dataMinds News Round up – October 2020
Ignite 2020
In September, the Microsoft Ignite conference took place, bombarding us with new announcements for most of the cloud hosted products. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, and want a resource to read through this at your own pace; the Ignite Book of News might be your thing!
Databricks
Megan Quinn (BlueGranite) highlights the top 5 modern data platform technology features which shipped earlier this year. In her first out of two blog posts, she elaborates on SPARK 3.0 and Databricks’s delta engine release.
https://www.bluegranite.com/blog/microsoft-and-databricks-top-5-modern-data-platform-features-part-1
Azure Synapse Analytics
James Serra, who is well on his way becoming a living legend discusses the Data Lakehouse terminology, and where Azure Synapse Analytics fits in. He highlights some key features, and where they might be leading in the future.
https://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2020/09/data-lakehouse-synapse
SSAS
Microsoft’s Michael Kovalsky (Elegantbi.com) shared his experiences on how to extract metadata from a tabular model. Whether you’re connecting to a .bim file, database.json, SSAS of AAS instance or a Power BI premium dataset: Michael relies upon SQLBI’s Tabular Editor to get the job done. As a recent piece of work, he’s also written on how to integrate the Vertipaq Analyzer information inside the Tabular Editor Best Practice Analzyer
https://www.elegantbi.com/post/extractmodelmetadata
https://www.sqlbi.com/tools/tabular-editor/
SQL
Mustafa El-Masry created an excellent 4-part series on how anyone can start solving SQL Performance issues, as if they were Microsoft Engineers. He tackles some of the common issues, and which tools you can use to quickly alleviate some concerns
Troubleshooting Performance issues Like Microsoft Engineers Part 1
Brent Ozar is convinced more people should be using ColumnStore indexes in their workloads, but also wants to make sure they’re used for the right scenario. He’s come up with a test, consisting of 7 questions, to quickly check if they could be right for you.
https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2020/10/want-to-use-columnstore-indexes-take-the-columnscore-test/
Power BI
Following Ignite, a shockwave has hit the Power BI landscape. There’s some very big changes coming up the licensing scheme, as a new Premium Per User license was announced. In the community, there’s already some people thinking about creative solutions, before it’s even here!
Power BI Premium will also see some big changes next year, as we’re moving towards the new generation. This will offer tremendous benefits, and more granular controls for our monitoring purposes.
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/answering-your-questions-around-the-new-power-bi-premium-per-user-license/
https://data-marc.com/2020/10/05/leverage-power-bi-deployment-pipelines-with-premium-per-user-licensing/
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-upcoming-evolution-of-power-bi-premium-to-enterprise-markets-and-beyond/