Have you ever created a Hyper-V virtual machine and later needed to change the size of the disk on the VM? When you initially create a virtual machine you provide a size for the virtual hard disk (as shown below).

It’s pretty straight forward to expand the size of this… Read more

As I’ve started digging deeper into using Azure the need to automate tasks (turn off all VMs, turn on all VMs, automatically resize all VMs, etc…) has becomes very apparent.  In April 2014 Microsoft announced the release of Microsoft Azure Automation to handle such operations. 

Activate Azure Automation

This new… Read more

I’m in the process of moving some my lab environments that I use for teaching SQL Server classes to Azure. I’m pretty new to the Azure infrastructure world but I thought I could share some of my lessons learned in doing this. My first post will walk you through moving… Read more

I’ve noticed a recent trend with many presentations and articles on Power BI and Excel functionality. Many of these presentations show how quickly you can take tools like Power Query to find and discover data and then quickly present it through tools like Power View and Power Map. These are… Read more

I wanted to share a quick resolution I had to a problem with connecting Power Query to data stored in HDFS.

Seems easy enough. Launch Excel and through Power Query select From Other Sources –> From Hadoop Files (HDFS)

Next you’re prompted to provide your Hadoop server name then click… Read more

I hope you were able to attend my free webinar on Creating Power Map Reporting Solutions on April 17 2014.  If you weren’t you can now watch the recording here.

Following each webinar I like to post a quick Q&A session for everything I was not able to answer in the allotted… Read more

I hope you were able to attend my free webinar on Bringing Power BI Q&A to your Organization on April 15 2014.  If you weren’t you can now watch the recording here.

Traditionally following a webinar I try to post a quick Q&A session for everything I was not able… Read more

I hope you were able to attend my free webinar on Understanding Microsoft Self-Service BI on March 13, 2014. If you weren’t you can now download the recording and slides.

I usually like to post follow up questions and answer that I wasn’t able to address during the webinar. Here’s… Read more

Come join me for this webinar on 4/17/2014 at 11:00 AM EST

Creating Power Map Reporting Solutions

Excel 2013 with Office 365 brings many new features to the realm of Self-Service BI. There are now new ways to extract, model and present data all within Excel. One of these newest… Read more

Come join me for this webinar on 4/15/2014 at 11:00 AM EST

Bringing Power BI Q&A to your Organization

Q&A is an amazing new feature of Power BI that allows you to ask you data question. No longer do you have to write complex SQL queries to get results. Simply… Read more

Come join me for this webinar on 3/13/2014 at 11:00 AM EST

Introduction to Power BI 

The future of Business Intelligence has many new and exciting features. This world that was once reserved for only experts in SQL Server technologies has expanded to serve the masses with more and… Read more

I hope you were able to attend my free webinar on Choosing the Right Analysis Services: MOLAP vs. Tabular on February 11, 2014 that I delivered with Dustin Ryan.  If you weren’t you can now watch the recording here.

Traditionally following a webinar I try to post a… Read more

Today Microsoft has officially announced the release of Power BI for Office 365.  You can read the Power BI teams post on the release here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2014/02/10/announcing-the-general-availability-of-power-bi-for-office-365.aspx

Power BI has some pretty amazing features that allow users take control of their data.  I’ve also written several posts in the past about… Read more

Today is the final day for the Power BI Contest voting and I could use your help to move on in the competition!  Please take a moment and vote for my video here http://tinyurl.com/PowerBIDevin

Thanks for voting! Read more

You’ve watched my video (hopefully) now vote for it!  In a previous post I wrote about my Power BI contest entry (Read more about it here).  I really enjoyed making this video and hopefully you enjoyed watching it.  Please take a few moments and vote for my entry here. Read more

Today I submitted my Power BI contest entry and I’d love for you to take a look!  Here’s a short description of entry and the video itself:

In this submission I have used Power BI to help me plan a vacation with my wife. We both love thrill rides so… Read more

With the recent updates to the Power BI preview and Q&A features added I thought I would do a quick tutorial of how it all works.  This post will walk you through uploading a workbook to Power BI, Using Q&A against that workbook, enhancing the workbook with synonyms and the… Read more

One of the nice new features that was added to Power Query with the latest update in December is the ability to connect to Microsoft Exchange as a data source.  You can download this update now here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=39933

Here’s a quick demonstration of how you may use the Microsoft Exchange… Read more

Just in time for Christmas the Microsoft product teams responsible for Power BI have a slew of amazing updates.  The list of updates can be found here but for my notes specifically on Power Query updates continue reading!

Power Query

Power Query now has 3 new data sources that you… Read more

A little gem was included with the latest Office 365 update.  After downloading and installing this update you will now find that a feature called Synonyms is available inside Power Pivot. 

Synonyms are a piece of the puzzle that make the Power BI feature Q&A work.  If you haven’t seen Q&A… Read more