SQL Data Partners Podcast

You've seen the visualizations and want to dive in--perhaps you were assigned the task. However you started with Power BI, chances are you might get stuck at some point. In this episode, we chat about strategies you can employee to help ensure success. Have a take on this? Hit us up on social media. We'd love to hear from you.

Episode 183: SQL Server Big Data Clusters

The very first podcast episode I recorded was about Extended Events. We've had several new versions of SQL Server since that time, so I thought it was time to bring up the subject again. We are joined by MVP Jason Brimhall and he shares his insights on Extended Events, what has changed, and how to get started.

In the second quarter of 2019, it was announced that Power BI would support paginated reports--at first this was assumed to be connected to an announcement that Power BI would support the RDL files from Reporting Services. The guidance however, was to continue building paginated reports in Power BI. In the fourth quarter of 2019, more information emerged about paginated reports and in this episode we drill into the offering of paginated reports in Power BI.

This week we heard the news of the release for SQL Server 2019 and a major focus of this release is data virtualization. In this episode, we discuss PolyBase--a topic we covered in Episode 95; however it has really come of age with SQL Server 2019. Our very own Kevin Feasel talks about some of the improvements of the feature and we discuss some of the use cases of when it will be useful and some of the pitfalls you might run into as you implement it.

SQL Trail continues to be an experiment in the making and year three proved no different. Eugene joined us this year and we discuss some of the changes, how the vision has changed for the conference and what the future will hold for our event. While there is plenty to be excited about with our event, we couldn't help ourselves and get into a discussion about Power BI and purchasing options.

After 170 episodes, we bring back Louis Davidson to talk about database design and get his thoughts on how we can get better at planning for our data.

The Lock Pages in Memory policy came up in our internal discussions. I wanted to chat about it a bit more and I couldn't think of a better person than Rick Lowe. After our recent SQL Trail, we sit down to discuss this policy option.

Creating reports in Power BI is awesome, but once you are ready to publish the reports--where are you going to store all the data? In this episode, we discuss storage options for Power BI and discuss how the version of Power BI can affect storage.

Are you in the cloud? Lots of folks are talking about moving to the cloud; however, as we find in today's episode this can be tricky to quantify what people mean by being "in the cloud". We are happy to welcome Rick Lowe to the show and he gives his take on working with AWS. We explore what it means to move to the cloud, our experience helping companies get there, why companies would want to consider cloud options, and how you can keep up with all the craziness of new technologies in the cloud.

Episode NULL: Summer Break

What do you do when you want to use the Visualizations of Power BI but management doesn't want to send company data to the cloud? Well, you can implement Power BI Report Server! In this episode we discuss the differences in architecture with the on-premises version of Power BI along with the limitations and options this version brings.

As the data platform continues to evolve, so do certifications. In this episode we chat with Rick Heiges about the new role-based certifications and how they fit into Microsoft's cloud platform. We revisit how certifications still play a role in career development and how certifications have changed. Also, Kevin gives us his experience with taking an exam at home.

From a SQL Server perspective we have many ways to identify problem areas. In this episode, we discuss ways to diagnose performance issues in Power BI. They are certainly making many strides; however, the tools won't feel as mature as they do in SQL Server. We review usage metrics, audit logs, the new Data Gateway monitoring tool and monitoring options in Power BI Premium. The Performance Analyzer had just been released and while we don't go into great detail, we'll be sure to include it in the show notes.

You’ve got first name, last name, full name, birth date, address, email, phone, tax ID or Social Security Number, driver’s license number, medical evaluation notes, MAC address, and IP address columns in a table. So, what would you encrypt in this table? In this episode, our guest, Tom Norman discusses various encryption options and how he goes about choosing what to encrypt. As there are more and more security breaches, the ability to encrypt data is as important as ever.