Last week was the first Microsoft Power Platform conference with over 150 interesting sessions and 18 workshops, I had the pleasure of meeting new people who share my passion for Power BI, and I met some of the heroes I’ve been following and learning a lot from like Patrick, Adam and Miri Rodriguez.

Yesterday I was catching up on my to-dos, so today I was able to make time to write a recap of the sessions I attended on the 2nd and 3rd at the Power Platform Conference.

Power BI + Azure Synapse Analytics. All you need to start creating a unified analytics solution

By Adam Saxton and Patrick LeBlanc

In this session Adam and Patrick shared how the Azure Synapse platform integrates with Power BI, and how ingestion of structured and unstructured data, extract-transform-load (ETL), big data, and data warehousing technologies coexist within a single unified service:

They also showed demos about:

1. Data Ingestion and Integration: Here we saw an introduction to logical data warehouses that allow querying disparate data sources without the need to extract, transform and load the data into another data store.

This allows organizations to extract information from data sources without the need for additional data warehouses to hold the transformed data.

2. Big Data and Data Warehousing: Here the objective is to design and implement a data model that, despite being complex, is fully optimized, for this the recommendation is to handle:

– Hybrid tables: It combine the performance of VertiPaq in-memory caches with the capabilities of DirectQuery, allowing users to unlock massive datasets for real-time, interactive analysis

– Aggregations: This is one of the most powerful data modeling features available with Power BI are aggregations because allows store data at a higher level of granularity than the original table which can optionally be stored in a compressed in-memory cache improving the performance

– Combined storage modes (import, DirectQuery and dual).

3. Power BI Datamart: It’s a self-service analytics solution that helps bridge the gap between business and IT users providing a simple no-code experience to ingest data from different data sources, transform it using Power Query.

Once the data is loaded into a datamart, the user can define relationships, DAX measures, and row-level security rules and it automatically generates a dataset, which can be used right away to create Power BI reports and dashboards.

Power BI datamart and Azure Synapse create a great synergy between enterprise and self-service analytics for example, datamart can be used as a serving layer for subsets of data coming from Azure Synapse

Azure Synapse Community Resources: aka.ms/SynapseCommunityResources

 

Azure Monitor, Azure Data Explorer and Power BI

By John White and jason Himmelstein

Log Analytics and Application Insights is a storage mechanism for telemetry data. At its core is Azure Data Explorer (ADX) or “Kusto”, and the KQL language for analysis, which can also be used independently.

ADX can connect to Power BI, a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your data and share the results across your organization. The various methods of connection to Power BI allow for interactive analysis of organizational data such as tracking and presentation of trends.

Power BI has a native connector to Azure Data Explorer. The connection process is very intuitive:

More info here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/power-bi-connector

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/

User Adoption: Creating and Supporting Power BI Champions

By Belinda Allen

It was a very interesting session where Belinda shared experiences and Microsoft Suggested Methodology to help during the adoption process of Power BI in the Organizations.

Successful Power BI adoption involves making effective processes, support, tools, and data available and integrated into regular ongoing patterns of usage for content creators, consumers, and stakeholders in the organization.

Some of the highlights of this session were:

“Any successful begins by bringing the right team together, so champions are essential to driving awareness, adoption, and education in your organization, they influence and help their colleagues in many ways, including solution development, learning, skills improvement, troubleshooting, and keeping up to date”.

“The resistance is normal in the adoption process for that we need to be anticipated which allows as to be proactive in identifying and managing resistance”.

“A key factor for successfully enabling users in a Power BI community is training as people are worried there will not be sufficient training for new ways of working and this is main reason for the resistance”.

Here there is very complete information about the process of Power BI adoption:

• Overview
• Adoption maturity levels
• Data culture
• Executive sponsorship
• Content ownership and management
• Content delivery scope
• Center of Excellence
• Governance
• Mentoring and enablement
• Community of practice
• User support
• System oversight
• Conclusion and additional resources

The Future of Storytelling

By Miri Rodriguez

It was one of my favorite sessions, I am passionate about storytelling and I think Miri is a great referent in this fields, in the session she shared practical tools to helps us become a skilled storyteller in this immersive new universe.

Key takeaways:

“Story is 22x more memorable than any other piece of information you will ever share”

“Storytelling is the emotional transfer of information, opinions, assertions, facts, data, ideas, and argument through the introduction of character, plot, and conclusion”.

 

Storytelling Hacks

1. Cross functionally and collectively aligns on WHY you want to the tell the story and which stories you will tell
2. Let product + data inform your story
3. Invite your audience to become your main character
4. Create tension and curiosity for the character
5. Let the character conclude that need your solution

Designs Thinking in Storytelling