George Woods

Take home items from my 1st PASS Summit and most likely blog topics for the foreseeable future.

13 Nov 2018

Besides catching up with some old friends. This conference is awesome. Everyone is very friendly, welcoming and willing to help. You truly feel like you are part of the #sqlfamily. I’ll post more about the atmosphere in the future.

Power BI

• datasets will be available in other workspaces. For instance, you will be able to share datasets across workspaces
• new workspaces are the future and will allow 4 roles. viewer, contributor, admin, member

• Paginated Reports are now available. There is no plan to phase Paginated Reports out. They want them to live alongside pbix reports

  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/paginated-reports-report-builder-power-bi

  • Finally, was able to catch Patrick Leblanc’s portion of the keynote. He is truly amazing and a natural on stage. #keephimonthebigstage
• Dataflows are now available
  • Self-service for PowerBI
  • https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-power-bi-data-prep-wtih-dataflows/
• Secure embedding – you will get a link, just like normal embedding, but with the secure embedding you will need to sign in with your outlook 365 credentials. Once your pc is signed in, you will not need to sign in again
• Powershell management cmdlets for PowerBI – might be able to get some data using the cmdlest that would not be available through the portal – https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-apis-and-powershell-cmdlets-for-power-bi-administrators/
• New gateway release
• Azure B2B sharing of content
  • Interesting item. If the person you are sharing the information with is a Pro user in their tenant, then they would be considered a Pro user in our tenant

SQL Server – 25^th anniversary

• Azure Managed instance
  • More like on-prem SQL Server
  • possibly save money on Barracuda backups
  • has sql server agent to be able to run jobs
• Azure SQL Elastic Pool
  • Kind of like “load balancing” your SQL server instances
• Azure SQL V-core
  • Possibly cheaper licensing model than current DTU’s
• SQL Server 2019

Misc.

• Package Deployment is once again available in 2016 or newer
  • Not sure if this would help us at all, but it was interesting to hear
• Azure Active Directory Federated
  • This is a way to have Azure AD look at your domain\…. user account and connect it to your Azure AD account. I know this can help with Azure SQL Databases and I believe this can also help with connecting SSRS/PowerBI Report Server reports to Azure Analysis Service
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse is meant for systems larger than 2TB or 3 TB
• Azure Dev Ops – replacing VSTS
• Azure Data Studio – Can this replace SSMS?
  • Being heavily developed
• Visual Studio Code
  • Json templates for Azure
• Adobe color wheel
  • https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/
  • Can use this for color schemes and also to find hex values of colors.
  • Can create themes from this website
  • 1 in 12 men are color blind, 1 in 200 women are color blind, so we have to watch how reports are built using colors for metrics.