SQL Server Tips & Tricks
Okay so I already posted a round up post for this month. You can see it here. Tonight one of the participants, Rob Farley (Blog | Twitter) made me aware of the fact that I missed a HUGE opportunity in making the round up in a Power BI report! *face palm* With that I proudly give you the interactive version of this month’s TSQL Tuesday round up!
This month I challenged the blogging community to share their own creations in Power BI. We got a ton of great entries this month, thank you everyone who participated! My overarching goal for this month’s topic was to get folks who may not normally play in the BI space to use this fantastic solution and maybe get some ideas flowing on how they may be able to apply it in their everyday work.
UPDATE: Thanks to Rob Farley for the idea, I’ve made this round up into Power BI report! (Direct link)
Thanks again to everyone that participated this month. Even if you weren’t able to participate in the official event, please feel free to share your Power BI experiences in comments!
So this month I’ve decided to bring every participant in this blog series kicking and screaming into the BI world. Power BI, if you haven’t heard or seen it yet, is Microsoft’s analytics and visualization solution. This month I challenged everyone to create their own Power BI report and share it with the world via our new Publish to Web feature. So far I’ve seen some great contributions from fellow bloggers, and those will shared in the upcoming round-up post. You can also check out the winners of the recent Power BI Report Contest (Congrats Jason and James!).
For my contribution to this contest I’ve decided to share with you a work in progress. If you know me, I’m a huge lover of Policy-Based Management. In fact, I’m actually part of the Enterprise Policy Management Framework (EPMF) project on Codeplex. T-SQL Tuesday event is normally a DBA-centric event so I figured I’d help the DBA crowd wrap their heads around how a BI solution can help them in their day to day.
What I did to kick start this effort was to create this Power BI report that allows you to explore the database repository that contains the EPMF policy evaluation results. The current EPMF project uses Reporting Services to deliver its reports. This won’t change. If anything I’ll be exploring new capabilities with SQL Server 2016 and R-integration. Here’s a screenshot of what the SSRS dashboard report looks like:
While this report is nice, it can be a little cumbersome doing interactive analytics against this data set. The reports are somewhat “interactive” in that you can click on a visualization to drill down in to a detail level report behind it, but it’s not really interactive. Enter Power BI! Below is my first swag (read also: none of this is set in stone for final EPMF release, any/all feedback is appreciated) at creating a Power BI version of this dashboard. And yes, I’ll be doing away with pie chart. Dataviz people rejoice!!!
I’ve included a lot of the existing elements from existing report including seeing detail level information of policy results breakdown by server and policies. You also get interactive elements such as choosing policy results, server names, month. On the trending and details page (second tab), I’ve used some custom visuals from Power BI’s Custom Visuals Gallery such as the tadpole spark grid plus to show trending over time.
The best part of using Power BI to visualize on your operational data? You can access your reports and insights anywhere, anytime through our mobile apps! We’ve got apps on all major platforms (iOS/Android/Windows Mobile) as well as a universal Windows 10 app. Think about this. Many large organizations pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for monitoring software that includes capabilities to push to mobile, and even then they’re usually shrunken mobile websites. This is a native application functionality in the palm of your hands at a fraction of the price, so cool!
What else is in the future for EPMF? I’ll be rebuilding the data model from the ground up to make it more efficient for reporting. The current model is very simplistic, and works, but as enterprises adopt EPMF and monitor more and more, the current model has certain scale issues. What do you think? Are you excited for new developments in EPMF? Are you using EPMF today? Let me hear it in the comments!
Hello everyone and welcome to this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. This 
month’s topic is all about Power BI! If you’re reading this and thinking “crap, I’m not a BI person!”, don’t you fret. My intention is to make folks who normally don’t use BI on a day to day basis try their hand at creating cool new visualizations and reports with Power BI and seeing how the other side lives. Maybe it can spark some ideas on how you can make use of it in your operational day-to-day. For the BI folks, let’s see your creative side! What cool things can you show us with Power BI?
Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to create and publish your very own Power BI report! Great news, one of the latest features of Power BI to come out is the ability to publish your report to the web so when you create and publish your report, embed it in your T-SQL Tuesday post! Here’s a couple of great examples of this feature in action:
If you’ve never used Power BI before it’s REALLY easy to get started. Simply head over to PowerBI.com and click on the ‘Get Started Free’ button. Download and install Power BI Desktop tool. It’s a free download and this is what you’ll use as your authoring tool. Click ‘Sign Up’ button. You’ll need to sign in with an organizational account (e.g. you can’t use personal email such as @gmail,com @live.com, @Hotmail.com, etc.). If you have a custom domain (e.g. SQLChicken.com), you can use your custom domain email address, otherwise you’ll have to use an organization/work email.
Once you’re up an running, check out the Power BI documentation page to help you get started. For this post, feel free to connect and use any data set you want that can be shared without issue. For example don’t publish your company’s data, customer data, etc. There’s a ton of data out there to use that is safe. In fact, the tutorial from the above link lets you download a sample CSV file if you can’t find a proper dataset. Also, Jen Underwood (Blog|@idigdata) actually posted a great list of public data sources you can take advantage of. Want more great Power BI information? Make sure to check out Adam Saxton’s (Blog | @guyinacube) Guy in a Cube YouTube channel and subscribe for awesome bi-weekly, content.
Want some inspiration on what you can do? Check out the Power BI Best Report contest that’s currently going on. Be sure to vote for your favorite report before voting closes on February 14th, 2016.
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different blogger each month. This blog party was founded by Adam Machanic (blog|@AdamMachanic). You can take part by posting your own participating post that fits the topic of the month and follows the requirements below. Additionally, if you are interested in hosting a future T-SQL Tuesday, contact Adam Machanic.
I look forward to seeing everyone’s reports!