Here is this week’s BI updates

Power BI – Twitter Solution Template

This is the second solution template offered by the Power BI team and this time I think they have done a fantastic job. As I know of many companies who are active on Twitter and currently either do not have the resources or the time to be able to complete not only analysis of your Twitter tweets, but also the sentiment analysis.

With this solution template it allows you to very quickly and easily get this up and running. Yes you will need to have an active Azure Subscription, as well as Power BI Pro, but I think that for the larger or even smaller organizations they have already got this set up.

You can find the blog post detailing more information and how to get it up and running here: Announcing the brand & campaign management solution template for Twitter

Below is the current pricing model for the Azure related instances:

And here is the link: Pricing Information for the Twitter Template

Power BI – Real-time data

The guys from Microsoft Power BI have released another blog post where they explain how to get started with streaming data into Power BI on a dashboard.

You can then also follow this blog post by Reza Rad where he explains how to set it up and test to see how it works (Monitor Real-time Data with Power BI Dashboards)

Which you can then use to try and implement the streaming data.

Here is the blog post: Real-time in no time with Power BI

Power BI – Embedded GA Pricing Update

The Microsoft Power BI team has released an update and simplified way to understand how the Embedded pricing works.

As you can see from the above it is very simple. As well as in the blog post they also detail exactly what makes up a report session. And it is very clear to understand and see how potentially there will be a cost associated to this.

You can find the additional details here: Power BI Embedded GA pricing update

Power BI – On-Premise Data Gateway Update

Another monthly update from the Power BI team for the On-Premise data gateway. And in this months release is the ability to refresh ODBC connections.

This is something that was requested and not only that, with ODBC connections your options are almost limitless in terms of what you can connect to.

You can find the blog post details here: On-Premises Data Gateway August update

Power BI – Monitor On-Premise Gateway

This is a great blog post by Brett Powell (InsightQuest) on how to monitor the On-Premise Gateway in terms of what is being used, and what connections are being made when.

This also means that you can combine this with the other performance counter values to see how this could potentially affect the performance of your server when the data refresh is happening.

You can find his white paper here: MONITOR ON-PREMISES DATA GATEWAYS

SQL Server 2016 – SSDT Update

It is great to see that they are also updating SSDT with regular updates.

In this release there are updates to the Analysis Services Tabular Model Explorer, which gives you a better view of the objects in your tabular model.

There are also updates for the Always Encrypted.

As well as fixes and improvements.

You can find the blog post here: Introducing Tabular Model Explorer for SQL Server Data Tools for Analysis Services Tabular Projects (SSDT Tabular)

SQL Server 2016 – SSMS Update

Here is the monthly update for SQL Server Management studio.

There are a whole host of fixes and additions in the changelog.

You can find the details here: Download SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)