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