T-SQL Tuesday #75: Round Up

This month I challenged the blogging community to share their own creations in Power BI. We got a ton of great entries this month, thank you everyone who participated! My overarching goal for this month’s topic was to get folks who may not normally play in the BI space to use this fantastic solution and maybe get some ideas flowing on how they may be able to apply it in their everyday work.

UPDATE: Thanks to Rob Farley for the idea, I’ve made this round up into Power BI report! (Direct link)

• My contribution this month was to do an overhaul on the enterprise policy management framework reports from codeplex. If you use policy based management in your enterprise you should check it out.
• Marlon Ribunal (Blog | Twitter) shared with us a really interesting report. He shows us comparisons of hospital charges for different services/cases for hospitals across the US compared to the US average and other cities around the world. Not going to lie, spent a lot of time playing with this report and seeing the cost differences between services in my hometown of Tampa, FL.
• Rob Farley (Blog | Twitter) stepped it up by showing us his step count. He exported his Fitbit data walk us through (yes, all these puns are definitely on purpose) how he set this all up. Run over to his blog and check it out! Okay I’m done with puns now…walk it off. Okay really done.
• Steve Jones (Blog | Twitter) fueled by Super Bowl fever, no doubt, brings us a report comparing the career of future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning’s career to another HOF quarterback from Denver, John Elway. What’s really interesting about this entry is not so much the content (which is fun to look at too) but the process in which he gathered the data. Steve shows us how Power BI can be used as a lightweight ETL-like tool. The data that drives his report is actually pulled directly from a webpage, which is a really cool trick to do.
  • Also be sure to check out Steve’s own editorial/summary post. There’s also SQLServerCentral’s Weekly newsletter you should check out. I’d also like to point you to his Voice of the DBA podcast on iTunes, if you don’t know about it. Great stuff!
• Jon Morisi (Blog ) is trying to show us…the Truth is Out There! Inspired from a TED Talk, he decided to showcase Power BI’s mapping and timeline visualizations to show us UFO sightings across the US for the last two years. What’s cool is this is another post where the dataset is pulled from a website. All I know is California and Florida are dueling banjos of strangeness…
• I was excited to see Chris Yates’ (Blog | Twitter) entry. On Twitter he was one of the most enthused about this topic and was a perfect example of what I wanted to see this month. Ultimately this experience lit up some ideas for Chris on how to use this going forward, which was really exciting to see.
• Niel Hambly (Blog | Twitter) was another really exciting entry as it perfectly showed how DBAs can leverage Power BI right away. Niel’s report visualized data from the MAP Toolkit (note: One of my favorite free tools, btw) to review your SQL Server environment. Not only does he do a fantastic job stepping through everything, you can download the code/report and apply it to your environment.This one is a must-read for DBAs everywhere!
• Tim Peters (Blog | Twitter) post is another runner in the group. He shares with us a report visualizing his very impressive running data. In addition to breaking down his mileage, Tim also breaks down an important lesson. Remember what the B in BI stands for.
• Malathi Mahadevan (Blog | Twitter) is another DBA learning the BI side of things. In her post she analyzes the data from SQLSaturday events she helps organize held in Louisville, Kentucky. Power BI helped her come up with some interesting insights! Go check out what she learned about attendees from using Power BI.
• Jens Vestergaard (Blog | Twitter) missed the call but the topic lined up with something he was actively working on and I wanted to make sure his post made the roundup as its really cool, especially for BI pros. Jens analyzed SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) performance using Power BI. Definitely worth a look if you work with SSAS at all.
• BONUS: John White (Blog | Twitter) was gracious enough to let us include his post in this roundup. In a funny circumstance, he posted an entry that was basically the exact topic of the month and he didn’t even know about T-SQL Tuesday! John is an avid diver and in his post he analyzes worldwide shark attack data!

Thanks again to everyone that participated this month. Even if you weren’t able to participate in the official event, please feel free to share your Power BI experiences in comments!