Month: June 2017

Connecting to Power BI Datasets with Power BI Service Live Connection

/ Mike / Leave a comment

One of the most useful features to come to Power BI in recent months is the Power BI Service Live Connection. You can find out more here.

What is it?

In a nutshell, it allows developers to connect to an already published Power BI dataset and create new reports without having to redo all the queries and data ingestion.

This scenario is great as an Analysis Services “lite” approach, allowing teams to better collaborate and reduce duplication of effort by sharing standardized models and content. As most of the effort involved in self-service BI tools is spent doing the data mashing, with this approach you can “model once and reuse many times”.

How does it work?

As Power BI Service Live Connection is a preview feature, you first have to enable it in “options”:

powerbioptions_powerbiservice

Once enabled, restart Power BI and create a new dataset using the normal Get Data functionality. This becomes your data model to publish and share. Instead of building any reports, simply publish the pbix file to the Power BI Service:

powerbidatamodel

Adventure Works Data Model In Power BI

 

emptymodel

Blank Power BI Workbook with Data Model

Once published, this dataset can then be connected to from any other Power BI workbook using the new functionality. Developers no longer need to do all the heavy lifting work with the data mashing, and instead just use the already built data model to create their own reports and dashboards.

powerbigetdatafrombilive

Browse to the published data set:

workspace

You then have access to the published data model, and can build your own content. Note the “Edit Queries” option is grayed out.

connecttomodel

New Power BI Workbook Connecting to the Published Dataset

This new functionality is a great addition to the Power BI toolset, and allows for a much improved sharing and collaboration experience within teams.

Find Out More:

Blog Announcement

Step by Step Guide

Optimizing SSIS Data Loads with Azure SQL Data Warehouse & PolyBase

/ Mike / 1 Comment

To gain the best loading performance with Azure SQL Data Warehouse, you want to leverage the power of PolyBase, which allows for massively parallel data loading into the underlying storage.

In standard scenarios, ETL developers using SSIS will leverage a data flow that takes data from a source (Database, File, etc) and load it directly into the target database:

SSIS Simple Data Flow

Simple SSIS Data Flow (Table to Table)

Unfortunately, adopting this pattern with an SSIS data flow into Azure SQL Data Warehouse will not naturally leverage the power of PolyBase. In order to understand this we need to take a little peek under the covers of SQL Data Warehouse:

Azure SQL DWH Overview

Azure SQL Data Warehouse Overview

As part of the underlying architecture, SQL DW has at its head the Control Node. This node manages and optimizes queries, and serves as the access point for client applications when accessing the SQL DW cluster. What this means for SSIS, is that when it makes its connection to the SQL DW using standard data connectors, this connection is made to the Control Node:

SSIS Front Load

SSIS Front Loading

This method introduces a bottleneck as the Control node serves as the single throughput point for the data flow. As the Control node does not scale out, this limits the speed of your ETL flow.

As stated earlier, the most efficient way of loading into Azure SQL DW is to leverage the power of PolyBase in a process known as “Back Loading”:

SSIS Back Load

Back loading via Polybase

Using this method, data is bulk loaded in parallel from staging files held in Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Store, which allows for the full data processing power of PolyBase to be used.

Leveraging Polybase Within SSIS

Previously, ingesting data from files into SQL DW using PolyBase was a slightly drawn out process of uploading files to storage, defining credentials, file formats and external table definitions before finally loading the data into SQL DW using a CTAS (Create Table As Select) statement. This works perfectly well, but introduces a lot of extra SQL coding on top of the norm.

Thankfully, with the SSIS Azure Feature Back, the above is now made much, much easier with the introduction of the Azure SQL DW Upload task. This process automates the creation of the SQL scripts required, allows you to seamlessly incorporate this task into an SSIS ETL process that will fully leverage Polybase.

Azure DW Upload Control Flow

Azure SQL DW Upload Control Flow

Azure DW Upload Task

Azure SQL DW Upload Task

Further Reading

Azure SQL DW Best Practices

Azure SQL DW With Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS)

Polybase Guide

First post

/ Mike / Leave a comment

Greetings. This my first post for the SQL of the North blog. This blog will serve as a platform for sharing the latest and greatest from the Azure data & analytics world, as well as sharing hints, tips and best practices obtained in the field.

By way of background, my name’s Mike and I’m a DSA (Data Solutions Architect) at Microsoft, where I specialise in helping customers on their data journey into the cloud. I have over 15 years in the data and analytics space, mainly focused on the Microsoft platform, however I’ve picked up a few other useful skills and technologies along the way.

Finally – why “SQL of the North”? Well, I’m a northern (UK) lad by origin, and am also an avid Games of Thrones fan. I wanted something that had a bit of a link to that,  and unfortunately the “Data Watch” was already taken 🙂