(Livestream Replay) PowerShell Hacks for Power BI - with James Bartlett

ABSTRACT 📝

There's never a dull moment in the life of a Power BI Administrator. In order to protect our time and sanity, it's important to automate as many of our usual tasks and processes as possible. Additionally, since the top priority of the Power BI development team is the end user experience, there are many edge cases and "power user" type activities that cannot yet be accomplished using only Power BI Desktop and the Power BI web service.

Fortunately, Microsoft has provided two priceless tools that allow us to automate and add functionality to Power BI: The Power BI REST APIs and the MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt module for PowerShell. This presentation will demonstrate several techniques for harnessing these powerful tools to make your job as a Power BI Administrator less time-consuming and more fun!

GUEST BIO 👤

James D. Bartlett III is a Senior Business Intelligence Analyst and Power BI Administrator at Des Moines University in Iowa, USA. He started working in IT way back in 2002, while he was a student in the Business Administration program at Colorado State University. After graduation, James dabbled in banking, real estate, healthcare, and even had a short stint as a resident DJ at Denver's top nightclub, before finally stumbling upon his true calling in the Business Intelligence field in 2018. James is a blogger and co-developer of the Business Ops app on PowerBI.tips, co-leader of the Iowa Power BI User Group, and recently completed his Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate certification. In his spare time, James enjoys longboarding, playing the guitar, and producing electronic music in his home studio.

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Power BI REST APIs
PowerShell Module
James’ Blog
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Two Ways to Create Single Value Input Slicers in Power BI!

Learn about two techniques for creating a single value input Slicer in Power BI Desktop!

The first method will apply a technique outlined in a SQLBI article (link below) that uses Tabular Editor to allow native columns (fields) to be modified to allow single value slicer types to be used with them. One consideration is that this technique is not officially supported by Microsoft.

The second method shows you an officially supported method for adding a single value input slicer. This alternative way implements a WhatIf parameter and leverages some clever DAX and relationships to achieve the same result.

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SQLBI Single Value Slicer
HTML Content Viewer (Daniel Marsh-Patrick)

Video by: Reid Havens

(Livestream Replay) Configuring Incremental Refresh PBI-Tools - with Mathias Thierbach

ABSTRACT 📝

You've heard about Power BI Incremental Refresh for datasets but you're missing powerful tooling? pbi-tools is here to help! Learn how pbi-tools supports you manage, configure, monitor and optimize incremental refresh for your largest datasets. Ask questions and see demos how to automate deploying and refreshing incremental refresh datasets. You'll hear about refresh policies, auto-managed partitions, effective date and many more technical details.

GUEST BIO 👤

In 2015, after having spent over ten years as a Software Developer and Architect with Microsoft technologies, Mathias Thierbach moved into the Microsoft BI space. He soon landed on Power BI, but also realized quickly that the development and engineering tools and practices were nothing like the ones well established in software development. This is how pbi-tools started as a project, filling this gap in tooling. Today, leading a growing data management team at YouGov, he experiences the benefits of those efforts every day. Having open sourced the project in fall of 2021, Mathias spends a lot of his free time bringing those practices to the wider Power BI community now.

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PBI Tools
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Mathias's Twitter
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(Livestream Replay) Exploring Azure Synapse Analytics - with Eric Gleiter & Justin Moen

ABSTRACT 📝

Have you considered using Azure Synapse Analytics? You may have wondered how it differs from some of the other Azure tools you're familiar with (such as Data Factory, Data Lake Gen2, SQL Data Warehouse, etc.) and when you should use Synapse over the others. We'll review what Azure Synapse is, how to get started using it, some "gotchas" to watch out for, and we'll show how we help get data into Synapse in an organized and usable way for reporting and analytics in a matter of weeks.

GUEST BIO 👤

Justin Moen is a business intelligence professional who has a passion for working with data and working with his clients to leverage data as a competitive advantage. Over the past 20 years, Justin has worked with many database solutions, such as Oracle, SQL Server, and Snowflake. He is quick at mastering new tools and has a great understanding of current trends in the industry. To complement his technical knowledge, Justin is excellent at working with both business and IT team members to help bring both sides together to produce strategies and solutions that propel businesses forward.

Eric Gleiter is a dedicated and driven application developer knowledgeable in a wide variety of tools. He is experienced in Data Governance and Data Engineering. His ability to learn and digest new information and technologies enables him to quickly understand, implement, and innovate solutions to client’s needs. Eric's mathematics background makes him both flexible and rigorous when it comes to implementing solutions- enabling him to break down complex problems into manageable parts that can be quickly addressed- allowing for fast and effective solutions.

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Website
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