Free Power BI Designer Desktop App

The new PowerBI dashboard designer in early preview in the US provides data transformation and visual analytics to build reports. It can be downloaded from powerbi.com 

Power BI Designer consolidates Power BI Excel add-in tools: Power Query, Power Pivot and Power View into one application.

Power BI Designer also provides self-service ETL . The free desktop data discovery tool can be downloaded and installed side-by-side with any version of Office or Excel on Windows.

More details are in the great article by Jen Underwood at  http://sqlmag.com/power-bi/introducing-free-power-bi-designer-desktop-app

The use of power BI tools is discussed by James Serra  with tools defined as


•Front-end (Excel) 
•Data shaping and cleanup. Self-service ETL (Power Query) 
•Data analysis (Power Pivot) 
•Visualization and data discovery (Power View, Power Map, Power BI Designer)
• Dashboarding (Power BI Dashboard)
• Publishing and sharing (Power BI sites)
• Natural language query (Power BI Q&A)
• Mobile (Power BI for Mobile)
• Access on-premise data (DMG, Analysis Services Connector) Power Query Power Pivot Power View Power Map Power BI Designer Power BI Dashboard Power BI Site Power BI Q&A Power BI for mobile

James displays the data flow as

http://www.slideshare.net/jamserra/power-bi-made-simple

SQLBits Superheroes

SQLBits Superheroes was held at ExCeL, Royal Victoria Dock, London between 4-7 March 2015. In its usual tradition an amazing conference packed full of a massive variety of Data and Database technology sessions. Attendees came from all over the world and it was a privilege to be able to help at the event again. I have now attended every SQLBits event and seen the event grow in size and strength. It is the place for the SQL community to grow and share.  

This year SQLBits was extended by an extra day consisting of 3 days and a free SQL Server community day on Saturday. There were more preconference choices, extended session lengths and double length sessions. The variety of topics discussed has exploded to cover the vast breath of the data platform from OLTP, Data Warehousing, Analytics, Hadoop, Azure etc. for DBA’s, developers and analysts.  All in all an amazing conference.