We’ll talk about working with data in high volume and massive scale and then I will show you a reference project which is a real project that I worked on recently. I’m actually using screenshots of that project simply because there was a lot of sensitive data. A live demo of a sample project will follow. We’ll talk about composite models and then I’ll demonstrate using parameterised queries – which you can use even if you’re just in a regular shared capacity tenant without premium features. And then incremental refresh policies, which are a premium feature, to take that to the next level. So let’s think about the song title first and we’re going to talk about the way that serious BI solutions used to be and then we’ll talk about where that’s going in the wake of Power BI.
So, The Way We Were of course… that’s a reference to a song sung by Barbra Streisand for a movie that she co-starred in with Robert Redford of the same title. Serious BI solutions have in the past used SQL Server Analysis Services for data modeling and storing that data, and of course we’re talking about analytical datasets that are used for analytical trend reporting the kinds of things that we typically use tools like Power BI for. In the past, Analysis Services is installed with SQL Server onto an on-premises server. You pay for that server you not only have to buy the hardware and manage, optimize and tune but there are also licensing costs associated with SQL Server outside of Power BI. Typically, the person who’s going to design those data models and manage those data models is a person like this. It’s time-consuming and these people generally work for an IT organization. What’s the song reference? …of course that was a song performed by Bob Dylan in the 60s. Visual Studio has long been the design tool of choice for serious semantic data model design and up to as recent as a year ago, that was my recommendation. If you’ve got serious data large volume data you need to protect that data, it needs to be a govern dataset that is being managed seriously within the organization… That’s typically going to be owned by IT and they’re going to design it deploy it, manage it and then users can connect to it – or IT will build reports that users can use. That’s the way that things have been and but things are changing. Tool sets are coming together and of course “Come Together” as a reference to a song by the Fab Four, the Beatles. What’s coming together? …the features of Visual Studio SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) for Analysis Services tabular and Power BI Desktop are coming together. We’re seeing features added to each of the tools but they’re definitely converging and so we would typically use Visual Studio the SQL Server Data Tools add-in for Visual Studio to create tabular data models like this but now we have these same capabilities – and even more capabilities – in Power BI Desktop. Power BI Desktop is really kind of becoming the preferred tool. You’d have to have grown-up in the early 80s to get this song title. This was a song, and the name of an album, from a pop/dance group in the 80s called “ABC”. They did some great songs like Poison Arrow and When Smokey Sings, but things are changing and we’re now at a place where Power BI is moving at a very rapid pace. The development of that product is very quick and the product team will focus on adding features to the product that they own and they manage and that is Power BI Desktop.