Power BI: How to Analyze FIFA 2014 Worldcup

Posted on July 26, 2015 by Reza Rad

It was sometimes ago that I’ve posted some data analysis that I’ve done with Power BI Designer on FIFA 2014 Worldcup results. In this post I want to take you through the process of how to achieve that analysis. This post is an introduction to Power BI features with the example of FIFA 2014 Worldcup result set. Through this post you will learn how to connect to web based data sets and mash up the data with Power Query component of Power BI Desktop. And finally how to model it and visualize it in the Power BI report. Most of the data for this example comes from data sets in FIFA 2014 Worldcup official website: http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/brazil2014/index.html

[…]

All in One: What’s New in Power BI Desktop 2.0 GA

Posted on July 25, 2015July 25, 2015 by Reza Rad

The Breaking news of General Availability of Power BI 2.0 in now everywhere all around the world. In this post I’ll illustrate some great new features of Power BI. if you would like to see a real world example of Power BI you can read FIFA 2014 Worldcup Data Analysis with Power BI, I’ll update that example later on with the new Power BI version. It has been a while that Power BI was on Preview, and with the great effort from Microsoft product team it is now available fully released. As per Microsoft blog post on 21st of July 2015 Microsoft mentioned some great features that will be available in this release, in this post we will go through them one by one. […]

Azure Data Catalog; What to Expect this Monday?

Posted on July 11, 2015 by Reza Rad

Thrilling news of public preview availability of Azure Data Catalog spread the word from Joseph Sirosh’s blog post yesterday; Azure Data Catalog will be available for public preview this Monday 13th of July. This is great step forward for using metadata alongside tools for extracting and visualization of the data. I would like to share my thoughts about what is a data catalog and what to expect from it on Monday.

What is Data Catalog; Data Catalog contains metadata related to the data source, metadata can contains tags, comments, descriptions, annotations…. about data source, tables, views, indexes, and all other objects in the data source. Most of you worked with databases (readers of my blog are database pros usually 😉 ). In all database environments there are two sides; business and IT (or let’s say owner, producers, or consumers of the database technology). Business usually understand concepts, while IT understand database structure. Metadata stored in a data catalog is the connection between these two.

[…]

Linked Services: Azure Data Factory Basic Sample

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Reza Rad

In previous post you’ve seen how to create Azure Data Factory. In this post we want to take the first step in building components of Azure Data Factory. Usually the very first step is creating Linked Services. Linked Services are connection to data sources and destinations. Data Source or destination may be on Azure (such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Database) or on premises (such as on-premises SQL Server, or on-premises Oracle). Linked Services need to work with Data Management Gateway if the data source/destination is on-premises.

In this example we follow the previous post solution; We want to copy data from some CSV files exists on Azure Blob Storage and load it into Azure SQL database. So we need two Linked Services for this example; one for Azure Blob Storage, and the other one for Azure SQL Database. Creating Linked Services might not be so hard once you have the environment ready for it. However in this example as we want to do everything from the scratch I’ll explain you how to create an Azure Blob Storage and upload CSV files there to be the source of our operation. I’ll also explain how to create the destination table in Azure SQL Database.

[…]

Building The First Azure Data Factory

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Reza Rad

Previously in another post I explained what is Azure Data Factory alongside tools and requirements for this service. In this post I want to go through a simple demo of Data Factory, so you get an idea of how Data Factory project builds, develops and schedules to run. You may see some components of Azure Data Factory in this post that you don’t fully understand, but don’t worry, I’ll go through them later on in future posts.

An overview from previous section; Azure Data Factory is a Microsoft Azure service to ingest data from data sources and apply compute operations on the data and load it into the destination. The main purpose of Data Factory is data ingestion, and that is the big difference of this service with ETL tools such as SSIS (I’ll go through difference of Data Factory and SSIS in separate blog post). With Azure Data Factory you can;

Access to data sources such as SQL Server On premises, SQL Azure, and Azure Blob storage
Apply Data transformation through Hive, Pig, and C#.
Monitor the pipeline of data, validation and execution of scheduled jobs
Load it into desired Destinations such as SQL Server On premises, SQL Azure, and Azure Blob storage
And on last but not least; This is Cloud based service.

[…]

Self Service BI- Power Query-Section 1: Search for Data

Posted on July 2, 2015July 2, 2015 by Leila Etaati

In this Video I tried to gather some information about Dog Breeds from different 3 websites : http://www.mans-best-friend.org.uk/dog-breeds-alphabetical-list.htm http://www.dogbreedslist.info/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dog_breeds I have explained how to get data from these websites even they don’t provide any API.

I’ll Speak in SQL PASS Summit 2015; 3 Years in a row

Posted on June 29, 2015June 29, 2015 by Reza Rad

It is a honor for me that I’ve been selected to speak in SQL PASS Summit 2015. SQL PASS Summit is the largest SQL Server conference and event in the world. Last year about 6ooo people from more than 55 countries attended this great event. I’ve been honored previously to speak in this great conference Read more about I’ll Speak in SQL PASS Summit 2015; 3 Years in a row[…]

SSIS Demos in Action: Tutorial Videos

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Reza Rad

SQL Server Integration Services is not a new technology, this technology is a mature data transfer and data consolidation tool which has been in the market since 2005. Prior than that SSIS had another name; DTS. However SSIS nowadays is capable of doing far more than what DTS had to offer.

You can transfer data from any source to any destination, you can upload or download files, you can set priority on execution of tasks, you can call third party applications or command lines, you can get part of the data from Web Service, you can zip or unzip result set, change structure of the result set and load it wherever you want.

[…]

What’s New in MDS of SQL Server 2016

Posted on May 28, 2015 by Reza Rad

SQL Server 2016 CTP 2 released almost a day ago, and I’ve had a chance to install it and play with Master Data Services to see what changes has been made in this product. Master Data Services is a service of SQL Server first released in SQL Server 2008R2, and enhanced in SQL Server 2012. There was no changes in MDS of SQL Server 2014. But fortunately MDS wheels are spinning now, there are some changes in 2016. Changes are not major though they are evidence of Microsoft investing on this services nowadays.

[…]