Neal Waterstreet

2013 and 2014 Goals

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Time to look back on 2013 and ahead to 2014 before its 2015…

2013

Overall: 2013 was my second full year as a consultant. I am enjoying my decision even more than I expected. Like most years, I didn’t get everything accomplished that I wanted to in 2013.
Result: B

Certification
Finally got the 2008 certification wrapped up by taking the last exam the week of the deadline. Nothing like waiting until the last minute, but on the plus side there was some progress toward 2012.
Result: A

Projects
Completed a SSAS Tabular project with Power View and Power Pivot. This project was definitely a highlight of the year.
Result: A

Healthcare SQL VC:
This continues to grow slowly and not at the expected pace. We’re still have some trouble getting speakers. If you’d like to speak please let me know.
Result: C

SQL Events/Training:
The PASS BA Conference in Chicago and the Polish SQL Day 2013 we highlights. International events are something I am going to try to do more often. I didn’t attend the PASS Summit – I think I’m going to make that an every other year event. Also, no SQL Saturday events in 2013. This is the first time that has happened since 2008.
Result: A

Presenting:
Presented a session at the Atlanta Microsoft BI group early in the year, but didn’t do it again in 2013. I’m not sure how much I like presenting and my plan is to start blogging more instead.
Result: B

Learn something new:
The Tabular project allowed me to work with DAX on a daily basis, so there wasn’t any problem getting time to learn this. It’s an interesting language and should only get better over time.
Keeping with the theme from the BA Conference, the statistics course on Coursera was excellent. There are so many useful courses on there.
Result: B

Blog:
Not nearly enough posts in 2013. The goal was 2 per month and there was 13 total. No posts at all after August, so not a good finish to the year at all.
Result: C

2014

Certification
Goal: Finish 2012 and 2014 certifications. Look into other certifications to see if there is anything that would benefit me.

Projects
Goal: This one is hard to measure, but will try to find a way to evaluate.

Healthcare SQL VC:
Goal: Increase attendance to 75 per meeting and have 9 presentations in 2014.

SQL Events/Training:
Goal: Attend as many events as possible, including PASS BA Conference 2014 and PASS Summit 2014. Looking to make it to Europe for an event too.

Learn something new:
Goal: This year R, Hadoop and Tableau look to be the top choices. This may adjust as the year progresses and projects evolve. Not sure how to measure this, but this sounds like somewhere to start.

Oh, and BIML too!

Blog:
Goal: 2 posts per month. In addition, the posts should be more technical, possibly as a series.

Technical Books:
Goal: This is a new goal for 2014. 6 books sounds like a reasonable amount to read.

And yet another goal…
Review Yearly Goals:
Goal: Check back at the end of every quarter to track progress. Unfortunately, this one is usually the first to get skipped but we’ll see what happens.

SQL Saturday #272 Nashville

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Last weekend Damu Venkatsesan and I made the short trip to Nashville for SQL Saturday #272. It’s the closest event to Atlanta this year (so far…) and we are trying to get to as many SQL events as possible to promote the Healthcare SQL VC.

The day started off on bad note with a dead battery. That couldn’t keep us away from the event, but did cause us to be a little later than we wanted. The location was easy to find and plenty of parking so no trouble once we got the car started.

Despite the late start we were able to catch a full day of sessions and they had a very good assortment of speakers. A few of the highlights for me were Allen White’s “Automate Your ETL Infrastructure with SSIS and PowerShell” and Joey D’Antoni’s “In-Memory Columnstore Indexes–Make Your Data Warehouse Fly”. I plan on implementing both of these into future projects. All of the sessions I attended were well done.

A few quick notes about Nashville:

  • The space was almost perfect for an event like this, especially the room sizes. They didn’t give a crowded or empty feeling in any of the rooms I was in.
  • Nice line up of sponsors. Pretty diverse mix too.
  • Lots of Atlanta speakers were there. I’m sure we’ll see them again at #285.
  • Big bonus for having great SQL Saturday swag – a pint glass. Nice!

The attendance seemed to be pretty good and everyone I spoke to enjoyed themselves. The organizers should be pretty happy with the outcome.

 

 

 

Thoughts on SSAS Tabular

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I recently wrapped up a project using some of the new(ish) Microsoft tools: SSAS Tabular, Power View and PowerPivot Power Pivot. The project still fresh on my mind, so I wanted to document my experience and offer some praise and criticism.

SSAS Tabular/Power Pivot

I really like the Tabular Model and find it easy to work with. The speed and flexibility of the tools are a nice change from multidimensional. The security model, which could be a problem in multidimensional, is much simpler to implement and modify.

One complaint about the GUI is that it can sometimes be difficult to manage once you get into more complex measures that contain a large number of calculations. I don’t really have a suggestion for how to resolve this, but it would be helpful if it were a little cleaner. It can really get confusing when the development is shared between multiple users.

The ability to import a SSAS Tabular model directly into PowerPivot is needed. Power Pivot can be used as a source, but it does not work the other way around. This would be a great help, especially for business users that are may be trying to learn or want to gain more insight. Marco Russo has created a Connect request for it. Please vote for it if you agree.

I really like the tool’s ability to predict relationships and the Diagram view and think it is a great idea. The only problem is that it is often wrong. After a while you can usually predict when there will be an issue, but I’m not sure how much time it actually saves.

The error messages really need some work. Many of the messages I received did not seem to be related to the underlying issue. Several of these turned out to be just bugs, like duplicate measure names or issues with data source connections. None of them really gave any indication of the real problem. Luckily, most of the messages I encountered were resolved after a search. It would be nice to see a repository for these somewhere.

Power View

The business users like it and so do I, but there are a couple of items I would like to see added on.

There is a need to be able to use expressions in Power View. A very common request is to show the data for yesterday or today. There are workarounds, but there are limitations to this that limit interactivity.

More attention needs to be paid to look and feel including support for HTML5. There is currently not enough control over fonts and colors. This seems to be one of the first issues that users notice and in some companies this is critical.

The ability to export or save to another format is greatly needed. Business users want to be able to see the data in Excel – even after viewing it in Power View. The export to PowerPoint (Power Point now?) is nice, but they need access to the data itself.

DAX

The DAX syntax seems to be relatively easy to work with and is very similar to Excel functions. DAX does have limitations, especially when compared to MDX. I realize they are two different languages for different purposes, but a few new features would go a long way. There are workarounds for custom calendar support and many-to-many, but there is a need for those to be included natively. I would like to see this in the next version.

I would really like to see more functionality for DAX built into SSMS – similar to what is in DAX Studio. If you haven’t checked that out you probably should.

The biggest problem I found with DAX is the lack of examples, but this is beginning to change. In fact, there have been a couple of great documents released in the last few weeks. Alberto Ferrari released Understanding DAX Query Plans and a new article was released on Performance Tuning of Tabular Models in SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services. If you are interested in DAX, both of these are well worth your time to read. That being said, I need to start posting more here.

Conclusion

In general, I think that this is a great start for Tabular. There is a lot here to work with already, but I look forward to seeing what happens next.