March 15, 2022 PASSMN Meeting (Virtual Meeting Only)

Important Note: This meeting is online only and will not be held at the Microsoft Technology Center

Agenda:
3:30-4:00 Kickoff / Announcements
4:00-5:00 Power BI Data Modeling - There is more to the star schema than you might think (Tom Martens and Nilola Ilic)
5:00-5:10 Break
5:10-6:10 Transitioning your skills to Spark SQL( John Miner)
6:10-6:15 Closing

Presentation topics, abstracts, speaker bio for this meeting:

Speaker #1: Tom Martens and Nilola Ilic
Title: Power BI Data Modeling - There is more to the star schema than you might think
Abstract:
We all have heard that Power BI works best if we design the dataset following the star schema paradigm. But creating a star schema comes with a price. We spent more effort on the data shaping, and sometimes it requires some mind-boggling thinking to identify the dimension tables and the fact tables.
This session explains the price we have to pay if we are not creating a start schema and provides a glimpse into aspects of advanced data modeling. Advanced data modeling comes into play when we create a model that takes away complexity from our DAX measures and supports the strength of the vertipaq engine.
Bio:
Thomas "Tom" Martens has been awarded as an MSFT Data Platform MVP and works as Solution Architect at Munich Re (www.munichre.com). For 20+ years, Tom delivers Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Analytics solutions. His current interest is in data visualization and applying analytical methods to small and large amounts of data, next to providing the Power BI Platform to users for tackling analytical challenges. Tom is a regular speaker at international conferences and user meetings. Tom is the co-author of the book "Pro DAX with Power BI."
Nilola Ilic
Nilola makes music from the data! PowerBI and SQLServer addict, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Pluralsight Author, blogger, speaker...Interested in everything related to data - always eager to extract valuable info from raw data in the most effective way. Multi-year experience working with (predominantly) Microsoft Data Platform (SQL Server, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, and Power BI). Father of 2 and true football (and Barca) fan!

Speaker #2: John Miner
Title: Transitioning your skills to Spark SQL
Abstract:
This presentation is a crash course covering the basics of Spark SQL for the Microsoft T-SQL Server developer.
Azure Databricks is a managed service which provides the latest versions of Apache Spark based upon open source libraries. Spin up clusters and build quickly in a fully managed environment with the global scale and availability of Microsoft Azure.
The Adventure Works database is provided as raw delimited files to transform. We will go over read and writing files to popular file formats using PySpark, a Python-based wrapper for the Scala API. The real power of PySpark is the ability to read a file into a data frame and abstract the contents of the file as a temporary view during processing. Optionally, the raw data files can be presented as tables in the hive catalog. Once this abstraction is complete, all the SQL skills that you have obtained over the years can be used to transform the views/tables in the hive catalog into refined data in the data lake.
Two thirds of the presentation will be focused on the mechanics to transform raw data files into hive objects. The rest of the presentation will be spent on exploring Spark SQL constructs and functions. At the end of the presentation, the SQL Server developer will be able to join the Big Data Engineering Team as a functional asset.
Bio:
John Miner is a Senior Data Architect at Insight Digital Innovation helping corporations solve their business needs with various data platform solutions.
He has over thirty years of data processing experience, and his architecture expertise encompasses all phases of the software project life cycle, including design, development, implementation, and maintenance of systems.
His credentials include undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science from the University of Rhode Island. Also, he has earned certificates from Microsoft for Database Administration (MCDBA), System Administration (MCSA), Data Management & Analytics (MCSE) and Data Science (MPP).
John has been recognized with the Microsoft MVP award six times for his outstanding contributions to the Data Platform community.