PASS BAC Blog Feed | Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog

Watch below for live updates during the conference

Stay tuned and you’ll find out what’s going on during this week in San Jose. I’ll be blogging from the conference as announcements are made and as the rest of the community buzzes about new developments in the community and here at the BAC in San Jose, California.

If you haven’t downloaded the pocket Guidebook, do it now. Just go to http://guidebook.com/g/passbac/, install and then search for PASS Business Analytics.

Tuesday, May 6

I arrived this evening, flying in from Portland. I met up with my long-time friend and co-author, Grant Paisley from Sydney, Australia. It all starts to happen tomorrow with the all-day pre-conference sessions. This is where the deep learning takes place. Every year, people who have serious interest in learning to use a technology or business tool spend a full day with some of the most respected industry professionals. They go deep and thorough, usually showing how to apply bet-practice skills to build a complete solution or tackle some serious issues. Registration for the preconference sessions will still be open on Wednesday morning until the rooms are at capacity.

Wednesday Precon Schedule:

Data Science Master Class: Exploring More Exotic Patterns in Data (AAT-199-P)

Mark Whitehorn (Penguinsoft Consulting Ltd.)
Implementation and Design on the Parallel Data Warehouse (BD-399-P)

Jason Strate (Pragmatic Works)
PowerPivot: Fundamentals and Patterns to Make You Effective TODAY (AV-199-P)

Rob Collie (PowerPivotPro.com )
Predictive Analytics for Absolute Beginners (AAT-299-P)

Artus Krohn-Grimberghe (Analytic Information Systems and Business Intelligence), Mark Tabladillo (SolidQ)
Real-World Small Big Data (BD-199-P)

Lynn Langit (lynnlangit)
Superhero Power BI (AV-299-P)

Peter Myers (Bitwise Solutions)

Wednesday, May 7

07:00 AM – 08:00 PM
Registration

07:30 AM – 08:30 AM
Continental Breakfast**, Exhibit Hall

08:30 AM – 4:30 PM

Precon Sessions

Thursday, May 8

07:00 AM – 06:30 PM
Registration

07:00 AM – 08:00 AM
Continental Breakfast, Exhibit Hall

08:00 AM – 09:15 AM
Keynote – Amir Netz and Kamal Hathi

09:15 AM – 10:00 AM
Refreshment Break, Exhibit Hall

10:00 AM – 6:15 PM

Sessions

Friday, May 9

07:00 AM – 04:00 PM
Registration

07:00 AM – 08:00 AM
Continental Breakfast, Exhibit Hall

08:00 AM – 09:15 AM
Keynote – David McCandless

09:15 AM – 10:00 AM
Refreshment Break, Exhibit Hall

10:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Sessions

———————————————————————————————————

Thursday Keynote

It’s 8:00 AM Pacific Time on the 8th of May, 2014 and the keynote session is beginning…

Welcome by Tom LaRock, President of PASS

”we get paid to work with data everyday – it’s just hard to explain to our family what we do”

For over 14 years, PASS has connected data professions for all over

PASS has over 100,000 members

John Whittaker from Dell:

“Is big data really happening in the middle market?”

Outcome is successful when there is business and IT alignment

“It’s easy to be clever with big data but it’s easy to be freaky with it”

Top big challenges:

Variety of types & structures

Sheer volumes

Budget limitations

What data to use for business decisions

Getting business to share across org silos

Inaccurate/data quality

Understanding where to focus decisions, metrics, KPIs, etc.

Dell has a large software division (manage, integrate & analyze data) – audience poll showed that about 20% of attendees knew that

Amir Netz & Kamal Hati from Microsoft on stage

“Satya loves data…”

This change in leadership at Microsoft will mean a greater focus on data and analytic technologies, especially cloud services.

Kamal: “Satya is making Indian accents cool at Microsoft”

2 million Power Pivot downloads

100,000 Power Query downloads

Power BI demos, using Power Q&A to explore the Power BI usage statistics

Sept: usage spike when Q&A went public in preview

March: huge spike when Power BI was released

Over 1 million Q&A questions answered in April

Power BI demo contest winner was Michael Carper – “can tweeting affect the outcome of an NBA game?” https://fb-3785439.strutta.com/entry/5477264

Kamal demo: analyzing Internet browser usage

Announcements:

The Power BI iOS app will be available this summer
Reporting Services will run in Power BI – by the end of summer
Power BI will work with on-prem data sources without using scheduled data refresh

Forecasting & Time series analysis –
line chart provides time-series prediction with error ranges & outlier correction adjustments – WOW!

Demo: Hawaii tourism survey:

Interesting insights about the spending per island and where visitors come from
Question: “why do Japanese tourists show more affection than other cultures?” – answer: More Japanese honeymoon in Hawaii

Julie, a volunteer from the audience, is doing the next unrehearsed demo…

WE HAVE HEAT MAPS in Power VIEW!!!! — Jun Underwood is hyperventilating
Drag a chart data point out to create another visual and drill-down – very cool!
Power View snaps and resizes

Bump and Shake gestures added – automatically separates a chart into multiples or combines two charts into one visual by dragging them together with two fingers on a touch screen.

In conclusion, the features shown today will be introduced in the next couple of months through Power BI in Office 365.

———————————————————————————————————

Attended a great session presented by Devin Knight for beginners about building an end-to-end BI solution using Power View

Devin is a very good presenter and was able to very clearly articulate the value of the Power Pivot and Power View toolset through live demonstrations.

———————————————————————————————————

Great quote from Gartner in Michael Trjedor’s session on Microsoft Analytics & Visualization:
"By 2015, organizations that build a modern information management system will outperform their peer financially by 20 percent."
– Gartner, Mark Beyer, "Information Management in the 21st Century"

———————————————————————————————————

Rob Collie: Your own Data Revolution

“It doesn’t have to be industrial scale to be industrial strength”

“The human prison”: The human brain is naturally trained to work within the boundaries established from past experience. If only certain questions could be answered by a system/report/spreadsheet/database/model/whatever, we’re not likely to ask other questions.

“apples and oranges”: Low hanging fruit…We often make unfair comparisons and establish benchmarks (e.g. KPI targets). There are often/usually more variables to consider in a comparison.

These tools & techniques allow our brains to thin the way they want to rather than the way they’ve been trained to think.

“The Data Gene”: 1/16 people have the data gene – in all demographics & at all levels of the organization.

You’re a data/business analytics conference… That’s not normal.

The people who mock those who built the pyramids are “normal”.

Data gene is an interest not a level of intelligence, no PhD necessary

There is no cure

———————————————————————————————————

Alberto Ferrari: DAX Solutions from the Field

“I’ve stopped believing in Santa Clause, the Tooth Fairy and Microsoft Marketing”

“The primary key in the fact table is your worst enemy”

The first step to optimizing performance should always be to reduce unnecessary distinct column values
Use Kasper’s memory size Power Pivot model to analyze the memory footprint of tables & columns
Use SQL Server Profiler, clear cache
Build the model with necessary columns
Find columns using the most memory

———————————————————————————————————

Dejan Sarka: Advanced Analytics in Excel 2013

if you would like to get a complete picture of the end-to-end data analytics capabilities in Excel, watch the recording of this session. Dejan covered all the essentials at an advanced level. This excellent presentation moved very quickly. Emphasis on data mining/predictive analytics.