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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on February 3rd

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on February 3rd, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Shabnan Watson will discuss how to apply aggregations to Power BI DirectQuery datasets to improve report performance.  Melissa will sponsor the meeting. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:Aggregations in Power BI
Date:February 3rd, 2020
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)
8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009
Overview:Aggregations are one of the most important optimization methods for managing big datasets in Power BI. Combined with Direct Query storage mode, they allow big datasets to be analyzed efficiently by answering high level analytical queries quickly from memory while sending more detailed queries back to the source database. In this session, you will learn about the concept of aggregations, different table storage modes in Power BI, different kinds of aggregation tables, how to configure aggregation tables so that they can answer high level user queries, and finally how to use tools such as DAX Studio or Extended Events to determine if the aggregations are actually being used.
Speaker:Shabnam Watson is a Business Intelligence consultant with 18 years of experience developing data warehouse and BI solutions. Her work focus within the Microsoft BI Stack has been on Analysis Services and Power BI. She is an active member of PASS community and has spoken at PASS Summit, PASS SQL Saturdays, PASS Women In Technology Virtual Chapter, and other Local user groups. She is one of the organizers of SQL Saturday Atlanta and SQL Saturday Atlanta BI Edition. She holds a master’s degree in computer science, a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, and a Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP) certification by The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI).
Sponsor:Bad data is bad business. Melissa helps organizations profile, cleanse and verify, dedupe and enrich all their people data (name, address, email and phone number) and more.  With clean, accurate and up-to-date customer information, organizations can monetize Big Data, improve sales and marketing, reduce costs and drive business insight. https://www.melissa.com/
Prototypes with PizzaTBD

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on January 6th

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on January 6th, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. I’ll introduce to Power BI Premium Automated Machine Learning (AutoML). Prologika will sponsor the meeting. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:Power BI Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)
Date:January 6th, 2020
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)
8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009
Overview:With the growing demand for predictive analytics, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) aims to simplify this process and democratize Machine Learning so business users can create their own basic predictive models. Join this presentation to learn how to apply AutoML in Power BI Premium to predict the customer probability to purchase a product. I’ll show you the end-to-end AutoML process, including:

·       Create a dataflow

·       Choose a field to predict

·       Choose a model type

·       Select input variables (features)

·       Train the model

·       Apply the model to new data

·       Bonus: Integrate Power BI with AzureML

Speaker:Through his Atlanta-based company Prologika (https://prologika.com), a Microsoft Gold Partner in Data Analytics, Teo Lachev helps organizations make sense of their most valuable asset: their data. His strategy formulation, trusted advisory and mentoring, design and implementation services empower clients to apply effectively data analytics in order to understand, improve, and transform their business processes. Teo has authored and co-authored several books on organizational and self-service data analytics, and he has been leading the Atlanta Microsoft BI and Power BI group since he founded it in 2010. Teo has been a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) Data Platform since 2004.
Sponsor:Prologika is one of the most trusted names in Data Analytics. Our clients, from small businesses to Fortune 100 enterprises, derive tremendous value from our services. Our mission is to help organizations make sense of data by applying the latest technologies for descriptive and predictive analytics and get actionable insights. Your organization will spend less time mining for information and be better equipped to make sound business decisions. https://prologika.com

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on December 2nd

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on November 4, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Stacey Jones will present Power BI options with Python. Accelebrate will sponsor the meeting. And I will share some tips demoing the latest Power BI Desktop features, such as the new ribbon, decomposition tree and AI integration. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:Integrating Power BI with Python
Date:December 2nd, 2019
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)
8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009
Overview:Python is well suited for Data Science and big data professionals. It has been voted as the most popular programming language in 2019. Microsoft made big investments in open-source R and Python, especially to extend Power BI. Join this session to learn how you can integrate Python with Power BI. Learn how to use Python in these ways:

·       Use Python as a data source

·       Transform data

·       Produce beautiful visualizations

Speaker:Stacey Jones specializes in mentoring and guiding firms in their efforts to build a modern Data, AI & BI governance programs that empower their business with Self-Service BI and Data Science capabilities. He currently serves as the Principal Data Solutions Architect at the Atlanta Microsoft Technology Center (MTC).
Sponsor:Don’t settle for “one size fits all” training. Choose Accelebrate, and receive hands-on, engaging training precisely tailored to your goals and audience! Our on-site training offerings range from ASP.NET training and SharePoint training to courses on ColdFusion, Java™, C#, VB.NET, SQL Server, and more. Accelebrate.com
Prototypes with Pizza“New ribbon, decomposition tree, and AI integration in Power BI Desktop” by Teo Lachev

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on November 4th

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on November 4, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Andy Lawrence will share best practices for impactful Power BI Dashboards. CCG Analytics will sponsor the meeting. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:Best Practices for Impactful Power BI Dashboards
Date:November 4, 2019
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)
8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009
Overview:Power BI is gaining momentum as a preferred tool for dashboards and interactive reports. Let’s revisit some best practices for dashboard development, such as:

·       The importance of form and function

·       Facilitating user adoption

·       Mistakes that everyone makes

·       Fast shortcuts for clean reports

·       Hidden settings that are lifesavers

·       Best Power BI updates of 2019

·       Live demo of a fast dashboard build

·       Questions

Speaker:Andy Lawrence is a senior Power BI consultant at CCG Analytics and the leader of the Tampa Power BI user group. He’s a Florida native and a proud UF Gator (MBA) and USF Bull (MIS). At CCG he provides guidance on data modeling, tabular environments, azure administration, DAX writing, T-SQL and data visualization best practices. All of which he can expand upon if you have questions during his presentation.
Sponsor:CCG specializes in deploying solutions that not only provide value to the business but are adopted by users ensuring accountability of the IT driven system.  Moving beyond reporting, our Business Intelligence solutions support data governance, quality and standardization across the organization and enable stakeholders with tools like predictive analytics, user-defined alerts, data mining, what-if analysis and visually appealing dashboards.
Prototypes with Pizza“Lineage view” by Teo Lachev

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on October 7th

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on October 7, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Qubole will show us how Presto, Azure Data Lake, and Power BI can be used to analyze Big Data. Qubole will sponsor the meeting. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:Leveraging Power BI on Presto for the Azure Data Lake
Date:October 7, 2019
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)
8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009
Overview:Presto is a distributed ANSI SQL engine designed for running interactive analytics queries. Presto outshines other data processing engines when used for business intelligence (BI) or data discovery because of its ability to join terabytes of unstructured and structured data in seconds, or cache queries intermittently for a rapid response upon later runs. Presto can also be used in place of other well-known interactive open-source query engine such as Impala, Hive or traditional SQL data warehouses. Attend this event to learn:

·        Why Presto is better suited for ad-hoc queries than other engines like Apache Spark

·        How to jumpstart analysts across your organization to harness the power of your big data

·        How to generate interactive or ad hoc queries or scheduled reports using Presto

·        Real-world examples of companies using Presto

Speaker:Man Zhang is a Solutions Architect at Qubole. He has 20+ years in software systems architecture, development, and integration and 4+ years in Big Data architecture. https://www.linkedin.com/in/man-zhang-34a887/
Sponsor:Qubole delivers a Self-Service Platform for Big Data Analytics built on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Clouds. We were started by the team that built and ran Facebook’s Data Service when they founded and authored Apache Hive.  With Qubole, a data scientist can now spin up hundreds of clusters on their public cloud of choice and begin creating ad hoc and/or batch queries in under five minutes and have the system autoscale to the optimal compute levels as needed.  Please feel free to test Qubole Data Services for yourself by clicking “Free Trial”​ on the website.
Prototypes with PizzaTBD

DCI_PowerBI

Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on September 10th

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on September 10, Tuesday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. This is a meeting not to miss. A DAX founder, Jeffrey Wang (Principal Software Engineer Manager at the Power BI product group) is coming all the way from Seattle to share DAX best practices with our group! Captech Consulting will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:Common DAX Patterns
Date:September 10, 2019
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)

8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900

Alpharetta, GA 30009

Overview:We will learn common DAX patterns by examining several issues frequently reported by DAX users through PowerBI customer support tickets. Users will be able to:

1.      Learn from mistakes made by other DAX users so you can avoid them in your own work.

2.      Learn the common techniques to debug DAX problems.

3.      Learn the best DAX patterns to solve common problems.

4.      Gain deeper understanding of DAX by learning relevant history and underlying design of the programming language.

5.      Ask me their own DAX questions

Speaker:Currently working as Principal Software Engineer Manager at Microsoft, Jeffrey Wang stumbled upon BI after the Y2K bubble burst, fell in love with the field, and stayed in the industry ever since. After I joined Microsoft Analysis Services engine team in 2004, I quickly discovered that working on the programming language is the best way to stay close to the end users, so I joined the MDX formula engine team. After shipping a couple of releases of SQL Server Analysis Services, I joined the committee that created DAX. Today I lead the development effort of the DAX engine and the modeling engine inside the Power BI product group.

DCI_PowerBI

Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on June 3rd

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on June 3, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. I’ll show you how to bridge the analytical and developer worlds by integrating Power BI with PowerApps. Eric Flamm will demonstrate SQL Notebooks in Azure Data Studio. Prologika will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:Bridge Analytics and Developer Worlds with Power Platform
Date:June 3, 2017
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)

8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900

Alpharetta, GA 30009

Overview:One of the Power BI most prominent strengths is that it’s a part of the much broader Microsoft Power Platform and Data Platform that spans various on-premises and cloud offerings for data storage, processing, and analysis. Join this session to learn how to integrate Power BI with PowerApps and discover exciting new possibilities that redefine the meaning of a report and let you do more with less. During this entirely hands-on, almost no-slides session I’ll walk you through the steps to implement a popular report requirement for writeback, that Power BI doesn’t natively support.
Speaker:Through his Atlanta-based company Prologika (https://prologika.com), a Microsoft Gold Partner in Data Analytics, Teo Lachev helps organizations make sense of their most valuable asset: their data.  Teo has authored and co-authored several bestselling books on organizational and self-service data analytics (his latest is “Applied DAX with Power BI”), and he has been leading the Atlanta Microsoft BI and Power BI group since he founded it in 2010. Teo has been a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP Data Platform) since 2004.
Sponsor:Prologika is one of the most trusted names in Data Analytics. Our clients, from small businesses to Fortune 100 enterprises, derive tremendous value from our services. Our mission is to help organizations make sense of data by applying the latest technologies for descriptive and predictive analytics and get actionable insights. Your organization will spend less time mining for information and be better equipped to make sound business decisions.
Prototypes with Pizza“SQL Notebooks in Azure Data Studio” by Eric Flamm

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on May 6th

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on May 6, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Patrick LeBlanc, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, will show us how to integrate Power BI and Flow for geospatial analytics. I’ll showcase Power BI Report Builder.  TEKSystems will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (use the RSVP survey on http://atlantabi.pass.org if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:

Using the Power Platform to Enhance Spatial Granularity

Date:

May 6, 2019, Monday

Time

6:30 – 8:30 PM ET

Place:

Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)

8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009

Overview:

Join this session to see how you can use the Power Platform to solve a real world customer problem. With a growing mobile workforce, many organizations are trying to figure out how to properly arm them with the correct tools. In this session we will explain and demonstrate how you can leverage the Power BI Mobile app and Microsoft Flow to build a solution that enables them to quickly identify locations near and far. We will demonstrate how the solution was built step-by-step, detailing how and why certain technologies and solutions were selected or not.

Speaker:

Patrick LeBlanc is a currently a Data Platform Solutions Architect. Along with his 15+ years’ experience in IT he holds a Master of Science degree from Louisiana State University. He is the author and co-author of five SQL Server books and one of the only two guys in the cube. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was awarded Microsoft MVP award for his contributions to the community. Patrick is a regular speaker at many SQL Server Conferences and Community events.

Sponsor:

People are at the heart of every successful business initiative. At TEKsystems, we understand people. Every year we deploy over 80,000 IT professionals at 6,000 client sites across North America, Europe and Asia. Our deep insights into IT human capital management enable us to help our clients achieve their business goals – while optimizing their IT workforce strategies. We provide IT staffing solutions, IT talent management expertise and IT services to help our clients plan, build and run their critical business initiatives!

Prototypes
with pizza

“Power BI Report Builder” with Teo Lachev

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on April 1st

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on April 1, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Considering all the the momentum behind machine learning, the main presentation will be “Microsoft Citizen Data Science with Power BI” by Stacey Jones, a Principal Data Solution Architect at Microsoft. I’ll do a brief overview of the brand new Modeling tab in Power BI Desktop.  Vacation Express will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (use the RSVP survey on http://atlantabi.pass.org if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:Microsoft Citizen Data Science with Power BI
Date:April 1 2019, Monday
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)

8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009

 

Overview:Are you curious about Data Science? Are you a Data Scientist? If you answered yes and no to these questions respectively, this session is for you. In this session I will discuss the emerging Citizen Data Scientist role and demonstrate the emerging tools targeting this role, especially the new features in Power BI, such as AutoML
Speaker:Stacey Jones specializes in mentoring and guiding firms in their efforts to build a modern Data, AI & BI governance programs that empower their business with Self-Service BI and Data Science capabilities. He currently serves as the Principal Data Solutions Architect at the Atlanta Microsoft Technology Center (MTC).
Sponsor:Based in Atlanta, Vacation Express is one of the largest tour operators in the southeast United States and has been in business for 30 years. Vacation Express is a member of family-owned and operated, Toronto-based Sunwing Travel Group Inc., Canada’s leading vertically integrated leisure travel company, and has sold well over 2 million vacation packages to its exotic destinations!
Prototypes
with pizza		“The Power BI Desktop Model tab” by Teo Lachev

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on March 4th

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on March 4th, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. The main presentation will be “Power BI Architecture” by Paco Gonzalez  from SolidQ. Eric Flamm will do us Prototypes with Pizza on configuring a Power BI visual for mobile layout. SolidQ will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (use the RSVP survey on the group page) if you’re planning to attend.

Presentation:Power BI Architecture
Date:March 4, 2019, Monday
Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)

8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009

Overview:Having the right architecture is key to the adoption of Power BI, and to make the most of your business intelligence solution. This session guides you through different Power BI architectures, such as Direct Query, Import, Connect Live, Composite Models, and Embedded. We will analyze different techniques in data refresh, incremental extraction, integration and collaboration to provide a quick overview of the different approaches available.
Speaker:SolidQ North America CEO and Microsoft Data Platform MVP. Paco Gonzalez has more than 15 years leading teams for high visibility solutions on Data Platform, Business Intelligence, and Machine Learning. He is also a frequent speaker at large and small conferences. SQL Saturdays, TechEd’s, PASS BA, PASS Summit,  DevWeek London, PAW Chicago and London, or Ignite.
Sponsor:The tools and technologies to manage information will constantly evolve, but the need for accurate and actionable information is timeless. SolidQ delivers services for Microsoft platforms that help you architect, integrate and optimize your use of data. The result? Our clients think bigger and move faster because we help them build the capacity and skills to interact with data in creative, collaborative ways that deliver new insights to the business. At SolidQ we measure our success by your satisfaction – and we guarantee it.
Prototypes with pizza“Move your PowerBI Viz to your Phone” by Eric Flamm

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