Next week I will be in Paris and Brussels for two editions of the PowerPivot Workshop. The evening after the first day of the workshop is always a good chance to meet people from local communities and I am happy there will be two community events, too!
- Paris, May 16th, 06:00PM at Microsoft Campus – registration required at GUSS web site.
- Brussels, May 19th, 06:00PM – registration required at SQLUG web site.
Both free events are almost sold out! But you can still find some seat in the 2-day workshop – still a chance for the very last-minute attendees.
The topic of my presentation (and I know there will be many discussions, too!) in both community events will be the following one:
PowerPivot / BISM and the future of a BI Solution
The next version of Analysis Services will offer the BI Semantic Model (BISM) that is based on Vertipaq, the same engine that runs PowerPivot. DAX and PowerPivot have been created as tools for Excel users but in Denali they will be available on the Corporate BI stack technology for Microsoft, as part of Analysis Services. The impact of this technology is huge, because many assumption that are made today for an OLAP cube (star schema models, surrogate keys and so on) might be no longer the optimal way to design a complete BI solution.
This session is about this impelling change: after an initial introduction about PowerPivot, DAX and Vertipaq changes that are relevant to this topic and some consideration about design impact on Data Warehouse, Data Mart and ETL pipeline, the session will become an open discussion with all attendees, in order to share experience, needs, technical challenges and understand future directions in corporate BI world.
And if you are from Sweden… there will be another workshop in Stockholm by the end of May. Not sure about user meeting there, I’m still checking the logistics, I hope to be able to participate in some community event there, too!