SQLSaturday Portugal

SQLSaturday Portugal 2015 has been a huge amount of fun but I’ve also learnt a lot. A big thank you to the organisers!

Below are my slides and notes from sessions I attended.

Agile BI

My session slides:

Azure data factory – Allan Mitchell (@allanSQLIS)

My key takeaways filtered by my view of automating everything and ideally doing weird stuff with R

  • Data Factory has an object model stored in JSON so JSON knowledge required
  • Programmatic access via PowerShell
  • w00t – there’s an API! Bring on more crazy Azure/R API fun!
  • Extend data factory with C# .dlls by adding in a zip file, hosted in azure storage
  • We could end up with a market place of extensions for data factory

DAX as BI enabler – Bruno Basto (@bvbrasto)

Having used PowerPivot I was interested in finding out more about it in it’s tabular model server version. The key things of use were

  • DirectQuery mode in the server version has connection limitations
  • Next version of tabular will allow many-to-many relationships. Woohoo!
  • Ordering data, before loading in column stores, can aid compression making tabular (and Excel) models smaller
  • DAXstudio is a really useful IDE for DAX
  • You can import PowerPivot models from SQL Server using restore backup from PowerPivot functionality
  • The BISM Server Memory Report is pretty useful!
  • Can filter existing measures with CALCULATE for cleaner functionality e.g. Total:=count(tbl[val]), TotalF:=calculate([Total],tbl[fil]=1)
  • It’s possible to return text in a PowerPivot function!!
  • DAX queries evaluate out –> in, opposite to SQL, algebra and so on
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