Category: Events

Learning Power BI And Fabric By Attending User Groups And Conferences

One of the most popular questions on the forums I follow is “How can I learn Power BI and Fabric?”. There are a ton of great, free online resources out there – blogs, videos and so on – but the people answering this question often do not mention user groups and conferences. I think that’s a mistake because, at least for me, attending (and indeed speaking at) online and in-person events is one of the most effective ways of learning.

Why is this? It’s not about the content, I think: a lot of what is presented at these meetings is freely available elsewhere already. Indeed, a lot of user groups and conferences record their sessions now and make them available for free online afterwards (eg SQLBits). What’s different is that an event, especially an in-person event, demands your attention more because it takes place at a specific place and time. You can’t pause an event because you’ve been distracted by an important work email or because you’ve seen a cat video that you just have to share, which means you’re more likely to concentrate on it than on a blog post or a video. That’s even more true for an in-person event where, if you’ve made the effort to travel to a venue and you’re sitting in an audience, there’s added social pressure to pay attention to what the speaker is saying. And trust me, I need all the help I can get avoiding distractions these days.

The other benefit of attending an event is the ability to chat with, and ask questions to, the presenter, other attendees and sponsors. Every online event I’ve been to has had a very active chat, and of course with in-person events there’s the ability to queue up and ask the speaker questions or ask for a selfie. I know a lot of people who have found new jobs as a result of attending conferences and user groups. In-person events very often have social activities which make it easy to meet people as well; again, SQLBits is a great example of this with its legendary party and other activities such as runs and the pub quiz.

User groups are almost always free and in many cases there is free pizza too. Most conferences are paid although some have a free day (in the UK SQLBits is free on Saturdays and Data Relay is an annual series of free one-day events). Even when you have to pay I think they represent very good value for money compared to other things you could spend you training budget on.

If I’ve convinced you to attend an event, the next question is: how do I find one near me? Meetup is the best way to find user groups and searching for “Power BI” or “Fabric” and your location there will give you a list of upcoming events you could attend. In the UK there are very active in-person user groups in London, Manchester (I was there last week and they had over 100 attendees), Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle. There are also several UK groups that are wholly or partly online, such as Oxford, Devon & Cornwall and the Fabric UK User Group.

I don’t think there’s a single list of all the Power BI or Fabric conferences anywhere but here are a few coming up soon that I plan to attend or know are good:

  • The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas, USA, March 26-28 2024. There will be a lot of Microsoft folks presenting and a lot of big announcements there!
  • Fabric February in Oslo, Norway, February 7-9 2024 – although I think it’s just sold out.
  • Power BI Cruise from Stockholm to Helsinki, June 3-5 2024. I really need to do this one year.
  • Power BI Next Step in Aarhus, Denmark, September 12-13 2024. Those Scandinavians do love the Microsoft data platform.
  • The Global Excel Summit in London, UK, February 7-9. Despite the name there’s a lot of Power BI content here too.
  • SQLDay in Wroclaw, Poland, 13-15 May 2024.
  • DATA:Scotland in Glasgow, UK, 13 September 2024.
  • SQLKonferenz in Hanau, Germany, 30 September-2 October.
  • SQLBits in Farnborough, UK, 19-23 March 2024. The best Microsoft data-related conference in the world as far as I’m concerned – I never miss it – and by far the largest in Europe too.

Apologies if I’ve missed your favourite event, there are too many out there to list or even remember…

So what are you waiting for? If you’re serious about learning Power BI and Fabric get yourself along to one of these events!

Top 10 Reasons Why Power BI People Should Attend SQLBits

SQLBits is happening again this March at the Celtic Manor resort in Wales. It’s the largest in-person Microsoft data technology conference in Europe and probably now the world; it’s also a lot of fun and something I would never miss. I imagine that a lot of you reading this post feel the same way that I do about SQLBits, but it occurred to me that if you’re relatively new in the world of Power BI you might not have heard of it and might not know why it’s such a great event to attend. Here are ten reasons why you, as a Power BI person, should go:

  1. Don’t be put off by the fact it has “SQL” in the name, this conference has lots of Power BI content. Take a look at the list of training days and conference sessions, and check out the (free!) recordings of sessions from previous events here.
  2. You could spend the whole event just going to Power BI sessions but there are also tons of sessions on related technologies like SQL Server, Synapse and Azure Databricks; there are also sessions on non-technical topics such as public speaking and how to make it as an independent consultant.
  3. Pretty much everyone who is everyone in the world of Power BI will be there. Want to see Alberto Ferrari, or Adam and Patrick from Guy in a Cube, in the flesh? Then come!
  4. It’s ridiculously cheap because it’s a community-run event and no-one is making a profit. In fact even if you live in the USA it may be cheaper to get a flight to the UK and come than attend a similar conference nearer home. People come from all over Europe (especially Scandinavia) to attend.
  5. No training budget? It’s 100% free to attend on Saturday 18th March – all you have to do is register and you get a full day of conference sessions without paying a penny.
  6. Can’t travel? Even if you can’t make it in person there’s a virtual option so you can watch sessions online. You really have to be there in person to get the full experience though.
  7. Apart from the learning opportunities, it’s a great place to network. I know lots of people who have found new jobs and advanced their careers from connections made at SQLBits – me included.
  8. Are you the only Power BI person at your organisation? Feeling lonely? Not sure that you’re doing things properly? You’ll meet people who do the same job as you so you can compare notes and complain about your users.
  9. It’s also a great place to meet companies that work in the Power BI space like Tabular Editor and Power BI Sentinel and check out their products and services.
  10. Most of all you’ll enjoy yourself. I know that might be hard to believe, especially if you’ve been to other tech conferences, but SQLBits is different: there’s entertainment every night, the Friday party is legendary and the infamous Power BI Power Hour is the most fun you’ll ever have with your favourite BI tool. It’s also a very friendly, welcoming and inclusive event.

Hopefully this as convinced you! If you’d like to find out more about SQLBits and how it’s run, I can recommend this recent interview with Simon Sabin on my colleague Kasper de Jonge’s YouTube channel.

SQLBits Power BI And Analysis Services Videos Now Free To View Online

SQLBits is one of the best Microsoft data platform conferences around, and last week’s event in Manchester was particularly good. As usual, videos of almost all of the sessions are available for everyone to view for free online (no registration required) here:

https://sqlbits.com/content/Event18

There were lots of Power BI and Analysis Services related sessions, so I thought I’d call out a few:

  • If you’re interested in the new calculation groups feature in SSAS 2019 that I blogged about last week, you should definitely watch Christian Wade’s two-part session here and here (part two has all the juicy details in), which also gives some details about other upcoming features such as XMLA endpoints. Kasper’s session here covers a lot of the same topics.
  • There’s more insight into Microsoft’s Power BI roadmap and thinking in the Q&A session with Christian, Kasper and Adam here
  • Marco and Alberto always do great sessions, and Alberto’s session on Aggregations here and Marco’s session on many-to-many relationships here are up to their usual high standards.
  • My session on Power BI Dataflows here sums up my current thoughts about them.

Of course there’s lots more there (more than I have had a chance to watch) so let me know if there are other sessions that are good!

Power BI/Power Query/M Pre-cons At SQLKonferenz, SQLBits and SQL Saturday Iceland

If you’re learning Power BI and you want to deepen your understanding of its data transformation and loading functionality, the Power Query engine and the M language, I’m doing one-day pre-conference seminars on this subject at three conferences over the next few months:

You’ll learn about all the functionality in the Power Query Editor window plus concepts such as merging, appending, parameters, functions, data privacy and M. I hope to see you at one of them!

Upcoming Power BI and Azure SSAS training in the UK, Israel and the Netherlands

If you have some training budget to spare why not come along to one of the pre-conference seminars/training courses I have coming up in the next few months? Specifically:

  • Introduction to Azure Analysis Services – a pre-conference seminar on Thursday 22nd February at SQLBits 2018 in London. You’ll learn about what Azure Analysis Services is, why you should use it and how to build Tabular models for it. More details and registration here.
  • Power BI for analysts and developers – a three-day course covering the whole Power BI development lifecycle in Herzliya, Israel, on March 12th-14th. Full agenda and registration here.
  • Loading and transforming data in Power BI and Power Query – a pre-conference seminar on Friday 23rd March before the Dutch Power BI User Day in Utrecht. It will cover everything you need to know about the Query Editor in Power BI and Excel, going from the basics to more advanced topics such as parameters, functions and the M language. Full agenda here.

Incidentally, if you’re in London for SQLBits don’t forget to come to the London Power BI User Group meeting on Wednesday 21st February: I’m doing a panel discussion with various other Power BI folks. I’m also going to be speaking at the Dublin Data and BI Summit (run by the Power BI User Group) at the end of April, and at several other user groups later in the year; follow me on Twitter (I’m now @cwebb_bi) to find out the details when they’re available. I hope to see you at one of these events!

In-Person Power BI And Azure Analysis Services Training In London

I’m pleased to announce two in-person training dates in London next year.

First of all, I’ll be running a three-day “Introduction to Power BI” course from January 29th to January 31st 2018.  Suitable for BI pros, analysts and anyone who needs to use Power BI to build reports, I’ll be covering data loading, data modelling, a bit of M, a lot of DAX, report design, publishing, security and administration. Full details and registration can be found here:

http://technitrain.com/coursedetail.php?c=84&trackingcode=CWB

Not long after, on February 22nd 2018, I’ll be teaching a full-day preconference seminar at SQLBits in London on Azure Analysis Services. The agenda can be found here:

http://sqlbits.com/information/event17/Introduction_to_Azure_Analysis_Services/trainingdetails.aspx

…but, to be honest, there’s likely to be a lot of cool new functionality released for Azure SSAS between now and then so that will all have to be fitted in too. SQLBits is, of course, the biggest SQL Server/Microsoft data platform conference in Europe, ridiculously good value for money and loads of fun. Pricing and registration details can be found here:

http://sqlbits.com/information/pricing

UPDATE: the SQLBits team wanted me to make a video to promote my precon, so I outsourced the job to my daughter. Here’s the result:

PASS Summit 2017 Day 1 BI News

There haven’t been any really big BI announcements at the PASS Summit this year – I guess we get so much amazing new stuff every month with Power BI that there’s no need to make ‘big’ announcements at conferences any more. However there have been several cool new features unveiled that I thought it would be good to highlight.

Azure SSAS automated scale-out

I’m a big fan of Azure SSAS, and what I particularly like is the way the dev team are making tasks that are complex with on-premises SSAS much easier when you go to the cloud. SSAS scale-out is a great example: on-premises you have to solve this by buying multiple servers, licensing and maintaining multiple instances of SSAS, and then setting up network load balancing on top of them. Today the Azure SSAS team announced their automated scale-out feature is live, and now all you need to do to scale out is drag a slider to the right:

image

Of course this is all scriptable too, so if you know you need to have to handle more users on a Monday morning you can scale-out appropriately and then when the rush is over you can reduce the number of query replicas and pay less.

Power BI Report Server

There’s a new release of Power BI Report Server available, and you can read all about it here:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-version-of-power-bi-report-server-now-available/

The blog post highlights the fact that you can connect to SSRS shared datasets via OData – which is basically what I was talking about here.

Preview of in-memory/DirectQuery hybrid datasets

Christian Wade of the SSAS dev team gave a very cool demo of building Power BI reports on a trillion row dataset. Not many details are available about how this works, or when it will be released, but it seems to be through a feature where you can combine tables stored in-memory and tables that use DirectQuery storage (in the demo this was DirectQuery on Spark) in the same dataset. It sounds a bit like HOLAP: queries that request aggregated values hit the fast, in-memory data, but when you want to look at detail-level data queries use DirectQuery. Someone is very excited about this:

PowerApps/Power BI integration

Something that was going to be demoed – but the demo failed so we didn’t see it – was the promised integration between PowerApps and Power BI. Apparently this will be released soon.

ESRI Plus subscription for Power BI

Mentioned in the keynote but again with very few details is the fact that ESRI is going to offer a special subscription for users of the ESRI maps visual in Power BI. It looks like this is it and it is slated for release in November:

http://go.esri.com/plus-subscription

Here’s what the ESRI site says the benefits will be:

  • Access global demographics
  • Access verified ready-to-use data, curated from authoritative sources
  • Access more basemaps including satellite imagery and terrain
  • Map and view more locations on your visualization

Pre-Conference Training Day On Data Loading With Power BI/Excel Get & Transform/Power Query At PASS Summit

I’m pleased to announce that I’m running a pre-conference training day on “Loading and transforming data with Power BI and Power Query” at this year’s PASS Summit in Seattle. For the full agenda and details on how to register, see:
http://www.pass.org/summit/2017/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=66485

This full-day session will teach you everything you need to know about loading data into Power BI or Excel; it’s specifically focussed on self-service BI scenarios, but if you want to learn M for SSAS 2017 you might find some of what I cover useful too. Topics covered include using the UI to build queries; using parameters and functions; the M language; data privacy settings; and creating custom data connectors. I hope to see you there!

Microsoft Data Insights Summit Videos Published

The Microsoft Data Insights Summit finished today, and the videos of the sessions have already (!!) been published online here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/mspowerbi/playlists?sort=dd&view=50&shelf_id=9

I can’t remember ever attending a conference where there was so much new functionality revealed. I’m not talking about things like Power BI Premium – that’s last month’s news – I’m talking about lots and lots of really cool new features that I had not seen before, so many that I feel completely overwhelmed by them all. There are a few blog posts out there that try to summarise the announcements (apart from the post on the official Power BI blog, check out Matt Allington and Dustin Ryan’s posts) but really your only option is to watch as many of the session videos as you can! I thought I would call out some videos about the new features for you to start off with:

  • The keynote on the first day was pretty amazing (Amir Netz’s demo should be watched in full) with some highlights being:
  • The session on the Visio custom visual for Power BI had a lot of detail on how Visio/Power BI integration will work, and was very impressive. You can sign up for the preview here.
  • Power BI/PowerApps/Flow integration, with Power BI content appearing in Power Apps and vice versa is something I am going to watch with interest.
  • One major announcement (at least for me) that slipped out in the session on the Common Data Model is that there’s going to be a standalone, SaaS version of Power Query available that will be able to load data into the Common Data Model
  • Matt Masson’s session has a lot of information on building custom data connectors as well as the announcement that M is officially called M!
  • Azure Analysis Services will soon have a much better web interface that will allow you to create simple models, and also to import models from Power BI .pbix files. Christian Wade’s session on Azure Analysis Services also has a great extended demo showing off new SSAS Tabular features, including one showing using BISM Normalizer to merge parts of a mode in a .pbix file into a Tabular model.

This is by no means comprehensive. I haven’t been able to watch all the videos yet either, so there may be other important new features in other sessions that I completely missed.

Last of all, although they don’t contain any new announcements, you can also watch my two M-themed sessions from the conference: Working With Parameters And Functions and Working With Web Services in Power BI/Power Query/Excel Get&Transform.

Two Upcoming Power BI Webinars

This is just a quick post to let you know about two webinars I’m presenting soon. First, on the 21st of June (today!) at 1pm PST I’m presenting a webinar on “Introduction to M” as part of the Power BI community webinar series; more details on it and how to register can be found here:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/week-of-june-20th-webinars-power-bi-security-and-introduction-to-m-by-chris-webb/

Second, I’m presenting a webinar with Pyramid Analytics about their on-premises BI solution and how it integrates with Power BI on the 30th of June called “The Public Cloud Is Not For Everyone”:

http://pages.pyramidanalytics.com/ThePublicCloudIsNotForEveryone.html

[Full disclosure – I’m being paid for this – but it won’t be marketing fluff, just honest discussion, similar to the webinars I did with Pyramid last year]