Andrew Tegethoff

In his July 10th email to employees, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentions the word “data” no fewer than 15 times.   This simple fact serves to highlight how dealing with data is a foundational part of Microsoft’s future strategy.   When he describes a “mobile-first and cloud-first world”, Mr. Nadella is describing a world where data is ubiquitous in “the […]

When I speak to clients about In-Memory features in SQL Server, I find that Columnstore indexes just haven’t gained much traction as a marquee feature. The functionality itself is quite useful in the BI/DW realm as far as potentially boosting query performance by 1.5 to 10 times. But I think it gets overlooked because the […]

Having recently come off a string of Agile BI projects, I’ve made some observations about factors which can potentially hamstring such efforts. Great (but Unrealistic) Expectations First, Agile is not a silver bullet. It will help deal with rapidly changing requirements, and it will get “something” together, rather than “nothing”. But Agile suits some situations […]

I knew that there were differences between Power View in desktop Excel and Power View as run from SharePoint. But I recently felt the impact of this for the first time. The first confusing point I found was, the Export to Power Point function only works for reports created in Power View in SharePoint Server. […]

The age of Big Data is upon us, and the age of Pervasive (or “Ambient”) Data is rapidly approaching. This means that not only the typical loosely-structured Big Data sources that we’ve become accustomed to considering, like Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and web logs. This also means we’re dealing with the streams of data generated […]

As early as the beginning of this year, Microsoft began positioning their “Cloud OS” concept, based on the pillars of Windows Server and Microsoft (formerly Windows) Azure.  This perspective on the spectrum of Microsoft’s offerings casts Cloud OS as a giant next generation operating system, with all the scope and scalability that cloud computing offers. […]

While poking around in Azure, looking to set up a BI Demo VM , I noticed that Microsoft had added a few SQL Server-oriented images to their catalog.   VMs labeled “SQL Server… for Data Warehousing”! There was one for SQL Server 2012 (SQL Server 2012 SP1 for Data Warehousing on WS 2012) and one for the current […]

For several months, I’ve been working on a DW/Reporting project which uses Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2012 for Agile project management.  This has been my first experience using that aspect of TFS, so I’ve been alternately surprised, annoyed, gratified, accepting — I’ve run the gamut of human emotions dealing with this tool.  I’m a longtime […]

“Power BI is a compelling new offering with advanced collaborative BI capabilities –including mobile cross-platform reporting– to Office 365 SharePoint Online users.    But that’s not all.  Power BI also encompasses new tools in Excel 2013 that support streamlined self-service reporting and analytics.    Find out how you can leverage the hot new self-service BI features coming […]

Previously, we addressed the specifics of data services in Azure, and what paths might be valid for SQL Server BI.   Today, we’ll look at delivering data to users — the “last mile” of Microsoft’s cloud BI story — via SharePoint. Whenever you talk about delivery of Microsoft BI, the first point of discussion is logically […]

In the last post in this series, we looked at why Azure Machines are the most likely candidate for workable SQL Server-based cloud BI implementations.   Today, we talk turkey about actual limitations and things you need to know as you look at a potential solution in this environment. The first thing to know is that Azure […]

In my last post in this series, I described the basics of Data Services within Microsoft’s Windows Azure public cloud platform.   Basically, we were able to somewhat exclude the majority of PaaS offerings in Azure and home in on the IaaS offering:  Azure Virtual Machines. Azure VM’s are effectively the only real path to full-fledged […]