Exploring Excel 2013 as Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Client

A little over six months ago, I wrote an article on Magenic.com about Excel 2013’s Impact for BI Users.  This coincided with the Office 2013 Preview release.  I discussed the addition of Power View and PowerPivot into the product.   Last week, I followed that article up with another on the fact that Excel appears to be Microsoft’s BI client platform now and into the future.

It appears that I am not alone in this assessment.  Michael Koploy of Software Advice, a company that reviews BI software, did a Q&A session with Rob Collie, a.k.a. PowerPivotPro ( T | B ), where Rob came to some similar conclusions.  He notes that “the inclusion of PowerPivot in 2013 is a major inflection point” for users to implement BI in Excel more fully.  I really like his take on the relationship between BI specialists and IT pros and the end users of Excel.  Microsoft has been pushing a concept of BI for the masses and ironically today’s Excel is the helping this happen.  Check out the rest of the Q&A about whether Excel is the next great BI tool for more insights from Rob.

As I start to deliver more solutions with customers using Excel, SharePoint and soon Office365, I am going to kick off a new series here on my blog – Excel 2013 BI Tips.  My goal is to document those tips, tricks and discoveries from my journey with the new Excel.  Some of them may be seem common, but I just don’t want to forget so I will be noting them as well.  Join me for this interesting journey through Excel and BI.

Are You Signed Up for 24 Hours of PASS–Business Analytics?

If you have not signed up for the 24 Hours of PASS-Business Analytics you should be.  This is a great chance to hear 12 speakers (they will be repeated in the following 12 hours).  Topics are varied from Big Data to Strategy to Collaboration.  Most importantly you can’t beat the price to hear speakers like Denny Lee, Peter Meyers, and Stacia Misner to name a few.

I get the privilege of moderating two of the sessions: Session 8:  What Is Big Data? by Mark Whitehorn and Session 10: Visualizing Data with Power View by Sean Boon.

Finally, I heard Marc Reguera talk about how Microsoft Finance uses Power View at a different event.  If you want to see Power View put into practical use by a business user, I highly recommend you check out his session.  I think it is the final piece of the puzzle to join the technology with the business.

I hope you all take the opportunity to join us for this compelling and free event preview to the PASS Business Analytics Conference in Chicago on April 10-12, 2013.

PASS Summit 2012 Wrap Up

Wow, what a week. Once again, PASS put on a great event that provided much in the way of events and training for the SQL Server community. If you followed my countdown you know some of what I love about PASS. Last year I blogged everyday but I did not do that this week. So, what was different for me? Well, for one I volunteered much more this year than last and I was privileged to speak twice. I spent more time meeting new people and catching up with friends and that was great as well. Enjoy my wrap up from my week.

Tuesday – Leadership Meetings, Welcome Reception, and some Karaoke

Before the event officially kicked off, I joined community leaders from around the world for a series of leadership meetings. First we had a meeting on SQL Saturdays which was an opportunity to see the immense growth of these free training events around the U.S. and throughout the world. What a great opportunity for SQL Server professionals to improve their skills and for those passionate about the community to improve their abilities by leading these events. Many ideas were shared among the team including a panel on how to effectively run a SQL Saturday on a tight budget.

Once that was completed, the Regional Mentors enjoyed a lunch together and an opportunity to share what we do to support the user groups in our regions. I particularly enjoyed the fact that I was able to spend some time with Regional Mentors from Germany, Holland, and Portugal. This highlighted further the international scope and reach of PASS. This was followed by the Chapter Leaders meeting. That meeting was held as a series of round tables that the chapter leaders could move through. I was working at the table focused on leadership with Ryan Adams ( B | T ) from the North Texas SQL Server User Group – NTSSUG. We had a number of good conversations around building leadership teams for user groups and what is needed to have an effectively led user group. Check out the NTSSUG site for the by-laws sample we discussed multiple times.

All of these meetings were followed up with the Welcome Reception, which I made a small portion of as I was trying to drop my backpack at my hotel and work my way back there. After the reception, I headed out to Bush Gardens with a number of others. During that time, Jes Borland ( T ) managed to get a microphone in my hand and I had my first round of karaoke. Yes, I actually did sing and had fun doing it. All-in-all, it was a good time had by all.

Wednesday – SQL Around the World, Microsoft Announcements, Tabular Models, and Magenic Team Dinner

This was the true kick off to the event. For many, they looked at the key note as the kick off. Before that even began, I was working in the Community Zone encouraging people to participate in the SQL Around the World community activity. It was a great game. You needed to find 10 people from 10 different countries and find out something interesting about them or their country. I found a dancer and someone who had ridden a cheetah as a kid. I also surprised someone from the Czech Republic when she mentioned her home town only to have me let her know I had been to her home town many years ago. It was a fun conversation. If you did this and have other cool stories let me know. It was amazing as well over 50 different countries were represented at PASS.

Next, Ted Kummert had the first keynote session of the day. His keynote was filled with announcements concerning SQL Server including the following:

• Hekaton: the project code name for a new in-memory OLTP engine
• The Columnstore Index will be updateable
• Next version of PDW will be out in H1 2013
• Polybase: allows you to query across multiple types of data sources such as SQL Server and Hadoop with T-SQL
• DAX Queries will be able to query SSAS Cubes

He also highlighted some recent announcements related to the SQL Server stack:

• Microsoft HDInsight Server CTP: Hadoop for Windows Server
• Windows Azure HDInsight Service Preview: Hadoop for Azure
• Power View and PowerPivot fully implemented in Excel 2013

After the keynote, I hit a session on BigData and Hive which was put on by SQL CAT and very informative. My big takeaway was to use EXTERNAL tables not INTERNAL tables when working with Hive. I then went to do final prep for my Tabular Model session. In this session, “Building a Tabular Model Database”, I present on what tabular and in-memory is, and then proceed to open up a Visual Studio project and create a database. I think it went well and the attendees seemed to enjoy the upbeat nature for an end of day session. The night wrapped up with dinner with the Magenic team (7 of us). Good chance to grow relationships across offices from around the country.

Thursday – Community Zone and DAX as a Query Language

Thursday was a fairly low key day for me. Once again I spent time in the Community Zone. I had the opportunity to talk with a few people on creating a user group in their area. As always, I like to see people interested in growing their local community.

I also attended Alberto Ferrari’s session on DAX. I think the biggest surprise to me was that you can now query DAX directly from SSMS. I am not sure that I am convinced that it is a full query language yet, but it is definitely closer. The key to it all is the EVALUATE expression which allows you to create the DAX query ironically in the MDX window. Here is just a taste of DAX as a query:

EVALUATE
    ‘DimCurrency’
ORDER BY

    ‘DimCurrency’[CurrencyAlternateKey]

What I found interesting is that you can create columns, build measures, and perform many other operations against the tabular model using DAX. In the end, it will not increase the memory used as storage as it is all calculated. Look for some more on this in later blog posts as I delve more into the in-memory storage and usage when working with DAX.

Friday – More Community Zone, HDInsight, Paul White, and Window Functions

Last day. I spent more time in the Zone. I really did enjoy my time there as I continued to meet more people. I was even present when a contract was completed for the Shanghai user group. Very cool indeed. I then attended a session on HDInsight by Mike Flasco from Microsoft. This is very cool stuff as you can create simple Hadoop cluster on your desktop to test the technology. Microsoft and Hortonworks have done a great job of bringing Hadoop data into the Microsoft stack.

On my way to present my final session of the day and the conference, I stopped in for the second half of Allen White’s ( B ) optimization presentation. In a word (or two), mind-blowing! Wow, who knew that the optimizer did all those things? I was highly impressed and think he should look at a precon on the subject next year. Unlike some three hour presentations, he could have went longer as he was not stretching his content out. Nice work Paul. So, I got to follow that with a presentation on Window Functions in T-SQL. For the second time, I had the last slot of the last day. I think this presentation went well even though we were all worn out from a content-filled week. It was fun to try some ideas from the audience in the demos. That always makes for a more interesting demo. I will be doing a follow up post on what I learned from some of the attendees on the subject as well, proving once again this is a user community event. We all have something to contribute! (If you attended this session, you will find links to the blogs on the subject here.)

What’s Next?

Coming in April is the new Business Analytics conference in Chicago followed by the PASS Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. Of course, your local user groups will continue to meet with regional SQL Saturdays sprinkled throughout the year as well. How will you participate and contribute in 2013? We look forward to seeing you all again, soon.

Excel 2013 Will Impact BI Users

As noted in that great text, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic!” Excel 2013 will make even more capabilities available to BI users.  This includes having xVelocity natively supported in the tool which makes much of the PowerPivot capabilities available in a spreadsheet which used to only be available in the PowerPivot window.  It also adds the ability to create Power View reports in Excel.

Check out more on my thoughts about this on Magenic’c blog.

PASS for Today (and Tomorrow)

I just wanted to plug two events that are free SQL Server training.

First, Thomas LaRock (@sqlrockstar) and Jason Strate (@stratesql) are teaming up to bring you “Choose Your Own Adventure – Performance Tuning”. Join us at the Microsoft Technology Center in Edina, MN or online for this great adventure. This adventure starts at 3:00 PM CDT. More details can be found at http://minnesota.sqlpass.org.

Is that all?, you ask. No. Starting tonight at 0:00 GMT (7:00 PM CDT) is 24 Hours of PASS. Check out the awesome roster of speakers including the likes of Denny Lee from SQLCAT, Marco Russo, and Dejan Sarka. These sessions run through the night and will be close captioned in 15 languages, making it a truly international event.  Oh, did I also mention, I will be speaking at this as well.

Take advantage of these free training opportunities by leaders within the SQL Community.  We all look forward to seeing you at both or either of these events.

Why I am excited about SQL Server 2012

By now many of you have had the opportunity to hear or see something about the next release of SQL Server.  It is later on March 7, launch day.  I have enjoyed a number of sessions on the SQL Server Launch site.  Many people have talked about what they look forward to in the product, so I thought I would discuss some of the things that excite me.

SQL Server Integration Services Improvements

I think the updates to SSIS make the best case for early adoption of SQL Server 2012.  If you are currently using SSIS or are planning to use SSIS, the changes to the platform are significant and reduce the overall development time for enterprise class solutions.  And yes, developers will see many changes that will further help productivity, “beyond rounded corners.”

ColumnStore Indexes

As I work with large data stores for reporting and loading SSAS, this index type will greatly improve performance.  Once again Microsoft has made significant improvements for large, set based query operations.

Enhanced Window Functions

I have done a lot of work with window functions in Oracle lately.  I am thrilled to see similar functionality being added to SQL Server.  This allows for more complex aggregations and query results while not sacrificing performance.  Join me during the 24 Hours of PASS to see these functions in action.

Power View

Wow.  This visualization tool really fills a gap within in Microsoft’s BI offering.  I am excited to see this in operation at customers as this is a game changer for the end user.  The replay capability is both cool and very functional.

Extended Events for SQL Server Analysis Services

While I have not worked with extended events in SQL Server 2008 as much as I would have liked to, the introduction of extended events for SSAS will allow us to follow the path taken by many SQL Server DBAs who have used these events.  This will allow us to monitor SQL Server more closely while minimizing the impact we experiences using SQL Profiler.

These are just a few items within SQL Server 2012 that excite me, what excites you?