Microsoft Power BI and Data Platform News and Tips

Introduction SQL Server 2017 has not been officially released yet, but you can start evaluating it with the Community Technical Preview (CTP).  This post will describe how to download and install it. Download Before starting the SQL Server installation process it is a good idea to close any other programs, so the install is not competing with other programs.  Also, you will likely need to reboot at the end of the installation anyway. To get started, head over to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-sql-server-2017-ctp/ .  You will then need sign in with your Windows Live account.  Once you are signed in, you will also need to register and set your communications preferences. Once you've registered, you will be given a choice of ISO or CAB file type.  I'll go with ISO. The next choice is Product Language, and I will choose English.  Your browser will then let you download a 1.68 GB file, SQLServerVnextCTP2.0-x64-ENU.iso.  I will save that to my C:\Instal

Microsoft announced SQL Server 2017 yesterday (4/19/2017).  No release date was provided but CTP 2.0 is currently available so my guess is that the production release will be within the next three months. This is the first time that there have been SQL Server releases in consecutive years.  Since 2000, the releases have been 2000, 2005, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016 and now 2017.  (There was also 2008 R2 releases in 2010, which some at the time suggested should have been SQL Server 2010). SQL Server 2012 focused on data warehousing and business intelligence with the addition of the column store index and substantial improvements in SQL Server Integration Services deployment in management.  SQL Server 2014 shifted the focus back to OLTP with in-memory tables and compiled stored procedures providing an order of magnitude performance improvements for applications that could take advantage of it.  The data warehouse capabilities also improved in SQL 2014 with the clustered column store inde

Introduction You may have heard of Data Lakes and are wondering if it is the next big thing.   This post will provide an overview of Azure Data Lake, how to use it and some of its pros and cons. History of Data Lakes and Azure Data Lake The Data Lake term was coined by Pentaho in October 2010 to address limitations of a data mart, which typically has a subset of attributes and is aggregated.   Per Jamie Dixon’b Blog, the lake terminology was chosen since “the contents of the data lake stream in from a source to fill a lake, and various users of the lake can come to examine, dive in, or take samples.” Microsoft’s Azure Data Lake became generally available in November 2016, as described in this post: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-intelligent-data-lake/ .   There are really three services that make up the data lake as shown in the diagram below.   The underlying technology for the data lake is based on Hadoop, but as an end user that is transparent.   You