I conducted a workshop in Florida recently, aimed at helping people to move from Business Intelligence to Analytics. I thought I'd post the slides here. If you have any questions, please get in touch with me here. I have added some guidelines for using Power BI with marketing and sales data. These are general principles,… Continue reading Moving from Business Intelligence to Analytics?
Azure SQL Database is introducing two new features to cost-effectively migrate workloads to the cloud. SQL Database Hyperscale for single databases, available in preview, is a highly scalable service tier that adapts on demand to workload needs. It auto-scales up to 100 TB per database to significantly expand potential for app growth. What does this mean?… Continue reading Microsoft Ignite interview with Kevin Farlee on Azure SQL Database Hyperscale
Don't you think that the amount of Big Data technologies in Azure is very confusing? I've distilled some information from the official Microsoft Azure blog so it's easier to read.
Businesses struggle with many different aspects of data and technology. It can be difficult to know what technology to choose. Also, it can be hard to know where to turn, when there are so many buzzwords in the mix: analytics, big data and open source. My session at PASS Summit is essentially talking about these… Continue reading Want to learn how to light up Big Data Analytics using Apache Spark in Azure?
Joseph Sirosh's keynotes always contain amazing demos. The future is here, now. You can have this technology too.
As organizations move into a Big Data world, many projects will include a Data Lake component. What is a data lake, and how do we get our data into the Data Lake? There are many different interpretations of a Data Lake, but the interpretation given by Attunity and Hortonworks' jointly produced Data Lake Adoption and Maturity Survey Findings Report… Continue reading 5 Factors to Consider before Pouring Data in your Data Lake
As always, I don't speak for PASS. This is a braindump from the heart. I realise that we haven't communicated about BA as much as some members might like. It's a hard balance - I don't want to spam people, and I don't want to get it too light, either. If you want to sign… Continue reading Jen’s Diary: Why are PASS doing Business Analytics at all?
I organised an AzureCon viewing party tonight in Hertfordshire, with great team support from Team Awesome over at Cloudamour. We watched a total of four keynotes, running back to back for almost four hours. The keynotes were all awesome and I've blogged some learnings here. First up, was Scott Guthrie (t), igniting the keynotes and kicking… Continue reading AzureCon round up: Intelligent Cloud, Applications, Data, Infrastructure, Business Agility and Cloud Ability
How do R and Power BI fit together?Technically, it is about munging data around between R and Excel and the Power BI components. You can use RODBC to connect to data between R and SQL Server, or R and Excel. Alternatively you can import data in.Why else might you use R?Pivot Tables are not always enoughScaling… Continue reading The Data Analysts Toolkit Day 5: How do R and Power BI fit together?
So what actually is R? Let's take a look at running some commands, and we can talk about it as we go along.R is a powerful environment for statistical computingIt is like a calculator and its power is: … it lets you save results in variables. Let's take a look:> x > y > z =… Continue reading The Data Analysts Toolkit Day 4: Getting to know R a bit better
I have located a number of R Scripts over at my OneDrive account and you can head over there to download them. There are some other goodies over there too, so why not take a look?how do you open files? To create a new file, you use the File -> New menu.To open an existing… Continue reading The Data Analysts Toolkit Day 3: Introduction to running and understanding commands in R
In this topic, we will look at the installation of R and RStudio as part of our R and Power BI Data Analysts Toolkit.Why use RStudio as well as R?Simply put, it is suitable for the enterprise and it is also open-source. It makes R easier to use and to troubleshoot.RStudio is a tool which… Continue reading The Data Analysts Toolkit Day 2: Installing R and R Studio
