Re-Watch the MS Ignite 2020 Sessions On-Demand – When and Where You Like

Microsoft Ignite went virtual this year and according to the social media responses (and my experience too) – the conference was a huge success. Besides the live session experience, sessions were repeated to suite for other time zones (with was very nice for us Europeans – Thanks Ignite Team!)

My days during the conference only had 24 hours and too many interesting sessions happened in parallel! But luckily, the sessions are now available as on-demand sessions:

Browse the Ignite session catalog …

Take a seat, sit down comfortably and enjoy the sessions!

Data News – 2020-09-28

Welcome to another episode of my #DataNews series. In the past week I found some interesting stuff I find you should have a look at.

Microsoft Ignite 2020

Last week was MS Ignite 2020 week. Three days full of technical sessions, announcements and networking fun. My experience of the Ignite online conference was a great one – The sessions were broadcasted three times – one time live and two times as on-demand sessions.

AND: The sessions are now available as on-demand sessions: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions

Ignite Session Catalog

MS Ignite 2020 Book of News

All the announcements from Ignite are listed in the Book of News

Power BI News from Ignite 2020

I’ve collected the Power BI announcements in one blog post: have a look here (includes links to announcement posts, Q&A sites and conference sessions) – Power BI at Microsoft Ignite 2020

New Power Platform Icons

The members of the Power Platform got new icons – have a look here

Screenshot from James Phillips Session at #MSIgnite 2020 – New Power Platform Icons

Online Conferences & Web cams

I have to watch that tip from Scott Hanselman – Virtual PowerPoint Greenscreens!!

Have a nice and successful week,

Wolfgang

Azure Synapse Analytics at MS Ignite 2020

MS Ignite 2020 is over – many interesting sessions and announcements happened .. and the content and news were shared on several different channels..

In my opinion, not easy to follow and therefore I now would like to summarize the sessions & announcements around Azure Synapse Analytics in this blog post.

Before you dive deeper into the Azure Synapse news… please follow the official twitter account – they need more followers 🙂

Follow the official Azure Synapse Analytics twitter account

Azure Synapse Analytics Sessions:

• Real-time analytics and BI using Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB (Euan Garden) – session link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/4ac2276d-808a-41fb-a6c5-89e34b453efd
• Building real-time enterprise analytics solutions with Azure Synapse Analytics (Saveen Reedy) – session link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/1c74b5ad-c774-42a7-a7c6-eb0242ecaa27
• Running cost effective big data workloads with Azure Synapse and Azure Data Lake Storage (James Baker and Michael Rys) – session link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/1c74b5ad-c774-42a7-a7c6-eb0242ecaa27
• Ask the Expert: Building real-time enterprise analytics solutions with Azure Synapse Analytics (Saveen Reddy, Matthew Hicks, Kevin Ngo, Ron Ortloff, Euan Garden) – session link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/b749ff04-036d-413f-8933-a5813a25345e
• Building systems of insights for enterprise scale with Power BI and Azure (Arun Ulagaratchagan, Priya Sathy) – session link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/819848a0-0229-4f08-bf23-b29e2590eea7
• Smart Data Pipelines to Azure: Ingesting and migrating data the DataOps way (Asrar Khan, Girish Pancha) – session link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/43f39474-6781-4cd6-9a11-8ae43dc7695c
• Ask the Expert: Building systems of insights for enterprise scale with Power BI and Azure (Priya Sathy, Christian Wade, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Deepesh Srivastava, Krystian Sakowski, Akshai Mirchandani, Denis Lamtsov) – session link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/a4bc873c-fc35-4743-b583-ca0220ce10a9
• What are the possibilities of Data & Machine Learning? (Vlad Iliescu, Marc Lelijveld, Terry McCann, Dave Ruijter) – session link: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/f55df338-fe4d-4994-a05b-64da8389b9cc

Announcements for Azure Synapse Analytics (from the past week)

• Azure Synapse Knowledge Center – Your entry point to quickly get started… https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-synapse-analytics/quickly-get-started-with-samples-in-azure-synapse-analytics/ba-p/1700475?WT.mc_id=DP-MVP-5001676
• Powering data exploration and data warehousing with new features – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-synapse-analytics/powering-data-exploration-and-data-warehousing-with-new-features/ba-p/1695416?WT.mc_id=DP-MVP-5001676

Feature	Available when?	Link(s)
Power BI performance accelerator	private preview	Apply for preview
Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB now includes Synapse SQL	public preview	link link2 link3
Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB API for Mongo DB	preview	link
Enhanced support for analyzing text delimited files	public preview	link
COPY command	GA	docu
Fast streaming ingestion	GA	link docu link2
Column-level encryption	Public preview	docu
MERGE support	public preview	docu
Stored Procedures	public preview
Inline Table-Valued Functions	public preview	docu
Azure AD authentication features		link
Apache Spark for Azure Synapse In-Cluster Caching and Shuffle Service	preview	link docu

Now it’s your turn… 🙂 Take your time and learn about the new stuff in Azure Synapse Analytics

Happy Analytics,

Wolfgang

SQL Saturday Denmark #963 – Virtual

Today, I presented a session at this years #SQLSatDenmark which went virtual and online this year. The organizers provided us with five parallel tracks and overall 29 sessions over the day.

I presented my session “Continuous Integration for the BI Developer” where I tried to highlight the topics of

• Version Control
• Traceabilty
• Automation
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

in BI projects.

My slides are already uploaded on the SQLSatDenmark site: get there from here

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me!

Wolfgang

SQLSatDenmark #963 (2020) Schedule: https://www.sqlsaturday.com/963/Sessions/Schedule

New Power Platform Icons

During some Microsoft Ignite 2020 (#MSIgnite) sessions, new icons for the members of the Power Platform have been revealed: One of their first appearances was during James Phillips session – Gap and Supercharge Organizational Agility:

source: https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/bdb4ea05-29c0-4850-b702-c103d5d9066e

https://twitter.com/MSPowerBI

https://twitter.com/MSPowerApps

https://twitter.com/MSPowerAutomate

https://twitter.com/MSPowerVirtual

Power BI at Microsoft Ignite 2020

This week is Microsoft Ignite week and this year is a special edition – Ignite has gone digital and online this year.

https://myignite.microsoft.com/

In “normal” years, MS Ignite was one of the biggest (if not biggest) Microsoft tech conferences. I had no chance to visit an in-person Ignite so far, but this year I already spent and will spend some hours in front the PC to watch some sessions live.

Schedule – Live Sessions and On-Demand option

The Ignite team put great work into creating and providing a schedule feasible for different timezones. As I read, every session will be provide three times – at least once live plus to recordings adjusted to different time zones. And if you are not able to watch the sessions during the “official” conference time, the sessions will be available on-demand afterwards.

Power BI / Power Platform Sessions and Announcements

As you may have noticed in the past, I am a little bit into the topic Power BI and Power Platform. And these technologies are heavily included in the #MSIgnite schedule this year.

The Power BI team created an overview page listing all the Power BI sessions

Read the Power BI session post here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-at-microsoft-ignite-virtual-conference/

Power BI Announcements

The list of announcements is long – you can find a summary in Arun Ulags blog post “Driving a data culture in a world of remote everything“

Let’s dive a little bit deeper: Data Culture is a thing not only for individuals, but also for teams and organizations. Starting with easy and powerful reporting support for individuals, stepping up to support teams to make the right decisions and reaching the enterprises with support for professional development, reporting and data tasks.

Many features have been announced during the (keynote) sessions:

Some of the mentioned features are already available for testing, some are coming soon and others are planned to be available later in this year. Please have a look at Aruns blog post for a detailed description – I will only summarize the availability of these features in a small table: (taken from here, 2020-09-23 //13:15)

Feature	Availabilty	Detail Links
Smart narratives (public preview)	available today	blog post blog post IgniteSession
Anomaly detection	later this year
Power BI for HoloLens 2 (preview)	available today	blog post
Power BI app in Teams (preview)	later this month	blog post
Dataset discovery in MS Teams (preview)	later this year	blog post
Excel Certified Datasets (GA)	later this year
Excel Data Types (preview)	available today
Power BI Premium Gen2 & Power Premium per User	later this year	IgniteSession Premium Gen2 post Q&A blog post
Power BI performance accelerator for Azure Synapse	later this year
Visual Data preparation “Diagram View”	later this year
Deployment Pipelines (GA)	available today	blog post
Data source impact analysis (preview)	available today	blog post
MIP sensitivity labels in Power BI (Power BI Desktop)	later this year
Power BI Desktop September 2020 release	available today	blog post

Last but not least – new Power Platform icons have been revealed (seen in James Phillips session – Gap and Supercharge Organizational Agility):

First time appearance of the new Power Platform icons

For me, the list of announcements and new features is overwhelming.. It seems like the Power BI team does not sleep anymore 🙂 Could be worse

What is your favorite new feature?

Wolfgang

Data News – 2020-09-21

Welcome to another episode of my #DataNews series. In the past week I found some interesting stuff I find you should have a look at.

Power BI

• Power BI (Paginated Reports) and Power Automate – Better Together: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-automate-actions-for-exporting-power-bi-and-paginated-reports-now-available/

• Have a first look at the Power BI report created for and presented at the Gartner (Virtual) BI Bake Off 2020: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-analytics-and-bi-virtual-bake-off-2020-world-population-health-analysis-with-power-bi/
• Updates on the ‘new look’ experience and release plan: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/updates-to-the-new-look-experience-and-release-plan/

Events

This week is #MSIgnite week – three days, in your timezone – content from (almost) every Product Group presented for free:

• Register now and take part of one of the biggest virtual conferences in 2020: https://register.ignite.microsoft.com/
• What Microsoft Business Applications sessions are there at #MSIgnite: https://register.ignite.microsoft.com/https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/bdm/2020/09/15/your-guide-to-microsoft-business-applications-sessions-at-ignite-2020

Power BI DEV Camp

• Join the next episode of the Power BI DEV Camp on Thursday 24th, 2020 – 11 AM PDT with Ted Pattison – This time: Writing PowerShell Scripts for Power BI
  • https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/join-us-power-bi-dev-camp-thursday-september-24-2020/

Azure SQL Digital Event

• Join the Azure SQL team on October 14th for the Azure SQL digital event: Transform your applications with Azure SQL

Have a nice and successful week,

Wolfgang

Data News – 2020-09-14

Welcome to another episode of my #DataNews series. In the past week I found some interesting stuff I find you should have a look at.

Power BI

• Security is always a thing: Gilbert wrote a great summary article about Power BI / Groups and where they can be used to set permissions: https://www.fourmoo.com/2020/04/01/power-bi-which-groups-can-be-used-to-set-permissions-in-power-bi/

Reporting

I found a very, very interesting and inspiring post by Lisa Charlotte Rost – How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations – https://blog.datawrapper.de/beautifulcolors/

Azure Synapse Analytics

Join the team that works on the product itself in an AMA (ask-me-anything) session on September, 15th 2020 on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI/comments/ioywtx/save_the_date_ama_with_the_microsoft_synapse/

If you do not know what that Azure Synapse Analytics thing is.. here is the introduction: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/overview-what-is

Autumn Event season starts:

a more general one: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200826-what-the-future-of-conferences-could-look-like

• SQL Bits (29th September – 3rd October) Do not miss the Azure Data sessions by Microsoft (and all other sessions too) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql-database/azure-data-sessions-you-won-t-want-to-miss-at-sqlbits-2020/ba-p/1620056
• Microsoft Ignite is coming – free and in September (September 22-24 2020) https://myignite.microsoft.com/home
• SQL Saturday Denmark (Virtual edition) – This year it’s a virtual one, no data party in Copenhagen – Join me and others (see the agenda here) on Saturday, 26th 2020
• Data + AI Summit Europe – 17-19 November 2020 https://databricks.com/blog/2020/09/02/spark-ai-summit-europe-is-expanding.html

Have a nice and successful week,

Wolfgang

Data News – 2020-09-07

Welcome to another episode of my #DataNews series. In the past week I found some interesting stuff I find you should have a look at.

Announcements this week

• Power BI Paginated Report Builder updates in August 2020: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-paginated-reports-august-2020-updates/
• If you are using Power BI and connect to multidimensional sources – They are getting faster! 😉 https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/improving-power-bi-performance-when-querying-multidimensional-models/
• Data Lake permission administration made easier (and recursive) – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/azure-data-lake-storage-gen2-access-control-list-recursive-update-in-public-preview/

Some Learning

• Have a look at the Power BI Learning catalog – a great collection of many Power BI related topics – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/learning-catalog/

Autumn Event season starts:

• SQL Bits (29th September – 3rd October) Do not miss the Azure Data sessions by Microsoft (and all other sessions too) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql-database/azure-data-sessions-you-won-t-want-to-miss-at-sqlbits-2020/ba-p/1620056

• Microsoft Ignite is coming – free and in September (September 22-24 2020) https://myignite.microsoft.com/home

• SQL Saturday Denmark (Virtual edition) – This year it’s a virtual one, no data party in Copenhagen – Join me and others (see the agenda here) on Saturday, 26th 2020

Have a nice and successful week,

Wolfgang

Data News – 2020-08-31

Data News is back!

Long time ago, I tried to collect some interesting information pieces found on social media and technology blogs.

I hope that this journey continues for a longer time now.. this time, I challenged myself with already scheduled entries for the next weeks.. so.. if I do not change the post and add no links, you’ll get a blog post like this.. 🙂

This is a sample message 🙂
It will show up if I do not update the scheduled posts for #DataNews in the next weeks!!

And the posts are scheduled.. so the challenge is open!

Data News links

But now back to the real content – some interesting links I found in the past week:

• Best practice guidance for Selecting an Azure data store for your application – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/data-store-decision-tree

• In general – Azure Application Architecture Guide – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/

• Diving into Delta Lake (Databricks) is a three part video learning series – https://databricks.com/diving-into-delta-lake-talks
• Power BI Dev Camp – Ted Pattinson (now member of the Power CAT team) created a webinar series about many topics around Power BI development (https://www.powerbidevcamp.net/)
  • August 27 – Developing for Power BI with .NET Core
  • September 24 – Automating Tasks in Power BI using PowerShell
  • October 29 – Deep Dive into the Power BI JavaScript API

• Christopher Finlan (t) provides us with an update for the upcoming Power BI Report Server release – it will be delayed and released in October 2020! https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/release-update-for-sept-2020-release-of-power-bi-report-server/

• Update to the On-Premises Data Gateway (August 2020) – https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/on-premises-data-gateway-august-2020-update-is-now-available/

• Exciting news – The licensing for the #PowerBI and #Excel integration got updated -NO E5 license is required to access Power BI datasets from Excel! (in my opinon, a very, very good decision Microsoft :-)) – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/simplifying-enterprise-data-discovery-and-analysis-in-microsoft/bc-p/1617175/highlight/true#M1540

Upcoming events:

• Microsoft Ignite 2020 – virtual and divided into two parts – Part one is happening in September (22-24) – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ignite

• On October 1st, all the news and planned features for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform will be presented by James Philips (President MS Business Applications Group) in a launch event – #MSBizAppsLaunchEvent – https://events1.social27.com/microsoft-business-applications-launch-event/page/pre-signup