SQL Saturday #800 – the annual BI Edition for Atlanta, GA, took place on Saturday, September 22nd at the new Microsoft Avalon offices in Alpharetta, GA.  This was the second large-scale event I’d attended in this space (the first being Azure Data Fest).  Initially, I’d had some reservations about the size of rooms vs. the number of attendees, but everything was planned excellently and no session on my wishlist was over capacity to the point where seats weren’t available.  No small feat for the planners!  The entire day went off great and the sessions were some of the best I’d attended to date.  Unofficially, it seemed the like underlying theme of the event was performance tuning SSAS Tabular and Power BI, which was very timely for me as that is currently an area I’m focusing on.

While all of the sessions that I attended were fantastic, Shabnam Waton’s “Performance Monitoring Analysis Services Tabular” session stood out to me in particular due to its overlap with a project I’m currently working on — retrieving detailed DMV information from SSAS Tabular for documentation purposes.  Shabnam’s methods for accessing the DMVs via a linked server from SQL relational database to the SSAS Tabular server proved to be simpler and more elegant than my previous idea of accessing the information via a scheduled SSIS Package (while SSAS DMVs are query-able from the server directly, the DMVs don’t support joining and other advanced query functions — unless done from a relational SQL server, and joining the results is where the true insights are surfaced).  I look forward to implementing some of Shabnam’s other functionality from her presentation as well.

The entire day was a success and I’m very happy to be fortunate enough to live in Atlanta where I can count on two major SQL Saturday events in the area each year.  I’m already looking forward to the next event this Spring/Summer.  A great job by all of the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees.

 

Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman presenting “Taming of the Shrew – Optimizing Power BI”

 

The lunch time general Q&A speaker panel

 

Shabnam Watson presenting “Performance Monitoring Analysis Services Tabular”

 

Adam Saxton presenting “Debugging Common DAX and Model performance issues”