Another week close to Christmas and another week of great news in the Business Intelligence world.

Power BI – PowerPivotPro & Microsoft helping displaced workers

A quick mention on how it is great to see both the people at Power Pivot Pro & Microsoft are working together to help people find employment.

The great thing about Power BI, is all that you need is a computer and an internet connection and you are good to go.

You can find the details here: PowerPivotPro and Microsoft help displaced workers with near-free Power BI Training Dec 7th

Power BI – Visualizing weather from Microsoft OMS

This is a great blog post where the people from Microsoft explain how using OMS they can leverage the weather data that they collect and publish it to Power BI.

If you currently use Microsoft OMS this could be a great resource.

You can read up about it here: Visualizing weather information in Power BI with data from Microsoft OMS

SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) – New SSAS Memory (1200 Compatibility Only) report using Power BI

Here is another really great resource of information from Kasper De Jonge, where he has updated his SSAS Memory usage report, with the latest versions of SSAS, but also to use Power BI to visualize your memory usage.

Also Kasper has put it on GitHub which means that it is open for anyone to use, as well as to contribute and hopefully make it into an amazing Memory usage report.

You can find the details, as well as how to download the file here: New SSAS memory usage report using Power BI

SQL Server – Service Pack 1

It is not often that there I would blog about a service pack, but this is an exception. As you can see above Microsoft have made available a whole host of features that were previously only for the Enterprise Edition which is now available in not only Standard Edition but also Web, Express & LocalDB.

One thing to note is that it would appear that all of the licensing updates are in the RDBMs space.

There are 3 updates for SSAS whichi is firstly that SSAS is NUMA Aware, I know that this is something people have been asking for, for a long time. As well as Memory Allocation and Heap Fragmentation.

You can find the blog post here, which has all the detailed information, as well as what additional update there are in SP1: SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 (SP1) released !!!

SQL Server – SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) updates with SP1

Not only where there the licensing features with SQL Server 2016 SP1, but also updates to SSRS, as you can see above the SSRS team is listening to what clients and customers are asking for and have updated the Details view.

They have also updated the Execution logs, so that you can now get some basic information in terms of who is accessing and viewing mobile reports.

And finally direct navigation options for KPI’s, which makes it easier to navigate to a direct link when viewing a KPI.

You can find all the details here: What’s new in SQL Server 2016 SP1 for Reporting Services