Eating the Elephant: Totally free videos showing an introduction to Visualising Big Data for Business Intelligence Professionals

Continuing my ‘eating the Elephant, one bite at a time’ series, which focuses on Microsoft Business Intelligence and Hadoop, I’ve put together a series of totally free videos, to help people who are interested in visualising Big Data using familiar tools in Microsoft. The purpose is to take data from various data sources, including SQL Server, HDInsight (Microsoft’s distro of Hadoop) and Excel, and visualise the data via PowerPivot and Excel.

Self Service Bi – and Big Data – a Business Intelligence person’s dream! Well, it is for me!

As I say in these videos, Excel is the world’s favourite software for Business Intelligence, and it must surely rank as one of the most favourite software applications of all time. Excel is used (and abused!) more than any other software I’ve seen.

I hope that you will enjoy the videos and I look forward to your feedback. You can access them on YouTube here http://www.youtube.com/user/CopperBlueConsulting/videos

Please note: in the process of practising for my Big Data precon at SQLPass Summit in Charlotte on 15th October, I reused the material from a fantastic blog post by Cindy Gross of the SQLCat team and I’d like to thank Cindy and her team for writing this material.

The blog post is here and I recommend that you go through it – I just videoed it, but the material belongs to them so I’d like to make sure that they get credit for the blog post, so that’s why I’m emphasising that I’m calling it out.

Please note that this isn’t material from my actual precon – it’s simply a way of me to work my way through preparing for the precon I’m presenting jointly with Allan Mitchell (SQL Server MVP). I have simply put it in video format in order to practice my delivery, and then it struck me that people might find this useful. If so, look out for more videos in future!

I hope it helps.
Kind Regards,
Jen