October Is National Disability Employment Awareness Month

As many of you know, I was diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease a couple of years ago. Since then, I have 9 made it a personal mission to write about my continued journey to continue working while the disease progresses. (You can follow my personal story on our Caring Bridge site.) For example, this post will be included in my Working with ALS content that highlights the methods I use to continue working through the various stages of the disease.

Supportive Tools

Tools and Software Presented at Kentucky ALS Resource Meeting

After becoming part of the disabled community, I wanted to learn more about the tools that support accessibility and how I could use those tools to keep working. I am truly thankful to companies like Microsoft who make accessibility a key part of their overall mission with their tools. I am an avid user of Voice Access including using it to write and edit this post. I have also used some of their adaptive tools such as buttons that allow me to do more work with my feet. I share about these tools because I want others to know that having a disability should not prevent you from working.

Supportive Employers

I really must give a shout out 3Cloud who have really supported me in the transition to being disabled in the workforce. I find some irony in the wording that I just used, as I would insist that I am still able to work though I have lost certain physical functionality along the way. It is their belief in my ability to continue to work while doing it differently that has made the transition easier. They continue to work with me to find great ways to work together. Sometimes this includes specific hardware or software to make my job easier. Other times this includes patience during meetings and supporting specific collaboration needs I might have. The support from leadership to my peers has been great.

Working Through Difficulties

It is not always easy to keep working. There are days when I am frustrated because I am unable to work as quickly as I used to work. My mind works faster than my body in most cases. Because I use voice for most of my work from controlling my mouse to typing up documents, what used to be a single click, now takes me multiple commands which can often result in a weird type of context switching.

While the tools are great, they are not perfect. Some tools are downright hard to use because they are 100 percent designed for mouse usage. For example, whiteboarding tools assume you can easily drag and drop and make connections between objects. Many times, this simply cannot be done with the tools that I use. I have relied on others for help when trying to use tools that are difficult to control the voice. Two of the biggest examples for me include Lucid which we use for charting and collaborating with whiteboards. The other example is PowerPoint. PowerPoint assumes you can work within boxes, move them around, and is not very good to use with dictation.

I often need help from family and friends to make these tools work. For me one of the most difficult parts of this is trying to explain what I am thinking in terms easy enough for someone to translate and produce something on the screen. In some cases, this is not that difficult but in brainstorming sessions it is very difficult as a thought poorly formed is not easy to express.

A Hope and a Future

Those of us that have physical limitations can and do continue to work and be productive in the workplace. Employers who support us are highly valued and appreciated. Often what we think in our minds outpaces what we can express with our bodies. As we look at future tools such as CoPilot from Microsoft which use AI to support a variety of tasks in our day-to-day work, there is a lot of promise to make us more productive in the workplace. Thank you to all the companies who support us through tools and employment. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Congratulations to Pragmatic Works – Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalists, Again

Pragmatic Works has done it again. Microsoft has recognized us for our work this year with two finalist awards — Power BI and PowerApps and Power Automate. This recognizes work we have done for our customers with these products.

This follows awards over the last three years for Data Analytics (2019) and Data Platform (2017). I am proud to work for a great company who strives to be industry leaders in data and analytics in the cloud and on-premises. I am truly excited to see where we go from here!

Power BI Is Finally in the Azure Trust Center

With the most recent announcement of Power BI’s inclusion in the Azure Trust Center, it is a good time to review where we are today with Power BI security and compliance as it relates to various customer needs. I do a lot of work with financial, energy, and medical customers. These groups represent a large amount of compliance and regulation needs. I wanted to understand where we are today and this announcement is significant.

What’s in the Announcement?

One the primary roadblocks to accepting the Power BI service has been the lack of compliance and concerns around security. Microsoft has been making a number of enterprise level improvement to the Power BI service and desktop. Power BI now has the following compliance certifications:

• EU Model Clauses
• HIPAA
• ISO/IEC 27001
• ISO/IEC 27018
• UK G-Cloud

This announcement shows Microsoft’s continued commitment to security and compliance in its cloud based products. While Power BI is not yet to the level of Office 365, some key compliance areas are now covered.

I think the most significant compliance certification is HIPAA/HITECH which removes barriers related for the medical industry. As hospitals, insurance companies, and providers scramble to meet reporting demands from their customers and the government, Power BI gives them a flexible reporting and visualization platform to meet those needs. It will empower self-service in the organizations and departmental or enterprise collaboration with data. The HIPAA/HITECH certification will allow them to use the platform with more confidence and security.

Beyond medical, more institutions will be able to rely on Power BI in a manner that is compliant and safe. As Microsoft continues this journey with Power BI and its other Azure based offerings, customers will be able to react more quickly to the changing business and regulatory environments with confidence in the security and management of their data.

The Reality – You Are as Secure as You Choose to Be

Even with this significant move by Microsoft, you are still responsible for implementing a secure, compliant solution. Microsoft is merely providing tools that are secure and will comply with regulations if implemented correctly. The key to a secure environment will always be you. The data you use and analyze with Power BI is ultimately your responsibility.

I encourage you to review the following resources in addition to the ones above as you determine your security and compliance within the Power BI product:

• Power BI Security
• Power BI Governance
• Row-level Security for Cloud Models

 

TechFuse Minnesota Follow Up

 

My Session: Using Azure SQL Database for Enterprise Needs

On 10/6/2015, I presented on Azure SQL Database at TechFuse Minnesota. Some of the highlights from the session included a comparison of the various SQL Server offerings and how Azure SQL Database fits into the overall picture. During the session we also discussed the importance of V12 and elastic databases (still in preview) for the enterprise environment. I was also raised and discussed the cloudy concerns including data safety, data compliance, data privacy and business continuity. With the ongoing changes Microsoft makes in this space, expect more changes to come. However, even today you can be successful using Azure SQL Database for your enterprise needs.

The presentation can be found in PDF format here.

Microsoft has a wealth of documentation which can be found here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/sql-database/.

Questions from the Session

How are upgrades handled in Azure SQL Database?

Most upgrades to Azure SQL Database are seamless to us. However, they have made changes over the years which have required some intervention. One such change was the move from Web and Business Service Tiers to Basic, Standard, and Premium. In this case Microsoft provided a lot of guidance around the process and it was very easy to do in most cases. The most recent instance was the move to V12. Once again Microsoft provided the upgrade path in documentation. Both upgrades could be handled in the portal. However, V12 was a significant change so groups needed to do more testing prior to an upgrade.

Microsoft’s Azure upgrades for Azure SQL Database over the past couple of years: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/?service=sql-database.

Can we use Point in Time Restore to recover a table or to recover to a new database?

Point in Time Restore allows us to recover databases to specific points in time. Each service tier has different amounts they retain: Basic-7 days, Standard-14 days; Premium-35 days. Azure SQL Database always recovers the database to a new database. This means you can either “swap” the database once it is recovered or move the items you need to recover from the new database. One word of caution, you need to have the DTU capability to run both databases on the server to support the restore capability. Be sure to plan the recovery process and clean up when you have completed your recovery.

Thanks again to everyone who could attend this year.

Until the next session …

2013 – A Year In Review

It is in our nature as humans to look back in order to understand where we have been.

Warning – some of this blog contains stuff about my family… In case you only want the technical stuff.

Family Fun

This past year has been very interesting for me personally and professionally. In the past year, my youngest, Mikayla, has entered Junior High officially taking our family out of elementary schools. Mikalya joined me at the SQL Saturday event in Omaha. At the same time, my oldest, Kristyna, is now a senior at Burnsville Senior High School. Both of my boys, Alex a junior and Andrew a freshman, are both taller than me and staying active. Alex joined us at the Minnesota SQL Saturday and did a lot of volunteering. Andrew probably had the best event of all as he joined me at SQL Saturday in Fargo. There he got to see Bill Gates in person. I am proud of all of them, they are great kids. This was also the year I celebrated 20 years with the woman I love, Sheila. Without her support, I would not have been able to get this far in my career as well. Yep, it has been a busy year personally. Soon there will be lots of college, marriage, and maybe even grandkids. Wow, I must be getting old.

Magenic and the Server Development Practice

2013 is my first full year as a Practice Lead at Magenic. I started out as the Practice Lead for our Business Intelligence and Data Practice. In August, my role expanded to include SharePoint, Biztalk, and TFS. This allows us to focus server technologies at Magenic. Along  the way, I have had to learn a lot about VMs (still a work in progress). I really enjoy working with the pros across the company that we have. We some very talented BI, SharePoint and BizTalk consultants including a few virtual TSPs in SQL Server, Business Intelligence, and BizTalk.

During this past year, I have traveled around the country to consult, to speak, and to meet customers. I have had the privilege of speaking at multiple SQL Saturdays, Modern Apps Live, SQL Live, and Code Mastery events. It has been fun. I almost made it to all of our offices including the locations we opened this year. I made it to Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte, Boston, New York City, and San Francisco. Still need to get out to Los Angelos and Manila.

While it has been hard at times, the travel experience has been good overall. I try to keep my speaking engagements up to date, maybe I will see some of you next year.

This year I also authored outside of the blog. Chuck Whittemore (The Insight Analyst) and I coauthored a white paper on Leading with Excel: The Changing World of Business Intelligence. This was a fun project where we bring together Microsoft Excel and Microsoft BI in a real world way. We continue to successfully work this strategy with our customers and it was the impetus for my Excel BI Tips blog post series. I also had the privilege to coauthor a book that is just being released: SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Cube Development Cookbook by Packt Publishing. This the third book I have worked on and it has been a while since was last published so this was a good experience for me. I still don’t know if I would take an entire project on, but maybe someday.

This year wraps up with me becoming a virtual TSP with Microsoft to further support their efforts with SQL Server and Business Intelligence in the marketplace.

One other thing that has been interesting for me is that with the release of Power Pivot and SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular Model, I am seeing a huge shift in how I work with and sell BI. I have always worked with cubes, but now I see the in-memory space as a more compelling and leading edge solution that will continue to change what my career will look like. While I had a lot of fun being a cube and MDX wizard, the ability to deliver results to business users in a timely fashion with great visualizations is actually more fun. The more things change …

Happy New Year!

I hope you and your family had much to look back and celebrate this year. I thank God for the blessings of a great company to work for and an awesome family to be with.