Speaking at SQL Saturday Prague 2019

Last weekend I had the great opportunity of speaking at my first SQL Saturday, in the beautiful city of Prague in the Czech Republic. Together with my colleague Jeroen Schalken (B | @JeroenSchalken), we travelled to Prague to deliver our session on implementing Power BI (Premium) at Van Lanschot Kempen.

I also was very active on twitter during the weekend on the hashtag #sqlsatprague, I embedded every first tweet of my daily threads in the blog.

Friday

All settled and ready to go to #sqlsatprague with Jeroen Schalken! We are going to present the Tips & Tricks from our #PowerBI Implementation at Van Lanschot Kempen tomorrow at 17.15! #pbifamily https://t.co/6g7aGMQbDg

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 20, 2019

We started Friday morning with our travel to Eindhoven Airport. After a little delay in Eindhoven, we were just in time to drop our bags at the hotel and get ready to be picked up for the speaker's dinner. It was in restaurant Kuchyň, with a beautiful view over the city next to Prague Castle.

Having a great speaker's dinner at #sqlsatprague! With @JeroenSchalken @JiriNeoral @pinaldave @christinaleo @Neil_Hambly @SQLSwimmer @tomaz_tsql @MatijaLah @sqlpass_cz @jardaminha @SQL_Alex @DejanSarka @DamianWidera @TomasTucek @jaroreken @malekpav pic.twitter.com/7gLfFy8Rkr

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 20, 2019

We shared some starters on the table and then could pick our own food right from the kitchen, which was very nice. We were very well taken care of by the SQL Saturday Prague team!

Saturday

I started the SQL Saturday with a short run around the convention center and through the park and after having breakfast in the hotel we headed to the conference.

Rise and shine! It's #sqlsatprague time! pic.twitter.com/TLqGgG4apQ

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 21, 2019

During the day I attended these sessions:

• Profiling Your Data by Angela Henry (B | @SQLSwimmer)
  Angela showed how you can use Power BI or the SSIS Data Profiling task (also available in Biml) to profile your data. Oh, and you should do that before the start of your project btw.
• Power BI Row Level Security Deep Dive by Jiří Neoral (B | @JiriNeoral)
  Jiri showed RLS in Desktop, from defining your security in a (hidden) table to dynamic RLS.
• Power BI as a universal analytic tool by Michal Chmelár (B)
  Michal showed several Cognitive Services for analyzing and translating text to sentiment analysis and also how to integrate the PowerApps visual into a Power BI report.
• Designing your tabular/PowerBI model for performance and scalability by Ivan Donev (B | @ikdonev)
  Ivan showed us several best practices of creating an SSAS model after breaking down Hash, Dictionary and Run Length Encoding.

There was also time for relaxing in the speaker room and taking some fresh air outside. And then finally of course our own session at the end of the day:

Tips and Tricks of a Power BI (Premium) Implementation at a Financial Institute by Jeroen Schalken and me. Because we were the latest slot of the day quite a few people already left, but our audience was very interactive and had lots of questions, so thank you!

We also went to restaurant Na Pekařce for the SQL Saturday after party, where we were joined by the speakers, organisers and also around 40 attendees.

Sunday

We had this day to enjoy the beautiful city of Prague, together with a few other speakers and Jarda, who was our awesome guide for the day!

Sightseeing after #sqlsatprague with @pinaldave @jardaminha @christinaleo @SQLSwimmer @JeroenSchalken pic.twitter.com/6Le9LbgYJo

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 22, 2019

Monday

Because our flight was at 9.30 AM we started this day very early with a quick breakfast and on to the metro and bus to the check-in and security at the airport. It all went very smoothly so I even had some time to work on this post. At 11 o'clock we were back again on Dutch soil. As a surprise my wife and 2 youngest kids were there to pick me up.

Dobrý den: Final preparations before going back home from #sqlsatprague. Massive thanks to all the organisers @sqlpass_cz , sponsors, attendees and other speakers! A special thanks to @jardaminha for taking such good care of us and taking us on the sightseeing tour yesterday! pic.twitter.com/cXI4awH0Ah

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 23, 2019

Closing words

All-in all it was a wonderfull weekend and I met many new great friends from the SQL Community. I hope I can some day go back to (SQL Saturday) Prague!

I also made a short video of my adventures during the weekend, so enjoy!

Power User Days Belgium - September 2019 Edition

This weekend I attended the Power User Days in Belgium, organised by the Flemish Power BI User group together with the PowerApps and Flow User Group Belgium. It took place at the Bmatix office in Kontich. I not only attended, but also did 2 sessions on Power BI!

TL;DR - Slides

For those of you that attended my session or the workshop, here are the links to my slides:

• Workshop: The Power BI Service - Workspaces & Apps
• Tips & Tricks of a Power BI (Premium) Implementation at a Financial Institution

Always good to have stickers!

#powerbidays Gotta have them stickers! 😁 pic.twitter.com/cgDzs6XMJA

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 14, 2019

My experience

I had one session planned, my Tips and Tricks of a Power BI (Premium) Implementation at a Financial Institute, that I'm also presenting together with my colleague Jeroen Schalken (B | @JeroenSchalken) at SQL Saturday Prague next weekend. But Jan Mulkens (B | @JanMulkens) (founder of the Flemish Power BI User Group, a.o.) contacted me last Wednesday with the idea of doing a second session in the form of a 1-hour hands-on workshop. Jan quickly setup a demo Power BI tenant for me and I came up with the content of the workshop in the next few days.

I really liked doing the workshop, although it was a last minute change of plans. I like the interactivity you get with and between the attendees. The login and setup stuff took a bit longer then expected so I quickly ran out of time. However, almost everyone decided to stay another 15 minutes to complete the exercise I started, even though lunch was already being served :-)

Nice interactions in between sessions at @powerbidays #powerbi pic.twitter.com/ajT8aAwaKe

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) September 14, 2019

Altogether I really enjoyed the day, now on to SQL Saturday Prague where I will be (co-) presenting my Tips & Tricks session at the last time slot of the day!

Let me know if you're also going to Prague, otherwise see you at Data Saturday Holland or dataMinds Connect!

The New Power BI Workspace Viewer Role Explained

Back in April of this year Microsoft announced the rollout of a new Viewer role in Power BI workspaces. It is mentioned in the release notes of April of this year: Power BI Planned features

On June 25 the Power BI team announced therollout of the new Viewer role for Power BI workspaces.

This is all part of the newworkspace experience, which in fact is not that new anymore :) It in fact has become the default workspace you create, there will be a plan to migrate old workspaces to the new ones. You can read the docs on howthe new workspaces are different or on workspacefeatures that work differently.

As of now we have 4 roles available in a Power BI workspace. The new Viewer role works quite the same as the classic workspace option "Members can only view Power BI content". It gives a read-only experience to the users.

A few remarks that weren't totally clear for me in the beginning:

• You can have read-only access to the content in the workspace without publishing an app.
• The Viewer role does requires a Pro license or your content must reside in Power BI Premium capacity. That way it behaves the same as the published app on a workspace in Premium capacity.
• Row-level security (RLS) on the datasets in the Power BI workspace is enforced for users who only have the Viewer role.
• Users can only export summarized data.
• If you want a user with a Viewer role to Analyze in Excel, they need Build permissions on that dataset.
• Build permission on a dataset also means they can export the underlying data that's used to build the visual, so you might be careful before granting that access, especially with RLS.

There was an improvement to the export of summarized data with the Build permission. If you're using that or are planning to give users the Build permission, please do read the following blog post by Lukasz Pawlowski: Change to Summarized Data Export behavior with Build permission.

Here is an overview of the capabilities of the four roles: admins, members, contributors, and viewers:

So let's take a look at the experience in the Power BI Service. I tested everything myself to be sure, so these are all pictures from our own tenant.

When granting access to a user you can choose from one of the 4 roles:

In the new workspace you can choose to add individual users or add security group, where the latter is the best practice. That way you can manage the users and their access outside of Power BI.

As a Viewer, you only see the Dashboards, Reports and workbooks, in either view of the workspace. So the Datasets and Dataflows are not visible.

This is the File menu when logged in as a Viewer. So you can't download the pbix-file, as that would give you access to the underlying data.

This is the top level content of the workspace when logged in with the Viewer role.

As an Admin in the same workspace, you not only see the Datasets and Dataflows, you also have a lot more options like Usage Metrics, Settings, Delete, etc.

In a next blog post I will show how the Row-Level Security works together with the Viewer role and the Build permission on a dataset.

I hope this makes it a clear overview of the capabilities of the new Viewer role. If you have any other use cases or anything to add please let me know in the comments!

Add a Linked File in a Visual Studio Project: Add As Link

Yesterday I had to add a file into a database project as a link to another file. So not a copy of the file, but a link so I can use the file in multiple database projects and only have to maintain it once. Because I couldn't easily find the solution to this and I was searching on Google but also couldn't find it quick (enough to my opinion :)), I decided to write a short blog post.

I didn't know the exact naming of the property, so the majority of the links I got from Google where Linked Server items, only after changing the search phrase 3 or 4 times I found this entry by Grant Winney.

The normal icon that appears when you add a file is the following (at least when you don't have changes in source control, here TFS). A little blue lock is displayed, letting you know that it is a local file and it is checked-in in source control.

The other available icons would be:

A plus sign for a newly added file, not yet in source control:

A red check mark, for a changed file already in source control.

TL;DR - Solution

The trick to add a file as a link is not in the menu options in Visual Studio itself, that's also where I started searching.

You have to first add an existing item to your desired folder, as shown below.

After selecting the file, don't click Add, but click the dropdown next to the Add button. There you can select Add As Link.

Et voilá, we've got ourselves a linked item, with the new icon that looks like a hyperlink :)

Let me know if you have any remarks and found this post useful in the comments!

Nicky