From Reporting Services Rookie to Rockstar
One week from today, I will be conducting a pre-conference workshop at PASS Summit 2013, “From Reporting Services Rookie to Rockstar.” The official abstract provides a brief description of the...
View ArticleIntroducing the 2014 BI Immersion Experience
In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be in Tampa, FL to launch the new BI Immersion experience. I’ve been teaching this class for several years, adding in elements relevant to the latest releases of SQL...
View ArticlePASS Summit 2014… 10 Year Milestone!
This year I’m celebrating my 10th anniversary of both attending and speaking at PASS Summit, and therefore it seems appropriate to mark this milestone with a reflection of what PASS Summit means to me....
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Getting Some Learnin’ On
With apologies to The Beatles, the theme song that’s been stuck in my head this month goes something like this, Learn, learn, learn There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done Nothing you can build...
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A New Chapter…
It’s going to take some getting used to. For you and for me, but it’s worth it. Introducing the New Me I changed my name to Stacia Varga last month because (drumroll) on May 18 I was part of a fabulous...
View ArticleAll (too) Quiet on the (South)Western Front
Well, sort of…. This blog has been quiet for nearly a year ever since I announced my name change, but my life has been less than quiet meanwhile. I’ve been caught up in a whirlwind of activities:...
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Happy Birthday, Power BI!
Today Power BI… the application as a service available at PowerBI.com … is a year old and the Power BI community is celebrating with a very special video produced by Adam Saxton and Paul Turley. I’d...
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PostScript to a Gentle Introduction to Data Analytics
For the most recent 24 Hours of PASS, the topic was Evolution of the Data Platform and I was honored to present A Gentle Introduction to Data Analytics in SQL Server 2016. (The recording is available...
View ArticleThe Evolution of BI: One Perspective
This time of year people often write about their reviews of the past year, but I’m going to take a slightly different tack by going for a long view of the past by sharing with you a recent interview I...
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Spring Training
Every year around this time, I start thinking about Spring Training. No, not THAT Spring Training, the other Spring Training that I’ve been teaching for many years now in the ‘burbs of Chicago as a...
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Crushing Your Goals with Power BI: Getting Started
It’s that time of year when (almost) everyone around you is talking about New Year’s Resolutions, goal-setting, vision boards, new beginnings, bucket lists… well, you get the idea. Any time of year is...
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Crushing Your Goals with Power BI: Measuring Progress
In my previous post in this series, I explained how to capture and load goals data into Power BI and produced a very simple report that compares actual to target values for individual goals. But...
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Crushing Your Goals with Power BI: Visualizing Progress
Now that I have data both for my goals and for my subsequent goal-related activity as described in my first post in this series, and I have added calculations to quantify my progress as I described in...
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Power BI: R Home Directory vs Library Trees
Although I’ve been writing the last few weeks about Power BI, the rest of my time during the last month has been focused on wrapping up my latest course for Pluralsight, “Getting Started with R in the...
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Using Parameters in an R Script for a Power BI Query
In my last post, I described a problem I had working with an R script in Power BI for which the cause was not obvious (at least to me). In this post, I want to share with you what I was doing with R in...
View ArticleDynamic Web.Contents() and Power BI Refresh Errors
Recently, one of my clients was working with a new data source in Power BI that required multiple calls to a REST API to iterate through an unknown number of pages to retrieve JSON documents. We were...
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Getting Started with Data Analytics in Power BI
I’m a relatively new hockey fan. And I love data. Come join me on a series of posts as I see explore where a combination of these two interests leads. Even if you’re not a hockey fan, along this...
View ArticleGetting Started with Data Analytics in Power BI – Part 2
The hockey data that I started exploring in Part 1 of this series is just the tip of the iceberg. I have so many questions that standard hockey statistics reporting cannot answer for me. I’m interested...
View ArticleNew Pluralsight Course: Getting Started with R in the Microsoft Data Platform
I’m pleased to announce the release this week of my newest course at Pluralsight, Getting Started with R in the Microsoft Data Platform. If you’re not sure why you would need R in SQL Server or how you...
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Exploring a Data Set with Simple Statistics in Power BI
The goal of my last two posts was to gather data published by the NHL for hockey teams and players, including the basic statistics available at the team, player, and game level. I was able to put...
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