It’s the second Tuesday of the month and you know what that means! T-SQL Tuesday time! If you don’t know what it means, T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party of the SQL Server community – started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) – where everyone is invited to write about a common topic. This month’s T-SQL […]
Happy Holidays
It’s the time of the year again: the obligatory “how was the past year” blog post, combined with “what do I plan to do next year?”. I plan on keeping it quite short 🙂 2015 was awesome because: I got to speak on ITPROceed and SQLServerDays again, and it was great as always Power BI […]
Performance Tuning with sp_BlitzIndex
Just a small blog post about how I used sp_BlitzIndex for the first and how awesome that was. sp_BlitzIndex is one of the many free scripts you can get from the great team at Brent Ozar Unlimited. Recently I went to a client for a one day data warehouse performance tuning exercise. Because you only have […]
Master Data Services Configuration Woes
Installing and configuring SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get. Recently I ran into some troubles (or woes) when configuring MDS at a client. The installation went smoothly, as well as the installation of other prerequisites (like IIS, PowerShell and so on). The […]
Reporting Services redesign – it’s the little things
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is getting quite the overhaul in SQL Server 2016. Lot’s of things are changing: new look ‘n feel for Report Builder: Report Builder Changes in SQL Server 2016 new chart types (check out my sunburst, treemap and heatmap articles) a (somewhat) customizable parameter pane HTML 5 support and many, many […]
Reblog: Data Visualization – Book Review
To prepare myself for my session Data Visualization Tips & Tricks, I read a few books. In this blog post, I’ll give a short review for each one of them. Information Dashboard Design This book, written by Stephen Few, was the first one I read. And it was a fascinating read! I went through the […]
Webinar – What’s New for Business Intelligence in SQL Server 2016
I’ll be giving a webinar for MSSQLTips.com on Thursday 29th October 2015. The title is What’s New for Business Intelligence in SQL Server 2016 and its abstract goes like this: The preview of SQL Server 2016 has been released right before the summer and it already seems this will be the biggest Business Intelligence release ever! A lot […]
Presentation Design – Before and After
Recently I gave a session on the SQL Server Days about the new features for business intelligence in SQL Server 2016. I have always found that the design of the slide deck matters and this time I was fortunate enough to have the assistance of 356labs, a presentation design agency founded by SQL Server MVP […]
Overview of Published Articles – 2015Q3
Here is an overview of the articles I published in the third quarter of 2015. Retrieve file sizes from the file system using Power Query Create a Treemap Graph in SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 How to create a heat map graph in SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 How to create a Sunburst Graph in SQL […]
What’s new for BI in SQL 2016 – Session materials
SQL Server Days 2015 is over and it was a blast. Met a lot of people from the #sqlfamily, too many to mention, and I saw some interesting sessions. My favorites were David’s session about loading data faster and Catherine’s session about BIML (yes, both are related to SSIS). I gave a session on the new […]