Category Archives: BI Industry

Power BI Global Hackathon Contest Results

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The results of last month’s Power BI Global Hackathon are in! The Hackathon was facilitated by our our PUG here in Portland with the goal of welcoming global contenders in subsequent contest. Five teams entered the contest using publically-available data to visualize and tell data stories using our favorite data analysis platform.  Congratulations to Xinyu Zheng and Ron Barrett for winning the challenge with their entry, analyzing Yelp restaurant star ratings.  These were all great entries and you can view the contest results in the Power BI report below.

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Here are the published projects that were entered in the Hackathon:

Xinyu and Ron analyzed ratings from nearly 1200 restaurant Pittsburgh, Phoenix and Las Vegas.  Results compare ratings and reviews by restaurant and food categories, sentiment and key phrases in the review comments

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I loved the creativity of this solution from Jeremy Black and Kirill Perian who analyzed alcohol sales statistics using infographics and bookmarks to switch out visuals on the same page.  The presentation concludes on the last page of the report with an auto-advancing variation of “100 Bottles of Beer on The Wall”.  Nice touch.

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I’m admittedly a bit biased because this was my design, with a lot of help from Brian, Ron and Greg.  We used a series of tables to prompt a user for Power BI solution business requirements and recommend fitting solution architectures and components.  We pushed some practical and technical limits in our project and I’ll write a separate post about it.

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This entry from Ron Ellis Gaut is a nice, clean orchestration of county health data, measuring health and comparing personal well-being and program efficacy.

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The entry from Daniel Claborne emphasizes machine learning predictions performed with R Script, commonly used in data science.  He actually includes the annotated code and explains the technique and the approach using training and prediction data sets.

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The Portland Power BI User Group was one of the first and continues to be one of the most active in the international community.  We meet on the 4th Wednesday evening every month in Beaverton, Oregon. Today there are many active PUGs all over the world.

 

Keeping Up with Power BI – A Never Ending Story

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This first week of the new year has been a lot of housecleaning for me (literally and figuratively…  my office desk and cabinet will be clean by the end of the day!).  Three years into teaching classes and workshops on being productive with Power BI, it continues to be a product requiring a lot of work to stay current.  New features are introduced in every Power BI Desktop monthly update; not to mention updates to the cloud service and on-prem server.  You would have to be a child of the 80s to get the Never Ending Story reference.  Otherwise, it’s just a really bad flying dog – and pop song, which are both hard to explain, so we won’t.  The point is that it’s an ongoing effort to keep skills, courseware and presentation material up-to-date.

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If you’re like me, sometimes all these updates can be a bit of a distraction (we’re talking about Power BI again – not the dog, movie or song… case in point).  I’m excited by the continual innovations and improvements to Power BI.  However, the foundational rules of good design don’t really change that much.  Effective data curation, correct modeling and good core visualization design are as critical as ever.  The trick is to know which new features may be used to improve foundational design and which ones you can leave as icing on the cake for minor enhancements.  Updating courseware and workshop labs seems to be a never ending task and I’m hard at work revising older material and adding new content to prepare for new events this year.  An important topic I will continue to revisit this year is how Power BI is used along with other Microsoft tools to create different types of solutions.  I’m working on a new presentation to describe all of the incarnations of Power BI, used to deliver everything from self-service desktop reports – all the way up to enterprise-scale solutions for corporate users with governed and secured data – and most everything in-between.

The first workshop of the new year will be a one day preconference before the Redmond SQL Saturday, on Microsoft campus Friday, February 9.  You can sign-up for this event here.  I’m working on a few others in the following months and will update this and other blog posts when they are scheduled.  I hope to see you there.  You are welcome to send me questions or suggestions about specific topics of focus.  Just add a comment to this post, or reach me through Twitter or LinkedIn.

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Spontaneous Interviews at PASS Summit 2017

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Conversations with Julie Koesmarno, Olivier Matrat, Aaron Nelson, Seth Bauer and Robert Bruckner captured in video interviews below…

Continuing my video blog series of interviews from PASS Summit, I had the opportunity to catch-up with several Microsoft BI and Data Platform industry leaders amid the crowds and between sessions.  Stay tuned to this station for many more interviews and insider information about the Microsoft Business Intelligence and Data Platform.

I caught up with Julie Koesmarno in the Community Zone, a few days after travelling together on the SQL Train (aka “Oregon SQL Party Train to Seattle”) from Oregon SQL Saturday the weekend before Summit.  She’s been a non-stop community advocate for several years, and continues to speak at events all over.  Julie was an Business Intelligence consultant and user group leader in Australia and Southern California before joining Microsoft as technical evangelist.  You might recognize her from the executive demonstration during the opening keynote at PASS Summit last year.

Olivier Matrat, Principal Program Manager (that’s Microsoft job title code for “in charge of a lot of important stuff”), talks about how they are hard at work integrating several products in the “Power *” suite.  This is the first time I’d heard of all the “Power…” prefixed product names unofficially referred to as “Power Star”, but it makes perfect sense.  Olivier said that we can expect to see tighter integration between tools like Power BI, Flow and Power Apps with more embeddable features for developers and solution integrators.

Aaron Nelson, Data Platform MVP and hard-core PowerShell enthusiast, spoke about some new capabilities he presented in his session about PowerShell for Business Intelligence. The new REST API will let Power BI and report server admins orchestrate server migrations and task automation with PowerShell CmdLets.  He seized the opportunity to promote the PASS PowerShell virtual group that he helps manage, at SQLPS.IO.  I’ve promised Aaron a follow-up post to demonstrate how the REST API works with PowerShell and the new MSBuild integration, so please watch my blog for that in the next few days.

I chatted with Seth Bauer, BI consultant and Data Platform MVP, on the escalator in the Washington State Convention Center between sessions.  Seth has been on the front lines of the Power BI advisors community since the product launched.  He cites Q&A Natural Language and Explain the Difference as examples of the most compelling features.   He participates in PASS Summit for professional networking and to stay current with BI technologies.

Robert Bruckner is a Senior Architect on the Power BI team and long-time developer lead for Reporting Services.  He told me that there are many exciting capabilities on the horizon for Power BI and other integrated reporting technologies that are still under NDA.  He mentioned a recent announcement that the On-premises gateway will soon support single sign-on, delegation, load balancing and high-availability.  It is truly exciting to see such emphasis on enterprise-scale capabilities for these tools.

Interview with Pinal Dave at PASS Summit 2017

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While attending PASS Summit 2017 in Seattle, I had a chance to catch-up of several friends and industry experts, and I will be sharing these interviews in a series of posts.  On the 1st of November, Pinal Dave completed his 4200th post on SqlAuthority.com – a landmark by blogging once per day for eleven years.  Pinal shares this success story and humbly discusses his secrets about being the world-renound authority that we all know, along with some advice about tuning SQL Server.

Thank you, Pinal, for your time and all you do for the PASS community.