Data & BI Summit Day 1 Keynote

The kick-off is by Rose Spitzer (@RoseSpitzer), General Manager of the Power BI User Group.

John Doyle Sr. Director Product marketing

Video: Heathrow Airport showcase

Ben Watt

Park run: Every saturday a 5K run
It started out small but now has 1427 different places and over 34 million people participating!

Amanda Cofsky (@MissAmandaN) Power BI Program Manager

She starts her story with a New York taxi demo and shows some interesting new features to come:

• Incremental refresh (Premium users only)
• Drillthrough with filters and parameters (this will be released in May!)

Q&A explorer

John Doyle enters the stage again and talks about the roadmap for 6-9 months

Some interesting things coming! #PowerBI #DataAnalytics #DataBISummit @pbiusergroup pic.twitter.com/fUBnP4yiAq

— Gavin Clark (@gavinclark66) 24 april 2018

Colin Murphy

Colin starts another set of demos, starting with the Common Data Service for Analytics (CDSA)

Public preview of #PowerBI #CommonDataService coming soon!! #DataBISummit pic.twitter.com/x75t23aeaT

— Joël CREST #DataBISummit (@JoelCrest) 24 april 2018

Show details for table data under the graphs

Show details in #PowerBI reports.. #DataBISummit pic.twitter.com/tBGuGVjWOx

— Wolfgang Strasser (@wstrasser) 24 april 2018

Datapools (preview): Entities from CDS
Datapools are also available as a Power BI connector in Power BI Desktop.
You can add entities from different data sources.
Use case: Combine promotional data with CRM using Power Query online

Drill-throughs will now take all the filters/context from the page you’re on (not just the point you drilled into!), there’s a ‘show details’ feature and data pools (Common Data service for Analytics) is coming soon and going to rock the world of #analytics #DataBISummit pic.twitter.com/KLlQmwqoS2

— Rishi Sapra (@rsaprano) April 24, 2018

Data & BI Summit

I have quite some good news: in April I’m going to the Data & BI Summit in Dublin, Ireland.
The Data & BI Summit is hosted by The Power BI User Group.
With tracks like Visualise, Model, Govern and Develop there’s content for a wide range of people, from Business analysts to IT admins.

I’m particularly interested in the Microsoft Power Series where members of the so-called “Power BI dream team” will give 2,5 hour long deep dive sessions on topics like Security, Story Telling and Advanced Data Visualisation with Power BI.

What can we expect at the summit? From the website:

• Exceptional, quality content: Learn how to bring your company through the digital transformation by gaining new understandings of your data and deepening your knowledge of the Microsoft Business Intelligence tools. Products will include: Power BI, PowerApps, Flow, SQL Server, Excel, Azure, D365 and more! 
• Answers to your questions: Network with the Microsoft Power BI team, dig-in onsite to find immediate answers with industry experts, Data MVPs, and User Group Leaders while taking advantage of the opportunity to engage in interactive sessions, workshops and labs.
• Network with your peers: Enjoy countless opportunities to create lasting relationships by connecting and networking with user group peers, partners and Microsoft team members.
• Stretch your skill set: Advance your career by learning the latest updates and how they can help you and your business.

If you’re also going, let me know in the comments or on Twitter, I hope to see you there!

@NickyvV

SSDT Error Message: Unable To Cast COM Object of Type 'X' To Interface Type 'Y'

Just a short blog post today explaining a problem (and solution) I ran into when working at a client a while ago. Hopefully it is helpful for anyone.

Problem

I got this error message at a client when I tried to open an SSIS solution in SSDT:

Unable to cast COM object of type 'System.__ComObject' to interface type 'Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.Wrapper.IDTSObject100'

According to this source the reason could be a badly applied Service Pack or CU for example, but I’m not entirely sure about that in my case.

Solution

The solution for this is to reregister the dll that is referred to, in this case: dts.dll.
Before starting, make sure you close any open Visual Studio instance.
In a Command Prompt go to the following path (be sure to start the Command Prompt as Administrator):

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\120\DTS\Binn\

where 120 is you SQL Server version number.
Reregister the dts.dll by executing the command:

regsvr32 dts.dll

If all goes well you should see the following message pop up:

I found info here.

Happy coding :)

@NickyvV