Voice of the DBA

Tag: Database Weekly

  • The Power BI Pivot

    This week we had quite a bit of Power BI content appear on various blogs and sites. Some of this was normal traffic, with Power BI gaining popularity and more data professionals writing about the topic. There are always quite a few blogs from The Guy in a Cube, including a look at how to better use colors, but I also see more and more posts from others. We had others about R in Power BI and custom visuals.

    The big news this week was the announcement of the Power BI Report Server from Microsoft. This is coming late in the second quarter of 2017, according to the SSRS blog, which I assume means in the next month. The second quarter is almost over, and with Microsoft ending their fiscal year in June, I’d expect this to release sooner than later. There is also a Power BI Premium, which apparently allows an enterprise to purchase capacity in the cloud and then concurrently deploy Power BI reports on-premises.

    Many people have been looking forward to this. I’ve been hearing from some reporting authors that we were going to get Power BI rolled into SSRS as an option for SQL reporting. Apparently we are, but there are some new costs here. This may change your calculation of whether this is a good move for your organization, but certainly I think that Power BI is one of the better reporting engines I’ve seen.

    The licensing is confusing, and I liked in a few other thoughts on the announcement from others, such as Dan English and James Serra. Both note that the free tier gets to connect to the same data sources as the Pro previously could (including on premises data), which is good. The storage quota increases to 10GB, up to 8 refreshes a day and a bit more. Pro is still $10/month, and apparently is still needed for those that spend the money on Premium if they author reports or export to Excel, even if you have Enterprise Edition. At least, that’s what Mr. English notes in the license terms. Alternatively you can spend a few thousand dollars a month for the cloud version and let all your employees access reports in the cloud or from a local report server.

    Power BI has been one of those amazing products that I’ve been very impressed with in the technical sense. I can build amazing reports, and get great interactivity, allowing me to analyze data in a way that hasn’t always been possible in a visual tool. Almost every time I see a new type of report or some demo, I’m impressed with what’s possible. I love the desktop tool for my own use, since it’s a nice, responsive and easy to understand interface. However the deployment method (originally just with PowerBI.com) and the licensing have always struck me as a bit strange, and perhaps somewhat crippled. It certainly felt that many features didn’t cost me money directly, but there was a cost. With this latest change, it feels like another pivot to try and increase revenue, but not in a way that’s attractive to me.

    Microsoft wants to make money, and they’ve certainly invested money in the Power BI platform, so they get to make the rules. I do like Power BI, and if the costs make sense to you, and there’s enough value, this is certainly a very powerful visualization and reporting tool that I can only imagine will become more and more useful over time.

    Steve Jones

  • More Power in Your BI

    I’ve seen lots of data visualization tools over the years. Cognos, Microstrategy, ProClarity, and more. While I haven’t been a BI person for most of my career, in many of my positions, someone has wanted to try some new tool and eventually I’ll get involved somewhat. I remember first seeing the OLAP cube browser in SQL Server 7, and showing my boss a quick demo. While it wasn’t something that you could let an end user have, it also got my boss excited, and they started a project as I was leaving to implement some OLAP for the sales department.

    When I first saw Tableau years ago (2008?) at TechEd, it was the first tool I’d seen that was really slick for the end user. I expected they’d grow quickly, and they have. Many people have looked at the Tableau tools as the standard for data visualization. For years nothing looked close, and as much as I appreciated Microsoft moving PowerPiviot and other tools to Excel, they weren’t as nice to use as the graphical tools.

    That changed with Power BI. When I first saw this tool, instantly I could start to see the power of the tool. Even altering and changing a tool had an ease and power that I hadn’t seen since the Tableau tools. The initial release had lots of limitations and was just on the web. It was slow, and refreshes from remote data weren’t great. There were security limitations, and I wasn’t sure that the vision for the product made sense from Microsoft, even though I could see tremendous potential.

    Things have improved, and I am somewhat amazed with the power of Power BI. A simple sales report is interactive. I can click on something intuitively and the values I see will adjust to focus on that item. What’s more, other graphs on the screen adjust. However, I don’t have to stick with simple graphs, I can add better imagry, such as this wine report, or this airline maintenance report that drives work. I was especially impressed with the analysis of Stephan Curry (which won the contest). Some of those reports I couldn’t imagine trying to build with other tools, especially SSRS.

    Power BI is a great tool, and if you need to provide visualizations for end users, I’d urge you to take a look. The Power BI Desktop tool is great for modeling and working with data. I find myself using that for quick looks at data, building a graph in a way that’s easier than in Excel. I went through Microsoft’s EdX course, and was somewhat amazed to see the vast capabilities available in the product. Guy in a Cube, Adam Saxton, has a YouTube channel where he and Patrick LeBlanc (@PatrickDBA) bring you constant training and tips on how to get the most out of the tool.

    What’s more, I keep finding more and more Power BI blogs and posts that I can add to Database Weekly every week. So many people are experimenting and finding ways to better analyze data with Power BI. This week we have a continent slicer, data privacy, collaboration, and more. With montly releases, I find that people are constantly digging into the possibilities and helping you learn with them. There are even developers building custom visuals that you can download. There’s even one for acquarium lovers. If you want to learn about these, Devin Knight blogs regularly about custom visuals and we include many of those links here and on SQLServerCentral

    Power Bi is a great way to empower your users, reduce your reporting load, and make everyone happier. Power BI is a great way to let users experiment with data and actually decide what reports are worth investing in more with IT resources to perhaps optimize the performance of certain visuals. Give it a try to day, especially the desktop version, and see how you can easily start to examine data that might be important to you. Even the SQLDBAWithaBeard finds Power BI helpful.

    Steve Jones

  • The vNext Bleeding Edge

    Microsoft has had early access programs for years. I worked at a few companies that were a part of the TAP (Technology Adoption Program) program, and we would get access to code early in exchange for providing feedback and working closely with Microsoft engineers. This was interesting, as well as good and bad. We could move early to implement new features, but we also had the struggles of dealing with code that wasn’t always working as expected.

    Microsoft has stared a new program, the SQL Server Early Adoption Program (SQL EAP) to allow companies interested in moving to SQL Server v.Next as soon as possible. I suspect lots of ISVs that might want to build products for SQL Server on Linux might get involved, but there will also be some large corporations that want to influence the platform and get certain features changed or prioritized. The benefits note that participants can come to the SQL CAT team lab to test things, work with product managers, and get separate support if they go into production. For companies that might feel the next version provides some new benefits,

    Microsoft gets all sorts of feedback, but working with a small group of product managers or engineers is a good way to get your voice heard above others. I know that MVPs get the chance to exert similar influence, and at times this can be valuable. However, one has to keep in mind that this is the chance to voice opinions and thoughts, not votes. Microsoft isn’t necessarily going to implement something you want just because you convinced some engineers it’s a good idea.

    Getting into the program does mean that your are bound by an NDA, and that you may have a separate EULA for production workloads. However, if your company likes being on the bleeding edge, and wants the chance to upgrade early, perhaps you should consider applying. I would say that participation in the TAP program was a beneficial experience for my employers. Perhaps the SQL EAP will be for you as well.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Faster Versions and More Support

    When I started working with SQL Server, the versions came a strange paces. Three years between v4.2 and v6.0, but less than 1 before v6.5. Then two years to v7, one more to SQL Server 2000, but five until SQL Server 2005. After SQL Server 2008, we’ve moved to a 2-3 year cycle, but I can see that accelerating a bit more as SQL Server vNext looks like it might come in 2017, a year after SQL Server 2016. Since much of the code is released to Azure first and exercised there, I could see us getting on premise releases coming every 1-2 years in the future.
    Overall, I like this pace. We can see changes coming to the product on a regular basis and enhancements that I can choose to implement or not. We no longer have to wait years to get an enhancement or evolution of a feature. We always have the choice to upgrade. Many of us won’t, but that’s OK. Perhaps we’ll use new features in new applications, and learn how they might make the case to, or not to, upgrade existing instances.
    There’s a flip side to the rapid releases and enhancements to the platform. Many of our organizations expect a database server to last for years. We invest plenty of resources in building these database servers, and I think many managers and organizations expect they will be in service for at least five, and maybe ten, years or more before they are decommissioned or perhaps upgraded. I know there are still plenty of SQL Server 2005 and 2008 instances (probably not 2000) that are being used on a daily basis with no plans to replace them.
    This means that as the developers and DBAs that work with SQL Server, we will likely be supporting a wide range of versions in the future than ever before. Even if you started a company two years ago with a SQL Server 2014 instance, I’d guess you might have a few more now, perhaps some SQL Server 2016 instances. In two years you might have 2014, 2016, and 2017 (assuming vNext becomes SQL Server 2017). In five years, perhaps you’ll have five versions to support. I know there are people in that situation today with 2014/2012/2008R2/2008/2005 instances in production.
    There was an announcement this week from Microsoft. They are now offering SQL Server Premium Assurance, which will give you 6 years of support after the 10 you ca now get with Extended support. Certainly there are restrictions and costs, but I expect that there will be some large organization that think it’s worth paying this to continue to use older versions as long as possible. After all, this is a platform, which implies some level of stability.
    That doesn’t solve the knowledge issue and need to keep staff around that understand the platform, but with all the education and knowledge available from places like SQLServerCentral, perhaps supporting multiple versions isn’t a bit deal.
    Steve Jones