Supervising the PL-300 Labs at the Microsoft Business Application Cloud Week for Partners

BizApps Cloud Week

The conference is taking place April 4-8 and only requires a 2-hour commitment each day (apart from the labs). It is a virtual skilling event designed to teach attendees the practical applications of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform and prepare them for certification.
The agenda focuses on role-based certification tracks that are very relevant to my responsibilities as a what ever position they pursuit. This conference will have instructor-led courses, labs, exam prep sessions, and both live and offline Q&A.
Attending this conference would enable you to build your skills and implement them into customer projects in a meaningful way that would benefit my team and your company.
Please check out the conference registration page: Business Applications Cloud Week for Partners. The conference is free to attend with the only commitment being my time, as long as your are a Microsoft Partner.

My role in this event is supervising the labs. Specifically the labs around the PL-300 course. If you are unfamiliar with the PL-300 exam, it might be that DA-100 rings a bell!? The PL-300 certification replaces the DA-100 exam and introduces a set of changes. You can compare the skills tested here for PL-300 and here for DA-100. In a quick glance, the differences are as follows:

PL-300DA-100
Prepare the data (15-20%)Prepare the data (20-25%)
Model the data (30-35%)Model the data (25-30%)
Visualize and analyze the data (25-30%)Visualize the data (20-25%)
Deploy and maintain assets (20-25%)Analyze the data (10-15%)
Deploy and maintain deliverables (10-15%)

Obviously Microsoft has updated the content, but also moved the certification from one branch (DA) to another (PL). The DA branch only contained the DA-100 certification, as all other data related certifications either reside in the DP branch. Now it’s moved in with the other Power Platform certifications in the PL branch.

Back to the labs!

In this week of Business Applications, I am supervising the labs that run as homework for the classes in Power BI. These labs are similar, but not the same, as the ones that are available on some of the Microsoft Learn Learning Paths. If you are not familiar with these new and powerful capabilities of the online learning experience with Microsoft Learn, you should definitely check them out.

The labs are highly specialized towards a specific learning goal and of great use, when you want to fiddle about with a well refined use case.

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Power BI Community Tour

Blog post in Danish 🙂

Om lidt under en måned (25/4-27/4) ruller Power BI bussen afsted og gør sit første stop på Power BI Community Touren 2022. Mere præcist, så begynder vi i Lyngby, kører videre dagen efter til Odense og runder Touren af i Aarhus. Så alt efter hvor du er i landet, vil der være god mulighed for at deltage.

På hvert stop vil der blive disket op med introdultion og best practices indefor de forskellige elementer af Power BI. Med oplæg om Introduktion til Power BI, Data Loading & Mashup, Data Modellering & DAX, Data Visualisering og Distribution og deling vil alle hjørner være dækket.

Der er tale om oplæg der retter sig mod begyndere eller meget let øvede brugere af Power BI, og du kan her få en tryggere start på din rejse med Power BI.

  • Har du brugt Power BI, men mangler at vide hvordan det hele hænger sammen?
  • Har du importeret noget data i Power BI, men mangler at vide hvordan man organiserer sine tabeller?
  • Har du lavet en Power BI rapport, men mangler at vide hvordan man bedst visualiserer dataene?
  • Har du udviklet nogle rapporter, men mangler at vide hvordan du deler dem med dine kollegaer?
  • Har du aldrig brugt Power BI, men vil gerne vide mere om hvorfor det er et af de mest populære rapporterings- og self-service BI værktøjer?

Hvis du svarer ja til ét eller flere af disse spørgsmål, så er Power BI Community Tour for dig. Hvis ikke – så send meget gerne denne information videre til relevante kollegaer!

Sign up her: https://lnkd.in/eVzcBMvp

En stor tak til JDM, Kapacity, Microsoft og Seges for at stille lokaler og forplejning til rådighed.

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SqlSaturday is back in Town

SQLSaturday #963 - Denmark 2020

At last we can look forward to having anew edition of SqlSaturday in Denmark on April 25th. As previously the event will be hosted at Microsoft HQ in Lyngby, so the venue will be familiar to many of you who are returning attendees.

This year we are looking at session in all of the following categories:

  • Analytics and Visualization
  • Application & Database Development
  • BI Platform Architecture, Development and Administration
  • Cloud Application Development and Deployment
  • Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment

Currently we have received over 100 abstracts to select from, which is always a daunting task. Luckily Bent Nissen Froning (t|b|l), Claus Lehmann Munch (t|b|l), Just Thorning Blindbæk (t|b|l) , David Bojsen (t|l) are all very accomplished professionals, who will be making the right choices I am sure.

On the day before the conference, the team is offering three (3) pre-cons with world renowned professionals on:

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Bent (Nissen Pedersen) Nissen Froning
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For more details, go to http://www.sqlsaturday.dk and book your seat today!

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Speaking at the Power BI World Tour in Copenhagen

In just little over a week the Power BI World Tour will be stopping by in Copenhagen, Denmark. More precisely in Lyngby at Microsoft HQ. Copenhagen was luckily reelected for hosting the World Tour again this year, which I think will be very beneficial to the local Power BI adoption and community to say the least.

Copenhagen

Last time around I was honoured by having one of my sessions selected. This year I get to have two sessions. I am super excited about that!

My first session will be on Tuesday 11th about Power BI Best Practices. From the trenches of some of our own projects I have gathered a list of things to do in a project, to make your life easier.

My other session will be an Introduction to Power BI and Power Query (M). The query language is one of the few things of late that blown my mind in terms of capability and versatility. I will be showing you how to get started with the basics.

I am so looking forward to spending a couple of days with other Power BI Professionals, foreign and domestic!

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#TSQL2SDAY #101 Round-Up : My Essential SQL Server Tools

Tuesday 3rd of this Month I invited people in the SQL Server community to share which tools are essential to their daily work. I was really overwhelmed by the number of stories that the topic triggered. 22 in total took the time to write down and share which tools they use for their work chores.
Going through 22 posts and aggregating them has been taking more time than I had hoped for, since my trusted laptop broke down – blinking codes are well and alive I tell you!

Going through the lot, I found some similarities to the posts, and have categorized them accordingly. But first off a BIG thank you to all how participated!

Without further ado, here goes.

Relational Heavy Lifting

Kamil Nowinski (b|l|t) takes us through the classic stuff, I mean, the real classic stuff – some would call it vintage – by showing how Total Commander still has a place in the tool belt, this century 😉

Matthew McGiffen (b|l) shows how to set up a Central Management Server, in order to execute queries against multiple instances in ad-hoc scenarios, seamlessly. Very nice tip. Matthew also did a second post, lining up multiple tools he’s written about in the past, nicely aggregated in this post.

Jess Pomfret (b|l|t) does a really nice post on how Powershell and the dbatools has changed her way of working. Jess even provides some useful snippets to get you going. I share the same enthusiasm for Powershell as Jess does, and was very pleased to see homage paid to the dbatools – incredible tool. Best of luck on your speaking adventures!

Marek Masko (b|l|t) has a huge post on classic DBA tools as well as a pleasant surprise on testing using tSQLt. Also some good pointers to free community scripts and tools as well. Great read!

Tracy Boggiano (b|l|t) covers dbatools and a specific Powershell Command and T-SQL Stored Procedure, but also on Telegraf and VS Code.

Dan Clemmens (b|l|t) goes all in on DBA tools for statistics, execution plans and tracing, even including the legendary diagnostic scripts from Glenn Berry.

Steve Jones (b|l|t) has a huge list of free and paid tools, from SQL Server sentric tools to a good deal of process related tools – i.e. DevOps and such.
Also Steve manages to sneak in a reminder on the password thingy magicky, that, according to domain expert Troy Hunt we all should rely on, be it pwsafe or any other tool like that.

Doug Purnell (b|l|t) is short and concise in his praise of Ola Hallengren maintenance scripts  and Jared Zagelbaums extension of those in Powershell.

Warren Estes (b|l) is praising the usual suspects in the DBA field, but adds a couple of interesting options for productivity and benchmarking/testing and also rounds up a couple of SentryOne products.

Devon Leann Ramirez (b|l|t) is offering a thorough introduction to their free plan explorer offering. Devon also makes a good point in marking the company’s presence on the community. If you want the quick tour, head over to Vimeo.

Rob Farley (b|l|t) talks about two things I really hold dear; Coffee… and I forgot the other thing. No really, Rob has an excellent blog post on Live Query Stats (LQS), and what some of the use cases are for that feature/tool. There are more ways of using LQS than I had thought about – thanks for sharing!

Riley Major (b|l|t) share his story on how he works with Management Studio and how the cool could be improved to further support a common way of working. Besides the tips on SSMS Riley also lists his favorite (and not so favorite) tools.

The BI Power in Power BI

James McGillivray (b|l|t) is first and foremost writing about my trusted travel mate; The Kindle (App) as his favored tool of the trade. Besides that treasure trove books can be, James also has some pointers to daxformatter and a theme generator which is pretty hefty!

Community Zone

Jo Douglas (b|l|t) argues that the most important tool for any professional is networking and community, and it’s hard not to agree completely. Jo also writes about some great points of where to begin this journey.

Jason Brimhall (b|l|t) brings up the aspect of blogging itself as a great tool of the trade, and I have to agree here and couldn’t have stated it more clearly that Jason:

Blogging helps you become a better technical person.

Googlefoo is also described in Jason’s blog for this party, and he manages to sneak in a reference to his extensive work and blogging on Extended Events, which in itself is an awesome contribution.

Reid DeWolfe (b|l|t) offers a quick write up on classic DBA must haves; SQL Prompt, Plan Explorer and GitHub/SourceTree. Reid also describes some of the main benefits of the tools.

Other

Garland MacNeil (b|t) brings another perspective into the party, by writing from a borrows laptop – not sure it was intentional, but I guess the exercise is very rich in terms of learning. I know others have been there too:

Chrissy LeMaire (b|l|t) has, surprisingly enough, not written about dbatools, and if you believe in that you may call me Bill 🙂
In Chrissys blog post you’ll find a great list of auxiliary tools for all the things you do around programming; Screen shot/Image handling, code repositories, clip board management and video editing tools.

Josh (b) gives us the DevOps perspective of a Database DBA/Developer in a not so uncommon scenario – well, I think we’ve all been there at some point. Some prominent 3rd party tooling is getting some ❤

The Other Tools

Catherine Wilhelmsen (b|l|t) offers a completely different and refreshing view on tools that were completely new to me, at least. Going from database modeling to data generators to time keeping tools and beyond.

Finally, No Tools

Hugo Kornelis (b|l|t) makes a good argument on not becoming addicted/dependent on the presence of certain tools in order to perform your job. I guess this applies in particular, when you’re a consultant and can’t always BYOD. Apart from that Hugo really likes SQL Prompt and Plan Explorer 😉


The Tools Mentioned (in no particular order)

dbatools dbatools  PowerShell  dbareports  SQL Server Management Studio
 Redgate SQL Compare  Minionware  Sentry One Plan Explorer dbachecks  SQL Operations Studio
 SQL Database Modeler  Dynamic Restore Script  Scooter Software Beyond Compare  Redgate DLM Dashboard  Ola Hallengrens’s maintenance scripts
 Trello  SQL Server Data Tools  Passwordsafe  Sublimetext  Notepad++
 Redgate SQL Prompt  Mockaroo  Dropbox Visual Studio Code  SQLCover
 Sourcetree  SQLNexus  Coblis  tSQLt  Advanced Theme Generator (PowerBI)
 DAX Formatter  R Studio  Scale SQL Clear Trace   PSSDiag  Devart’s dbForge
 Toggl  Grammarly  SCD Merge Wizard Statisticsparser  Adam Machanics whoisactive
 Winmerge  Mythicsoft Agent Ransack  Redgate SQL Search    Glenn Berry’s Diagnostic Scripts

 

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