Governance & Administration - Fabric Administrator Role

It's been a while since I've written on a regular cadance, so I'm picking up my favorite topic again: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

Today I want to talk to you about the Fabric Administrator (role).

• What rights does an Admin have?
• Are there more people that also have these rights? (Hint: YES! 😉)

Toady, I'm not talking about the governance aspects of the Admin, the Tenant settings or the Admin portal in general. I'll leave that for a next time. Or read other posts, for example by Marc on other roles and controls in Fabric or the delicate balance of governance and collaboration.

Manage Fabric Administrators

Users with this role can manage everything in Fabric, so from the Admin portal, to workspace access, and have also read access to various other parts in the Office and Azure ecosystem.

I encourage you to check who are assigned this role, because it should only be a handful of people in my opinion. You can check this in the Azure portal, under Entra ID > Roles and administrators.

Alternatively you can also search for it in the top search bar and go there directly.

Looking at the description of the role, we can see a few interesting things:

(As an Admin,) You can go to Azure and O365 Service Health to check for potential status issues with those services. You can also check and file (Premium) support tickets, depending on the license/capacity you have.

I especially want to call out the last row in the permissions:

The link there reads: microsoft.powerApps.powerBi/....

Power Platform Administrator

Now let's take a look at the Power Platform Admnistrator role description:

You might have noticed the same path there: microsoft.powerApps.

So this means, everything "below" PowerApps is also accessible, so the Power Platform Admin can also access and manage the same things the Fabric Admin can!

I also encourage you to check the people assigned to this role 😀

Just In Time Access Roles

Depending on your organizational settings, Privileged Identity Management might be enabled.
This means that people might need to activate the Fabric Admin role (for a period of time) before it becomes active. In the below screenshot you can see that Ernst and me have the role permanently assigned for Powerdobs.

But if I'm working as a consultant it usually is on a need-to-have bases, so I can e.g. activate it for 1, 2 or 8 hours. 

Looking at the picture above, you can see that there's Active and Eligible assignments. Depending on the settings and activity, people might have the PIM-role, but not activated at the moment.

Wrap up

To complete the list of access to Fabric, the Global (tenant) Admin role also has access to everything in Fabric:

• Global Admin
• Power Platform Administrator
• Fabric Administrator

People with the above roles have the same rights as the Fabric Admin.

Did you know the Power Platform Administrator has those rights?

Do you think I missed any information in this blog?

Please let me know in the comments below.

Let Me Google That For You

In case you're not familiar, let me first explain what I mean with the title.

Let Me Google That For You is a website, that let's you create a demo of how to do a user-specified Google search. It was designed for tech-savvy people that are frequently asked for help. Its purpose is to gently, but sarcastically, point out that by searching for the problem yourself first, you'd probably come a long way to the answer.

While Google is the brand name of a leading internet search engine company, it's also quite commonly used as a verb:

To search the internet for information about (a person, topic, etc.):We googled the new applicant to check her background.

And of course, there's also a Bing alternative: Let Me Bing That For You.

Or even Let Me DuckDuckGo That For You 😄

How to google

Because once in a while I see people ask questions that I can (easily) google, I thought it might be worth writing down how I like to perform my searches. 
It might be obvious already, but I like to use Google for that. I find it to be better at its job than others, even for Microsoft tech like Power BI and Power Platform.

When searching for information, there are a few things I like to do:

Start with the topic

Start with a 1 or 2 word, preferably as short as possible, topic, like:

• Power BI
• Power Query
• DAX
• (Power BI) REST API
• PowerShell Power BI

Keep it short/to the point

After that, add your question on the topic, but also as short as possible. Try not to add too much filler words like and, or, the and a(n). I also tend to stay away from How do I type of questions.

So instead of asking: how do i use the power bi rest api with an authorization header

I like to keep it short and to the point: power bi rest api authorization header

While the search results might not differ thát much, the most important thing to me is that Google suggests search words for you. That way you will get the most commonly asked questions to choose from. That's particularly usefull when you don't know exactly what you are looking for.
In case of an error message it's often quite clear, but if you're looking for more general things, or for authorization with an API, you might not know it's called a bearer token.

Errors

In my line of job I unfortunately quite often run into errors. I always use the exact error message that I encounter: word for word. If the error is too long I might try the first part/sentence of it. But keep it exactly as it is. But again, I start with a 1 or 2 word topic, followed by the error message.
A good habit was to create a blog post on the topic if I couldn't find a solution easily. Mainly back in the days when I used to work a lot with SSRS and SSDT.

Ask for help

Sometimes you just can't find it on the interwebs. Then your best bet is to ask for help! There's quite a good chance someone has run into that same problem before.
Ask you co-workers, use Twitter, the Power BI Community, Reddit, a private or public Slack group, whatever works for you.

I'm quite active on Twitter (@NickyvV) and have been using that for over a decade. If you are not, I highly recommend to start doing that. Not only for asking for help, but surely also for the amazing community of Power BI and SQL Server people hanging out there.

There are even specific hashtags you can incorporate in your search: #sqlhelp, #powerbihelp, #pbihelp
Those are monitored throughout they day by a bunch of people that want to give others a hand.
And it's still Twitter, so sometimes you come accross some people that are, let's say, a bit less welcoming.. 😃 

The majority of interactions is however positive, it's an amazing community!

Searching for Call for Speakers

Because I'm also active in the speaking community, I sometimes like to search for places where I can submit my talks. In my opinion Sessionize is the best platform to use, for speakers as well as conferences. It quickly let's you make a public speaker profile with presentations you can give, but also submit those presentations to conferences without the need to re-enter all the same details over and over again.

Since a while, the website has this Discover events tab which you can use to search for open call for speakers. Before this option was available, and I still do it sometimes to make sure I'm not missing anything on Sessionize itself, I used the option to search for keywords on a specific site on Google:

site:sessionize.com power bi

Closing

With this write-up, I hope I gave you some insights in my daily routine of getting help with things I run into. And to be clear, me having xx years of experience, having a certain title on LinkedIn or being a Microsoft MVP has nothing to do with my amount of searches or things I have to look up.
Sometimes we like to think we do, but we can't know everything. Also, Power BI (and Power Platform) is constantly changing. I would say I'm probably looking for some sort of help more than 20 times a day, every day!

Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 1 Plan

The Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 1 Plan has just been released!

You can go to the plan in the documentation (here) or download the detailed PDF (here).

I'd like to give you a quick summary of what I think are the most exciting features coming up in this wave. Remember though that this plan focusses on the period from April to September 2021, so features releasing before that will not be taken into account here. For example: Object-level security is a feature planned for Public preview in February 2021. For a complete overview have a look at the 2020 release wave 2 plan.

My primary job focus is with Power BI and Power Platform governance, so as you may understand, the majority of features will be in that direction.

I also display the Public Preview (PP) and General Availability (GA) dates here, just to have a complete overview. Please be aware that this is a post on my blog that is accurate at the time of writing. For the most recent status of features please go to the 2021 Release Wave 1 Plan.

A little disclaimer before we start: Because this post lists features that may not have released yet, delivery timelines may change, and projected functionality may not be released. For more information, go to Microsoft policy.

Power BI

For an overview of all Power BI related new and planned features, go here. These are my favorites:

OLS permissions for dataflow entities (PP - | GA May 2021)
This will allow you to give permissions to specific entities inside a dataflow, so you don't have to share the whole dataflow anymore.

View permissions for dataflows (PP May 2021 | GA - )
This allows owners of a dataflow to give view permissions, so users can browse entities in a dataflow. Combined with the previous feature, you can now share a specific entity with view access.

Workspace level refresh for datasets and dataflows (PP May 2021 | GA - )
This is HUGE! This feature will take care of refreshing all artifacts inside a workspace, also taking care of dependencies and orchestration of those refreshes.

Deployment pipelines - dataflows support (PP May 2021 | GA - )
This feature describes itself, although there are 3 sub features mentioned:

• A way to visually compare the code between 2 versions of a dataflow
• Deploy dataflows through the stages
• (!)Maintain the relationship between dataflows and datasets through the pipeline

Background validation for dataflows (PP - | GA April 2021)
When saving a dataflow, the validation will no longer be blocking for the UI and be performed in the background.

Data lineage, impact, and API enhancements (PP April 2021| GA - )
While there are a few capabilities already available (lineage view in the workspace, dataset impact analysis), the below will also be added:

• Composite models in lineage view
• Admin API's to scan artifacts and lineage cross tenant
• An API that returns the list of workspaces that changed since the last API call
• Extending Service Principal authentication for Power BI read-only API's

Power Automate

For an overview of all Power Automate related new and planned features, go here. These are my favorites:

Improved onboarding experiences for new users (PP March 2021 | GA April 2021)

Improved licensing and usage visibility for Power Automate environments and tenants (PP March 2021 | April 2021)
This visibility will be provided in the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) and the flow analytics page.

Admin reports to show API usage for users and flows (PP April 2021 | GA - )
There will be license reports in the PPAC to view the API usage of flows and users, giving admins the capability to determine when flows or users are approaching usage limits.

Governance capabilities to prevent data loss (PP April 2021 | GA - )
There will be more governance capabilities in the PPAC including:

• Connector restrictions
• Connector action restrictions
• Endpoint filtering
• Restrictions for sharing connections

Governance and administration

For an overview of all governance and administration related new and planned features, go here. These are my favorites:

Power Platform tenant isolation support (PP April 2021 | GA - )
Enable/Disable tenant isolation using self-serve capability through the PPAC. Previously, we had to create a support ticket to enable tenant isolation.

User security configuration experiences in PPAC (PP April 2021 | GA - )
Managability of users and security will be better and centralized in PPAC, with a modern and intuitive UI for environments with a Dataverse database. Also AAD-groups will be included in the security role assignments

Tenant scope admin report for Power Apps usage (PP April 2021 | GA - )
Power Platform service admins will be able to understand usage with metrics like Monthly Active Users (MAU), the kind of engagement with new and return users, and also the list of apps in use and not in use at the tenant.

Tenant-level admin reports for flow usage (PP April 2021 | GA - )
Similar to the previous feature, but now for Power Automate. This will also provide useful insights, primarily in the field over number of (successful and failed) runs, number of makers and also total flows, number of flows created in the last 30 days, etc.

Data Integration

For an overview of all data integration related new and planned features, go here. These are my favorites:

Data source management enhancements (PP - | GA September 2021)
This is a LOOOONG awaited feature, at least from my side! :-) While the PPAC now already shows Power BI gateway data sources in read-only mode, centralizing the management will be enhanced further, a.o. by:

• visibility of the username and service principals of a data source,
• a new field called Data source description,
• Installed date, and Last used date for the gateway,
• and support to use groups instead of users. 

Email Alerts (PP - | GA September 2021)
For me, the best enhancement here is to set up email alerts to notify for updating to a newer version of the gateway.

Reuse and share queries across Power Query clients with Power Query templates (PP September 2021 | GA - )
While not immediately helpful for me (because I don't work that much with PQ), I do see the great potential for this feature!

Closing

All-in all a great set of features to be working on. I can't wait to get my hands on them!

Next to all this Power Platform goodness, there's also a lot going on in Dynamics 365, if you're interested have a look here.

Let me know what your favorite feature is or if you think I missed anything important!

My Past & Upcoming Speaking Engagements

I noticed I already did quite some presentations this year (15). So I thought this would be a nice time to give a short update on what I did and what presentations are still to come.

Past Talks

• Denmark Power BI User Group (webinar), November 4th
• MVP Lightning Talks (webinar), October 21st
• DataWeekender #TheSQL (webinar), October 17th
• SQL Saturday Denmark (webinar), September 26th
• SQL Saturday Croatia (webinar), September 19th

For a full list of all my presentations have a look at my speaking page.

A while ago I decided to create a github page to host all my slidedecks, so have a look there if you are looking for materials: https://github.com/NickyvVr/talks.

Upcoming Talks

M365 Chicago, November 13th

I know, it's Friday, and it's the 13th: what could go wrong, right? :)
I'm actually delivering 2 presentations here, which you can find below, one at 7PM and one at 10PM (UTC+1).

You can still register for this event here.

Just be aware that this is a US-based event, so it starts at 3:10 PM (CET) with the keynote: Building Community Through Storytelling and ends with an EndNote Panel at midnight my time.

Power Platform French Summit, November 20th

This will actually be a 2-day event:

• Thursday, November 19th with a Business Day
• Friday, November 20th with a Technical Day

Here I'll also be giving my Forms, Flow, Power BI session at Friday afternoon.

Closing

I would also like to mention that the next event (register here) for our Power BI Days Netherlands is scheduled on November 24th with this great line-up:

• Alexander Arvidsson (b | @arcticdba): The Untruthful Art – Five Ways of Misrepresenting Data
• Meagan Longoria (b | @MMarie): What Is Inclusive Report Design and Why Should You Care?

Finally, if you are interested in having me talk for your User Group or conference, have a look at my available sessions and let me know here or on Twitter.

A Form, a Flow and a Power BI Streaming Dataset Walk Into a Bar - Part 2

In this blog series I will set apart all the steps needed to get this demo up and running on your own. I will use the text in this post, as well as screen shots and video's explaining it step by step. So if you're already (somewhat) familiar with Forms, Power Automate and/or Power BI streaming datasets, feel free to go directly to the video's and start building your own demo right away. Otherwise, keep reading and eventually you'll come across all the resources as well.

In Part 1, I already explained what the reason behind this demo is, and what I used it for in my presentations. I made a start with the demo and showed you how to make a Form and set up a streaming dataset in Power BI.

In Part 2 of this blog series I will show you how to glue it all together with Power Automate and create a report out of the data. There are some things you need to know in the streaming dataset, to properly show the output in your Power BI report. And lastly, I will show you a trick to get your data refreshed live while respondents are answering the questions, but without refreshing your browser!

Create an automation flow

In Power Automate you can create flows manually or with the help of a template. I used a template for my first flow, but if I search for this same template in the gallery it actually doesn't show up.

Power Automate template

I do have the URL because you can check that in your current flows. I resubmitted it as a template because I think it's quite useful:

Power Automate flow details

You can use that template here, or create the steps yourself manually. It's actually not that hard if you take a look at the template.

Create a Power BI report

When the previous steps have been completed, we have built ourselves a working solution, we only have to visualize the results from the dataset. OK, I know, I could also use the default reporting of Microsoft Forms, but that uses pie charts… And you know: every time you create a pie chart, God kills a kitten! :-)

Microsoft Forms default report

Before creating a report it's good to have some data to create the visuals from. To do that, in Forms, clicking on Preview lets you enter the form as a user. You can then create a report by connecting to the streaming dataset, live from Power BI Desktop.

As you saw in the video, I created a basic report with the questions I used in the form. You can create any kind of fancy report with this approach of course.

If you use for example a multiple choice question in your form, with multiple possible answers, I use the DAX formula CONTAINSSTRING or CONTAINSSTRINGEXACT to get the values out of the JSON-string. You write 1 measure per choice and then plot them in a chart. I'm not sure if there's an easier way of doing this, also maybe with a dynamic number of values. Let me know in the comments if you figure this out :-)

Share the Form

Last but not least, we also want to share our form with our audience, right? You can do this by creating a shorter URL with any of the URL shortener services like bit.ly, tinyurl.com or Google. You then share this link in the first few slides of your presentation and even have it visible while attendants are walking in prior to the start of your session. That way they have a minute to fill in the form and you don't have to wait on their answers during the presentation.

Create a Live Dashboard

So the trick for creating a live refreshing view of the answers coming in, is to create a dashboard of the visuals in the Power BI service. So pin all the visuals you need from the report to a dashboard, maybe also add the URL to the form and you're done. You could also refresh the browser every few seconds (either manually or with a browser extension in Chrome). But I do think the automatic refresh in a dashboard looks cleaner, otherwise you're also depending on the speed of the WiFi for loading your whole page every time you refresh.

Recap

As you have seen, setting up this Power Platform demo is actually not that difficult, you just have to know the steps and maybe go through them once to remember them. It does however add a lot of value to a presentation in my opinion. After the PowerPlatform World Tour Meetup in Dublin I had some good feedback from people that wanted to use this setup in their next presentation. From Mary Fealty (B | @Br0adtree) and Marc Lelijveld (B | @MarcLelijveld) I already heard they implemented this, so that's nice to hear!

Mary even added a great feature to the report.

Hey Nicky, used the Forms & Power Automate solution today. Worked a treat. I added a date field so I could filter out my test cases in #PowerBI, there were many. 😊

— Mary Fealty | Broadtree Solutions (@Br0adtree) November 6, 2019

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter if you use this or another method or if you have any questions!

A Form, a Flow and a Power BI Streaming Dataset Walk Into a Bar - Part 1

This is the title of a live demo session that demonstrates the Microsoft Power Platform products working together to create an interactive data application. I recently had the honor of presenting this at the Dublin Power BI User Group (@DublinPUG) during my visit to the Power PlatformWorld Tour in Dublin. The slides of my regular session I gave there can also be found on my GitHub page.

I see you thinking about my title… I know Microsoft Flow is now renamed to PowerAutomate, but then my title just doesn't have the same flow of reading anymore :-)

@NickyvV speaker 4 of 8 at @DublinPUG #PowerPlatformWT
A form, a Flow and a PBI streaming dataset walk into a bar. pic.twitter.com/Jr8WXfJ4EU

— Ben Watt (@benrebooted) October 30, 2019

In this blog series I will set apart all the steps needed to get this demo up and running on your own. I will use the text in this post, as well as screen shots and video's explaining it step by step. So if you're already (somewhat) familiar with Forms, Power Automate and/or Power BI streaming datasets, feel free to go directly to the video's and start building your own demo right away. Otherwise, keep reading and eventually you'll come across all the resources as well.

As this is a blog series, in Part 1 I will explain what the reason behind this demo is, and what I used it for in my presentations. I will make a start with the demo and show you how to make a Form and set up a streaming dataset in Power BI.

Problem

I think it's good to have some form of interactivity in your presentation. Whether it's by (live) polling your audience, telling a story, asking questions during your presentation or any of the other 8 ways to make your presentation more interactive, doesn't really matter.

The way I started doing this during my first presentation was by firing some questions at the audience after I introduced myself. For example, I asked what kind of job they were in at the moment and with what technologies (related to the topic of the presentation) they have worked with. Although that worked pretty well, I was asking closed questions with a show of hands, so if someone didn't participate I couldn't really notice. I wasn't counting hands for that matter. I did get a feel of the audience from my perspective so I know on what topics to focus on a little more in my presentation.

Solution

As we work with the Power Platform suite of products, with my main focus on Power BI, I thought it was a good idea to use some of that Power! So what I did was the following:

• I used Microsoft Forms to create a form,
• Then I set up a Power Automate flow to get the answers,
• Pushed them into a Power BI streaming dataset,
• And finally created a Power BI report and dashboard on that dataset to get a live view of the answers of the audience

Let's go through it step by step.

Create a form

Go over to Microsoft Forms, login and create a new or use an existing form.

I'm going to create a form that I can use in my presentation, so it is focused at the topic I'm presenting on. So I would like the audience to enter their Name, Continent (of origin), Occupation and Experience. Let's see how it works.

A little side-note: unfortunately I can't change the language in Forms to English because this is disabled in our O365-tenant, so some words on the screen are still in Dutch, sorry for that.

I showed a few possible options for creating questions in a form, but you can experiment with other options yourself. Some questions (like the multiple choice answers) are returned as JSON-values so you have to be aware you have to do some calculations in the Power BI report to nicely visualize the values.

Create a streaming dataset

The streaming dataset, of type push, has to be created before selecting the workspace in Power Automate, because otherwise the streaming dataset won't show up. In PowerBI.com you can create a dataset in any workspace, also in My Workspace. You do that by clicking on the +-sign in the home screen of your workspace.

Make sure you turn on the switch for Historic data analysis when creating the dataset. That way Power BI will store the data that's sent through this data stream, and you'll be able to do reporting and analysis on the collected data stream. This switch can also be used to clear the dataset.

Recap

In Part 1 of this blog series I started with Microsoft Forms and a Power BI streaming dataset.

In Part 2 I will show you how to glue it all together with Power Automate and create a report out of the data. There are some tricks you need to know in the streaming dataset to properly show the output in your Power BI report. And lastly I will show you a trick to get your data refreshed live while respondents are answering the questions, but without refreshing your browser!

Speaking at dataMinds Connect in Belgium

I already posted a short update on LinkedIn, but I now finally also had the time to update my blog.

Query Folding in Power BI at dataMinds Connect

I had the honor of doing a session at the Newcomer track at dataMinds Connect. This was a special track for people like me that have (almost) no conference speaking experience. The conference assigned buddies to these newcomers. For that, I'd like to thank Koen Verbeeck (B | @Ko_Ver) for helping me enormously with feedback to and try-outs of my presentation.
My submission to this conference was actually the first I did earlier this year, after that I also submitted to the other places like SQL Saturday Prague. But this was actually my first technical session with lot's of demo's.

Slides on Github

The slides were already shared with the conference organizers, but are also available via my Speaking page. I recently made some changes to the way I share them because I moved all my talks and slides to my Github. I still have some things and links to add there, but the basics are there.

I also did some calculations on the feedback I received and I was pretty happy with the average of 3.9!

Feedback scores

Half marathon Eindhoven

Like I mentioned in my session at dataMinds Connect I also participated in the half marathon in Eindhoven on Sunday October 12.
As it was relatively warm with 24 degrees Celcius, I had to shelve my plans of running a PR fairly quickly after 5K. A lot of people also were struck by the warmth and humidity that day

Ouch, that was a heavy one.. hot and tough. No PR, but I DID finish it 👊 #runhappy pic.twitter.com/0cyPXiY6GU

— Nicky van Vroenhoven (@NickyvV) October 13, 2019

Power Platform World Tour in Dublin

The next stop is the Power Platform World Tour in Dublin where I'm presenting my Tips & Tricks of our Power BI implementation! I'm also doing one of the "Show & Tell" sessions at the Power Platform World Tour Meetup on the evening of October 30, organised by Ben Watt (B | @benrebooted).
I can also offer a $100 discount to all members who are part of their local Power Platform User Group community with the following code: 2019PPWT100DUB

NvV

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!