My Power Platform Summit Europe Recap

Last week the Power Platform Summit Europe was held in Amsterdam. I was there together with my colleagues Sander and Pim and next to the learning experience the conference gave me, it was really nice to join them!

Before starting my recap I’d like to point you to the following tool: Microsoft Office Lens, it’s available both on iOS and Android! In every session I was in there were always people taking pictures of the slides. I sometimes do it also, just because I want to make a note next to the slide or because it’s something in a demo I’d like to capture. But the point I’m trying to make here: do it with the Office Lens app, because then your pictures will look like this:

Pro tip for making pictures of the screen: please use the Microsoft Office Lens app, available on both iOS and Android! :-) #PowerPlatformSummit pic.twitter.com/zRvWwL3rNp

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) 27 maart 2019

The information/sessions that stood out the most for me:

Line Krogh talked about Brons, Silver and Gold Power BI report templates:

• Gold: created by BI team on a managed Tabular model
• Silver: not created by BI team on a managed Tabular model
• Brons: not created by BI team on non-certified data sources

The Art of Gathering Effective BI requirements by Mico Yuk

• An interactive session where she also shared her spreadsheet to be used in discussion with end-users

Nikhil Gakwaed showed us some nice improvements in the Power BI Service:

• Comments on dashboards
• Organizational branding for Power BI Home

Callum Green did a session where one part about data profiling was interesting in particular:

• Data profiling in M (Table.profile)
• He also did some tweaking afterwards to get the profiling on the column and value level

The Value of Self-serve BI in a Large Organisation by Rishi Sapra:

• What-if scenario builder, which he will explain in-depth at the virtual Power BI Days

Demo of splitting the report and the data model by Just Blindbaek:

• This will be even better when Shared and Certified datasets are available, hopefully later this month!

Power BI Performance by Kasper de Jonge, David Magar and Bhavik Merchant:

• Avoid Bi-Di crossfiltering: you will go to hell! (according to Alberto Ferrari)
• Instead turn crossfiltering on in DAX: CROSSFILTER(Dim, Fact, OneWay/Both)

• Use variables, especially with IF
• Don't use IFERROR
• Use DIVIDE
• Model Star-schema/Snowflake
• Filter on Dimensions

A great session on Aggregation Tables by Reza Rad:

• Import mode, Direct Query and Dual
• Use DaxStudio to analyse the queries send by DQ

At the end of day 2 we had a nice view of the entrance to the conference:

Nice ending of a great 2nd day at the #PowerPlatformSummit! So many good sessions today! Good meeting so many friends again and also making new ones who share the same love for #PowerBI pic.twitter.com/pzvLZPypcc

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) 28 maart 2019

In the morning I found some time to go running with Sander in the Amstel Parc just across the road from our hotel. Although it was very chilly, it was worth the early wake up!

Just came back from a 6K run with @SLKerstens, getting ready for the last day of #PowerPlatformSummit! pic.twitter.com/wWkkKr5zZz

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) 29 maart 2019

Let me know if you agree with me or if you think you liked other sessions more at the Summit.

My next post will be a recap of the Power BI User Day 2019 in Utrecht where I also gave a presentation together with Jeroen Schalken.

@NickyvV

Power Platform Summit Europe & Power BI UG

Power Platform Summit Europe

This year the Power Platform Summit Europe (formerly Data & BI Summit) will be held in Amsterdam in the RAI, on 27-29 March. They renamed it because the conference is focused on Power BI, Microsoft Flow and PowerApps.
I will again be attending this conference (you can read my blogs about last year about my announcement, the Day 1 keynote and the recap). While it is good to have dedicated time to learn from the sessions at the conference, I always find it very useful to get in touch and network with everybody there.
I hope I also get the time to get some blog posts out during the conference.

The tracks this year are Act, Administrator, Automate, Developer and Measure.

The mobile app for the conference is now also available (for Android and iOS), where you can:

• Build your personal schedule
• View session details and presentation materials
• See who else is coming to the conference
• Get updates or room changes
• Give feedback on the sessions

As last year, Microsoft added the Power Series to the conference, some of which I am very interested in. There will be over 15 hours of deep dive and hands on content. A few of the topics covered in the Power Series are:

• Data Flows
• Power BI Admin & Performance Tuning Deep Dive
• Power BI Embedded Deep Dive
• Debugging DAX and Model performance issues
• AI in the Power BI Service

Power BI User Group Day 2019

Immediately after the Power BI User Group Day 2019 will be held on Saturday March 30 in Utrecht, where my colleague Jeroen and me will be presenting about our journey of implementing Power BI (Premium) at Van Lanschot Kempen!
I assume a lot of the speakers and attendees of the Summit will also attend this UG. The keynote will for example be provided by Charles Sterling.
I think it will be a great week and it will be good to catch up with friends and make new connections in the community.
If you’re also going to one of the above events, let me know in the comments or on Twitter, I hope to see you there!
@NickyvV

19th Power BI UG Netherlands (November 2018)

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for some time now, but I never got to finish it. A little bit late, but here it is!


On November 29, the 19th Power BI User Group was held at our office in Den Bosch. Yes, that’s where the delicious “Bossche bollen” come from. This UG was officially called the Dutch Data Dude farewell tour, because @JeroenterHeerdt has moved to America to join Microsoft in Seattle, as you can read here.

After some delicious sandwiches, snacks and “worstenbroodjes”, Jeroen Schalken and I kicked off the evening with an introduction to data management and the introduction of Power BI at Van Lanschot Kempen.


Michiel Rozema and Henk Vlootman (Quanto) explained how to make financial reports with Power BI. A lot of organizations are used to financial reports in Excel. Readable for the accountant, but less accessible for management. How do you use the strengths of visualization of Power BI to create strategic as well as operational information?

Jeroen ter Heerdt closed the evening and took us on a ride through his world of data visualizations: from pie charts (do NOT use them) to the three roles he thinks are needed for data management:

• Data Engineer
• Data Scientist
• Data Artist.

Making a good data visualization can be difficult. Jeroen showed us the do’s and don’ts to make even better visualizations.

We had a wonderful evening with some great conversations amongst the attendees. Thanks @PBIG_NL for the chance to host this evening!

@NickyvV

Bits of BI – June 29

In accordance with Thomas LaRock I decided to also start my round-up of news from around the block of SQL Server, Technology or anything vaguely related to BI. And I might include some other things as well if I feel like it.
My plan is to do a weekly round-up, let’s see how that works out.
My latest post was 2 weeks ago, but here’s a new one! As we’re starting to go into summer and holidays, I might skip one edition in August also.

But for now, here’s the next edition of Bits of BI!

• SSMS 17.8 is now available by Pam Lahoud (sqlgoddess)
  Download SSMS 17.8 or review the Release Notes to get started.
• Does It Matter Which Field Goes First in an Index? by Brent Ozar (@BrentO)
  Some index 101 knowledge, but thoroughly explained. And as Brent says: index field order matters a LOT.
• Biml Express 2018 is here!
  It includes support for VS 2017, SSIS package import and many other things. Cathrine (@Cathrine) and Andy (@AndyLeonard) also blogged about it. Go download Biml Express 2018 or check the change log for all updates.
• Announcing the GroupBy September Lineup by Brent Ozar (@BrentO)
  The next (online and free) GroupBy conference is on Friday September 7, and will contain mainly SQL sessions this time.
• Stairway to Azure DataBricks by Leila Etaati (@leila_etaati)
  Leila already started with Part 1 and Part 2, Part 3 will follow later. She starts with adding a Databricks environment with a Workspace and a Cluster. In Part 2 she goes more in-depth with uploading data to Azure Data Lake Store, clean the data with Scala and use R to visualize it and do predictive analytics. In Part 3 Leila will show the result in Power BI.

That concludes this edition of Bits of BI, feel free to share it with others!
@NickyvV