Monthly Archives: February 2018

T-SQL Tuesday #99: I’m secretly a LARPer

For the 99th T-SQL Tuesday, I’m going to talk about something I do that’s completely unrelated to work. Something I’ve never told any of you about.

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What I don’t want you to know

There are 3 things in my life that could cost me a job, things that I fear an employer ever finding out about. I suffer from 3 big problems in life: depression, diabetes, and LARP. That’s right, I’m… a LARPer.

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I’m not kidding about the fear.  People get weirded out easily, and it’s easier to say no to an applicant than to say yes. I really worry about someone finding this post and turning me down.

I once heard a story about a potential staffed employee. Everything was looking good until the client looked up the employee’s Facebook and found out that they were a furry. After that point, the client was no longer interested in staffing that employee.

It’s unfortunate that harmless personal hobbies present such a risk, but here we are.

How it started

When I first heard about it, I was skeptical. In my head, all I knew was the stereotype of the uber-nerd shouting MAGIC MISSILE!
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My then fiancée and a couple friends of ours had started going, and she wanted me to come along. I told her quite clearly, “Listen, LARP is so dorky that if I go with YOU, you’ll end up breaking up with ME. No way.”

Well it turned out that my excuse had a limited shelf-life. A couple days after we are married, my new wife reminds me that I’m very much against us getting divorced. So now I have no excuse not to go, because we aren’t breaking up any time soon. We go to LARP a week after we are married.

What is it?

I could tell you it’s Dungeons and Dragons in the woods, but that would be doing it a disservice. Instead, let me tell you a couple stories from Memorial Day weekend, 2016. It was 8 months later, and the start of our honeymoon.

That time I tried to commandeer a flying ship

So my character is a diplomat / minstrel / healer. Which means, if possible, I’d prefer to solve things with words instead of violence. And one of my abilities is to use my charisma to persuade people, convince them we are friends, etc.

So, me and my group are informed by a Non-Player Character that some bandits have taken over his grounded airship, and he needs us to get it back.

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We approach the ship, and as we get on the ramp the bandits warn us to stay back. I tell my group, “Let me handle this.”

So I walk up the ramp, alone and in mild danger.
I tell the bandits, “Hey, I’m here to help. That guy you stole this ship from, he’s trying to find adventurers to kill you.”
“We didn’t steal it!”, they reply.
“Fine, the former owner is looking for you.”, I say as I keep walking up the ramp.
”Stay back!” they shout. Then I throw two spell packets at them. Spell packets are basically birdseed wrapped in cloth. This allows for ranged attacks without hurting us or the wild life.

Now the two bandits at the front are charmed and best friends with me. They are trying to convince the rest of the bandits that I’m legit. That they know me from…somewhere?

“Now, here’s how I’m going to help you.” I say as I lean forward, at the top of the ramp. As my foot hits the ground, I hear a loud squeak.

Crap.

Hoooooold!”, we shout. We have to pause the game because something important just happened. I stepped on a trap. An obvious trap. A trap so obvious that the person setting them up expected everyone to see it. Nope, not me. I’m too busy with my silver tongue.

“10 fire damage in a 10 foot radius. That counts as an aggressive action and breaks charisma.”

Crap. I guess we aren’t BFFs anymore.13320412_10156981353955430_161362360380645738_o

I try to re-charisma the one bandit and convince her that she set off the trap. She apologizes profusely, but the rest of the bandits are not convinced and a melee ensues.

Well, at least I tried. Now we have to kill them all. This is what happens when you travel with murderhobos.

Thankfully, all of the dead bandits are very forgiving.

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That time my hat was a cauldron, and it saved the swamp

“Keshan, do you know how to featherfall?” I’m asked.
“Sure, I just learned it.” I reply.
“Okay, we need you to climb this tree [metaphorically] with these magic flowers, and then jump out of the tree.”, Angus says.
“No problem.”

I jump and do a twirl and pretend I’m falling out of a tree. Now they can make some magic potion that’s going to cure the swamp of some ancient curse.

Only there is  a problem. “Where is the cauldron?” says the game marshal, “You can’t make a potion without a cauldron.”

Mind you, we are preparing for a town fight, a battle between all of the players and all of the NPCs. As far as our characters are concerned, we could be attacked at any moment.

So I shout, “There’s no time! Zanrick, turn my hat into a cauldron.” Zanrick here is a gnome, and they are a crafty folk. And they have an ability called improvise, which means they can make something into something else if they B.S. well enough.

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More shouts go out, “We need an amour patch!”. We end up with 3 of them. Technically they are mason jar lids, but in game they are used to repair your armor after a fight. And suddenly, my hat is a cauldron brewing a magic potion to save the swamp. Pretty cool, right?
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The best part of all of it? The game marshal was so delighted by my silliness, that my hat now counts as plate armor in-game. She was just expecting one of us to go to the kitchen and grab a pot. Well, that simply wouldn’t do.

To hell with what everyone thinks

There was a recent conversation on Twitter about how when you are 40, you learn to worry less about what other people think, and you learn to do what you love. I’m not quite 30, and I worry what people will think of me, but damnit I love LARP.

I mentioned depression at the beginning of this post. I usually don’t like to talk about it, because I don’t want to seem like I’m fishing for sympathy. But it’s worth mentioning that one of the causes of depression is ruminating or obsessing over negative thoughts.

In my life there have been only 4 things that have truly gotten me out of my own head and allowed me to stop worrying about things:

  1. Video game programming competitions
  2. Board games
  3. First-person shooters
  4. LARP

That’s it. Those are the only things that allow me to escape for a little while.

But even more than that, LARP is an excuse to turn off my cell phone. It’s an excuse to go outside and walk around. It’s a situation where I’m forced to be hyper-social and meet new friends. It’s this beautiful mathematical dual to everything I do in IT.

I do it to get away. I do it get a break. I do it to make friends.

As I get older, all of those things get harder and harder to do. I may take my work home with me, but there’s at least one place in this world where my work can’t follow me.

One last thing

One last thing, that I should probably mention. So, I might have published a book, in-game. Because why the hell not.

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The Mockingbird is a project I did for fun, collecting stories and lore from other players.

And so I’ll end with the introduction from my book. And if you ever come LARP with me, I’ll sell you a copy, for only two and a half gold.

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Deploying Power BI: Scaling from 5 to 5000

Today, I had the honor of speaking at the here are the slides.

I want to be clear that this talk isn’t so much about scalability in the performance sense, but more in the IT Governance sense.

Why deployment can be a challenge

Deployments are pretty boring, just like most administration. You just hit publish, right? Figuring out the right solution for you is actually pretty difficult. So why is that?

Too many options

There are at least 9 different ways that you can deploy your Power BI reports:

  1. Sharing Dashboards / Reports
  2. Sharing Workspaces
  3. Organizational content Packs
  4. “Apps”
  5. SharePoint Embedding
  6. Power BI Premium
  7. Publish to Web
  8. Power BI Report Server
  9. Power BI Embedded

So you have all of these different options to choose from and at time it can be confusing. Which method makes sense for your organization?

It keeps changing

Even worse, Power BI is rapidly being iterated on. This is great for users, but a challenge for people trying to keep up with the technology. One year ago the following deployment options modes didn’t exist.

  1. Sharing individual reports (Jan 2018)
  2. “Apps” (May 2017)
  3. SharePoint Embedding (Feb 2017)
  4. Power BI Premium (May 2017)
  5. Power BI Report Server (June 2017)
  6. Power BI Embedded V2 (May 2017)

It can be a real challenge to keep up. I think that a lot of the dust has settled when it comes to deployment options. I don’t see them adding a lot of new methods. But I expect there to be many small tweaks as time goes on. In fact I had to make two changes to my slides this morning because they announced changes yesterday!

Organizing by scale

So, how can we get our arms around all of these different options. How can we organize it mentally?

One way of approaching this is who do you want to share with? Do you need to reach 5 users, 50 users, 500 users, or 5000 users?

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This is the framework that I use in the presentation and the rest of the blog post.

Before we jump into the different ways to deploy your reports, we need to talk briefly about the dirty little secret of self-service BI:

Self-service is code for “undermining IT authority”

Any time you make it easier for Chris in accounting to create and share reports without having to talk to Susan in IT, you chip away bit-by-bit at IT authority This isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes the process governing your IT strategy is a bureaucracy.

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The reason I bring it up is that you’ll find that the more users we need to reach, the more of a centralized structure we need to support it. Dashboard sharing is great for 5 users but is horrific for 5000 users. It’s just like building a tower or skyscraper. The requirements for a 10 foot building are drastically different than a 100 foot building.

Sharing with your Team

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So let’s say you want to share with your team, just a handful of people. Well the good news is it’s pretty easy. You hit publish and you click share.

First you have to publish

Whenever you make a report in Power BI Desktop you have to hit the Publish button to push it out to the Power BI Service, a.k.a PowerBI.com.

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Whenever you do that, you are going to be asked what workspace you want to push it to.

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A workspace is basically a container for all of your report artifacts: dashboards, reports and data sets.

Dashboard sharing

The quickest and easiest way to deploy reports is direct sharing. Once you’ve published a report, you can create a dashboard by pinning visualizations to it.

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One it’s created, then you can hit the share button:

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From that point you will be asked who you want to add. When you add users to a dashboard you can either given them read-only permissions or the ability to read and share.

Report sharing

Last month, they added the ability to share individual reports as well. The overall process is the same. Upload the report, hit share. The difference is now we can finally do that without creating a dashboard.

Workspace Sharing

So let’s say that you actually want to collaborate with other people on reports, or at the very least keep them all organized in a central location. The quickest and easiest way to do that is to share the whole workspace.

When you share a workspace you can make people either admins or members. You can also decide if you want those members to be read only, or able to edit the contents of that workspace.

This is ideal for collaboration or sharing with small groups. But if you have to support 100 users, it can start to break down, especially if all the members have edit privileges. Let’s take a look at the next level of scale.

Sharing with Power BI Users

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Okay, you’ve been able to share with a handful of users. But now, you need to deploy “production” reports. This means having some sort of QA processes and a way to centrally manage things. We need to step up our game.

Organizational content packs

Organizational content packs were the original way of wrapping Power BI content in a nice bow and sharing it with the whole organization. Unfortunately they are now deprecated and have been mostly replaced by apps. Mostly.

The one use case for content packs is for user customizations. Whenever you share an app, the user gets the latest version of that app. With content packs, a user can download the pack and make personalization’s to their copy.

Business Intelligist has a good post breaking down some of the differences.

Power BI Apps

Power BI Apps are the definitive way to share content within your organization. A Power BI app is essentially a shared workspace with a publish button and some nice wrapping around it.

Apps provide a number of benefits:

  • QA and staging. Review your reports before deploying.
  • Selective staging. Work on reports without having to publish them.
  • Professional wrapping. Add a logo, description and landing page to your content.
  • Canonical Versioning. By using vehicles like Apps, you can have company endorsed reports.

To Share an App, you hit publish and are given a URL to distribute. Users can also search for your app. In the future, you will be able to push content out to your users directly.

Sharing with your whole organization

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So let’s say that you want to expand your reach and share reports with everyone in the entire organization. In that case you will either need to a) change your licensing approach, b)move away from powerbi.com, or c) both.

Power BI Premium

Power BI Premium is ideal if you have lots of users and lots of money. With Premium, instead of licensing users you license capacity. You are essentially paying for the VMs behind power bi service instead of the individual users viewing the content.

Power BI Premium is a licensing strategy, not a deployment strategy. The deployment is secondary.

Remember what I said about lots of money? The full Power BI Premium SKUs start at $5000 per month. If you are paying $10 per user per month, the break-even starts around 500 users. That’s a lot of users.

From a user experience perspective standpoint, absolutely nothing changes with changes. you mark a workspace as premium, and now it’s isolated and free to users.

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Image source: Microsoft

Power BI Premium also offers scalability benefits. Larger data sets, better performance, more frequent refreshes. If you are bumping up against the limits of the Power BI Service, Power BI Premium might make sense for you. The whitepaper goes into much more detail.

SharePoint Online Embedding

If your organization has made heavy investments in SharePoint, it may make sense to use SharePoint as the front-end instead of powerbi.com

To deploy a report to SharePoint Online, crate a new page and then add the Power BI Web Part.

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Once you add the web part, you have to specify the URL of your report and you are done.

From a licensing perspective, users with need to have Power BI Pro, or you can use the EM SKUs of Power BI Premium. The EM levels with cost you $625-$2495 per month.

Power BI Report Server

EDIT: This section is incorrect and will be updated. Please see David’s comment at the bottom.

For a long time, the #1 requested feature was Power BI on-premises. Power BI Report Server is basically SSRS with support for rendering Power BI reports. The deployment story is very similar to SSRS reports. Users would go to the web portal and open up reports from there.

Unless you have data sovereignty regulations or highly confidential data, you shouldn’t use Power BI Report Server. The first reason is that it is very expensive. There are two ways to get Power BI Report Server:

  • Licensing is included with Power BI Premium
  • SQL Server Enterprise Edition + Software Assurance

The other issue is that Power BI Report Server is that it is still limited:

  • No support for Dashboards
  • No support for Scheduled Refresh
  • No Q/A or Cortana support

I expect that they are going to continue to improve upon PBI Report Server, but as with an on-prem solution, it’s always going to be lagging behind the SaaS model.

Sharing with everyone

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So let’s say that you want to go a little bit broader, what if you want to share with people outside of your organization. What if you want to share with everyone?

Publish to Web

The simplest and easiest way to share with people is to use Publish to Web.  When you publish a report you will be given a public URL and an iframe for embedding.

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If you use publish to web, it’s completely free to anyone to view. However, your data is publicly available. Anyone with access to the URL can view the underlying data. If this sounds bad, be aware that you can disable publish to web at the tenant level or for specific security groups.

Power BI Embedded

To use Power BI Embedded, you are going to need a web developer. There are no two ways about it. And web developers are expeeeensive.

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Power BI Embedded allows you to use Javascript to control and embed Power BI reports in your web application. One of the consequences of using Power BI Embedded id you are going to have to roll your own security. You aren’t going to be giving users access like normal.

The other thing to know about Power BI embedded is that it depends on Power BI Premium to back it. So you are paying for capacity, not users. In this case you are using the A SKUs, which cost $725-$23,000 per month. That will get you 300-9600 render per hour.

If you want to start playing around with it, there are samples available.

External Sharing

While this isn’t a way to share with thousands of external users, it bears mentioning that you can share with external users. This is ideal if you have a handful of external clients. The overall user experience is largely the same. The big difference is that their account can live in a different Azure Active Directory tenant.

I won’t go into detail about it here, but check this link out if you want to learn more. There is also a whitepaper (AAD B2B) that goes into even more detail.

What now?

If you head isn’t spinning from all the information, definitely check out the deployment whitepaper. Chris Webb and Melissa Coates go into excruciating detail into all of your options and all the different details to consider.

Power BI Precon Wrap-up, Cleveland 2018

This weekend, I had the honor of presenting my Power BI precon for SQL Saturday Cleveland. I’ll be giving the same presentation March 16th in Cincinnati.

Inevitably, there are always some questions that I don’t have an answer for.  What I like to do is circle back and try to get some answers for the people who attended.

Do clustered data gateways provide load balancing?

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That being said, I created a view in the main database pointing to a different database and there wasn’t any issue. Going further, I decided to test out picking on database and hand typing a query pointing to a different database.

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And it works! It’s very interesting, I wonder where the limitations comes from if it’s so easy to get around.

What’s the best way to connect to a Web API application?

One attendee said they use ASP.net Web API as middleware for a large number of databases and tables. So what is the best way to connect to Web API for Power BI?

Steve Howard has a great blog post about different options. Probably the best option is to add OData support to your Web API.

If the API is complex and OData is not an option, custom data connectors are worth looking into. You’ll be writing a lot of M code, but it can be a good way to encapsulate that complexity.

Does Power BI support SAP Universe?

So the situation for SAP Universe is a bit weird. Back in 2014 they added support for SAP Business Objects.

But then later they removed it because of licensing concerns? It’s not entirely clear to me. That being said, there is a request for support to be added back.

Digging a bit deeper, it sounds like there might be a workaround using the SAP OData API, but that’s not the ideal solution.

What are the best options for sharing reports with external customers?

A question I here a lot is how do you share with customers and deal with multi-tenant databases.

Well very recently, back in November 2017, Power BI added support for external users with Azure B2B. This includes support for row-level security, which means you can have all your data in a central database and limit a customer to just their own data. This is very exciting.

There is a whitepaper if you want to learn more.

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