Another week has gone by, so let’s get into what is currently out there and happening in the BI world.

Power BI Designer Refresh

I do know that this came out last week, but I still wanted to comment on this.

Once again this is something that customers and myself have been waiting to be implemented and asked for on the forums.

For me personally this is really fantastic, because it gives me the opportunity to be able to get access to my data, shape it and then create my report interface using Power BI Designer. And through every iteration it is getting better, easier and smarter. And now with the ability to easily upload this into Power BI, and if you are using one of the supported data sources, it is simple as a few clicks in order to get the refresh up and running.

This really makes it easy for the people creating the reports, and with the future releases on the way, I personally see this becoming a valid competitor to the other visualisation tools that are currently out there.

You can read all about it here: Announcing Refresh Support for Power BI Designer files in the Power BI service

SQL Plugin for Excel

I came across this from reading through my twitter feeds.

I have to say that it does look very interesting. It appears that this can be used to pretty much have a SQL like interface when using Excel.

It also does appear that there is the potential to write data from your Excel workbook, back into SQL Server, via temp tables. This might be very handy, because I have had situations in the past where I have wanted to extract some data from a SQL database, in order for the users to make some changes. And then struggled to easily get the updated data back into my database. I could think of a method to be able to do this via the temp tables, and having a process to import the data from the temp tables into my database. Then once I have it in there, it would be easy to update the required changes!

More information here: thingiequery

SQL Server 2016 – In Memory Tables

Last week at the local (SSUG) SQL Server User Group, we were very fortunate to have some of the program managers from the SQL Server team present to us what is coming up in SQL Server 2016.

What I wanted to highlight is something that as far as I can see, so far has not really been highlighted.

It has to do with the In Memory tables in SQL Server 2016, and that Microsoft have almost resolved or allowed almost all of the query syntax is now available against In Memory tables. I do remember when I did try this before on SQL Server 2014 for my data warehousing loads, whilst there was not a big performance improvement, one of the issues was due to the fact, that there was a whole host of query syntax that I could not use.

Now with this almost having been resolved, as well as generally improving the In Memory tables, this is something that I am going to look at implementing where required in my data warehouse loads. Ideally I would imagine where there is a section of work, where it needs to be processed really quickly and having all the tables in memory means that this could potentially have a big performance improvement.

You can read about what is supported in SQL Server 2016 In Memory Tables here: Query Surface Area in Natively Compiled Stored Procedures

Azure SQL Data Warehouse

I am super excited about Microsoft starting to roll out the SQL Data warehouse preview in Azure.

I do think that this is something that is going to be a key driver for businesses to look at Microsoft for their cloud strategy going forward.

In the past few months, or closer on a year now, I have started to really enjoy how Microsoft has changed, and become a really forward thinking company, where they are listening to their customers and where they can taking the customers’ requirements and putting this into their products.

Along with this, especially in the cloud area, they are able to release and update their software at a pace that I have not seen ever. And when comparing it to other cloud vendors it is amazing how quickly they are able to do this. And for me as a consumer of these clouds services, and other services, it makes my work every interesting and keeps me on my toes!

I look forward to testing this out and see how it performs with my own data, when I can get access to it, and see if it lives up to all the hype!

You can read about it here: SQL Data Warehouse

Office 2016 Update

There is now an official blog update from Microsoft with regards to what they have done with Office 2016.

It is great to see what they showcased at Ignite to already be available for people to look at and test.

You can read more about it here: Office 2016 Preview—update 2

Power BI Content Pack – UserVoice

I am pretty certain that Microsoft is releasing a new content pack every week. When I log in and view what new blog posts are out there almost every week without fail there is another new content pack. Which is fantastic.

This week the content pack is for an application called UserVoice, which is allows it’s customers to provide feedback on their products. As well as for customers to share their experiences. And it looks like a really easy and simple interface to use. Which at the same time is very powerful.

You can find all the related information here: Monitor and Visualize your UserVoice Data with Power BI