 2 hours
9. Training – 30 min
10. Roles – 30 min
11. Wrap up – 15 min

Further your Power BI development skills

In this course we will learn tips and tricks to add onto your prior knowledge of Power BI.

The emphasis is on tips and tricks that can help the participants take the next step in their Power BI journey as well as best practices in Power Query, data modelling and reporting.

We will cover more advanced techniques in Power Query, data modelling best practices, report design and storytelling techniques.

Power BI comes in two different versions, free and paid. This course will use the free version so there is no need to have any kind of Power BI license to attend the course.

The participants need to come with their own laptop with Power BI Desktop installed.

The course contains the following:

Ingesting data in Power BI Desktop
• Importing data from folder
• Pivot and Unpivot
• Add columns
• Functions
• Append and Merge queries
• Last updated date
• SharePoint and OneDrive for Business as source
• Organizing queries

Modelling in Power BI
• Star schema
• Different cardinality
• Relationships
• Modelling views
• Auto Date/Time Hierarchies
• Row level security

Reporting
• Power BI Theming
• Background images
• Custom visualizations
• Storytelling with bookmarks, drillthrough, report page tooltip and DAX

Data flows
• What is Power BI data flows?
• Reusing your logic
• Dependencies
• Scheduling and sharing

What you gain from the course:
• Advance your Power BI skills
• Learn best practices
• Learn tips and tricks when importing data
• Learn to present more compelling reports

Who should attend this course:
This course is best suited for users with some Power BI knowledge that want to take the next step in their Power BI journey. It is assumed that the participants know the basics of Power BI and how some experienced in using it.

What´s on in my Power BI environment

As Power BI is a self-service tool, it can be hard for administrators to monitor it. Power BI is fast improving in this context but there still isn’t a consistent way of monitoring it. There are compliance, governance, performance, and implementation questions to consider. Who is creating content, how is it being distributed, what data is being used, dataset refreshes, who has a trial license, and what report is the most used? These are just some of the questions you as an administrator of Power BI might want to get answers to.

In this session, we will look at how you can find those answers by monitoring Power BI. We will look at the Power BI Audit log for usage, license, and other audit information. We will look at what the Power BI API can show us about data sets, refresh history, Enterprise Gateway information, premium capacity, and artifact inventory.

Lastly we will show how you can automate the data collection via Azure and PowerShell and report on the results.

Checking in with Power Apps, Flow and Power BI

In this session we will create an Power App that will allow users to check-in their location. We will then create a Flow that will take that location and write to a Power BI data source and refresh it. We will then create a Power BI report that will display the data on a map.

Power Apps is a great tool that allows you to create a desktop or mobile app with minimal coding. The app we are creating in this session uses the Bing location services to get the users location when a button is pressed. Microsoft Flow is similarly a tool that allows you to create data flows and logic with minimal coding. The flow we create in this session will take the location and user information and write it to a Excel. We will then create a custom connector in Flow that will allow us to refresh a Power BI data set. This will mean that the data will be visible in the Power BI report almost as soon as the user presses the checkin button. Power BI is a self-service reporting tool that allows you to connect to multiple data sources and mash up data into a beautiful report or dashboard. In the report we will create in this session we will connect to a Excel file with the location information in it and display it in a report including the location on a map.

The audience will take away useful information about Power Apps, Flow and Power BI including all the code created during this demo.

Reel in the Power BI Wild West

In this session we will hear about a method to govern your Power BI environment. This method is built upon my experience as a Power BI lead for a multinational company as well as my work with various customers of different sizes.

In my experience many organizations start thinking Power BI governance too late. Users are already working with Power BI and used to be in the Power BI Wild West. No matter if you are starting your Power BI journey or already in the Power BI Wild West this session will help you start with Power BI governance or enhance your existing one.

The method has four main pillars:

Process
Training
Monitoring
Roles

All these pillars are equally important but with different complexity. We will dive into each pillar and look at examples on documents and implementation methods. We will then bind it all together into a cohesive method and suggest how to approach the implementation.