Details

When: Thursday 29th May 2025 Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt Location: Slalom, Bloc Building, 17 Marble St, Manchester M2 3AW Session will not be streamed over MS Teams Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts & sponsors Robert Walters

May's PBIMCR will feature ..... Speaker Details - the man the myth the legend... Chris Webb (Microsoft) with: The complete guide to Power BI memory usage and memory errors If you've ever seen the "The visual has exceeded the available resources" error in a Power BI report or had your semantic model refresh with a "Resource governing" error, this is the session for you. In it you'll find out how Power BI semantic models use memory, how you can measure memory usage, when and why memory errors occur and what you can do to fix them.

Joe Billingham Consultant @ Purple Frog Systems

The DAX Speed Blueprint: Locate, Understand, Accelerate

Description

Slow performing Power BI reports and visuals are a major cause of frustration. Finding the cause of these slow-downs and understanding why they are happening are the first steps in resolving them.

In this session we'll discuss the troubleshooting steps for slow DAX executions, using tools like Performance Analyser and DAX Studio.

We'll cover the different purposes behind the two parts of the DAX engine - Storage and Formula, and how to write expressions that target each individual component, allowing us to utilise their combined power to unlock the full potential of DAX.

We'll see how optimising expressions in order to harness the power of these engines helps increase performance. This will be done using live demonstrations showing the actual difference in executions times as well as exploring query plans.

By the end of this session, you will know how to identify which DAX expressions are causing issues in your reports, you'll have a solid understanding of what the DAX engine consists of, how the parts work together and how to use them to your advantage to make your expressions faster and more efficient. You will also know how to view a DAX query plan to help troubleshoot slow performing queries.

About Joe: For more than a decade. I've been involved in the fascinating world of data! From SQL Server and SSIS, to Azure Data Factory, Synapse, Power BI, and more recently, Fabric. Day-to-day I'm a senior member of the data engineering team at Purple Frog Systems and in my spare time I run the Microsoft Data Platform Birmingham user group as well as my own blog.

Running a user group allows me to connect with amazing folks and either teach or learn from like-minded people. I've had the privilege of speaking at various user groups and conferences, giving back to the community wherever I can.

There's more to me than just data! I'm also the creator of the Data Luthier blog, where I talk all things tech and give a sneak peek into my other passion: guitars! Yup, I'm a total guitar geek – from playing to collecting, fixing, and even crafting my instruments.

Power Query is the self-service data transformation tool in Power BI Desktop, Fabric Dataflows and Excel.

In this session you'll find out about new user interface features, new M functions, new data sources and data destinations, and lots more new functionality that has been added in the last year.

Chris Webb is a member of the Fabric Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft. He has been using Microsoft BI tools for over twenty five years and is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups all over the world. He blogs about Microsoft BI at https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswebb6/ https://x.com/cwebb_bi https://bsky.app/profile/cwebbbi.bsky.social https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/

PBIBRUM - November meetup with Chris Webb and Nikola Ilic!

Join us in person for the #PBIBRUM November meetup in the Robert Walters offices.

Agenda:

17:45 - Doors open

18:00 - Intros

18:05 - Chris Webb: What’s new in Power Query in Power BI, Excel and Fabric? Power Query is the self-service data transformation tool in Power BI Desktop, Fabric Dataflows and Excel. In this session you'll find out about new user interface features, new M functions, new data sources and data destinations, and lots more new functionality that has been added in the last year.

18:50 - Break - Networking with free pizza and drinks!

19:10 - Nikola Ilic: Crash course on Data Visualisation in Power BI You've connected to a data source and imported data into Power BI - now what? You need to display the information to users in the most effective way!

Is 40 million of revenue good or bad? Are your visuals equally accessible to anyone? How to display detailed data, or highlight important points?

In this session, we'll examine different ways of (mis)representing data in your visuals. You'll understand why context is the key, how to choose the appropriate visualization type for certain business scenarios, and how to configure and format visualizations to provide additional value to your Power BI reports.

20:00 - Finish

📍Location: Eleven Brindley Place, 9th Floor 11, 2 Brunswick Square, Birmingham B1 2LP

When: Thursday 17th October 2024 Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt.

Location: BJSS, 90 Victoria St, Redcliffe, BS1 6DP

Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts BJSS

*Social drinks afterwards will be at Ye Shakespeare (50m away) for those interested.

October's #MSFABRICBRISTOL will feature Chris Webb and Robert Hawker

Session 1 - Fabric Direct Lake Deep Dive - Chris Webb One of the coolest things about Microsoft Fabric is the new Power BI Direct Lake mode, where you can build reports on data in your data lake without needing to import it. In this session you'll learn all about Direct Lake mode: how it works, why you might not get it to work, how to monitor it and more!

About Chris Chris Webb is a member of the Fabric Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft. He has been using Microsoft BI tools for twenty-five years and is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups all over the world. He blogs about Microsoft BI at https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/

Session 2 - Fabric Capacity Management - Robert Hawker Organisations using Fabric Capacities must carefully monitor and manage usage of these capacities. Improperly managed capacities can cause reductions in performance, and users will likely receive error messages stating limits have been reached until the "overuse" has been repaid, known as throttling. As organisations with Power BI capacities migrate to Fabric capacities with broader capabilities, this needs even greater focus. This session will outline:

• The importance of managing Fabric capacities and what can go wrong

• Using the Fabric Capacity Metrics App

• Best practices in detecting and avoiding the impacts of capacity problems

• Different throttling scenarios, and the action you might take in each scenario

• Guidance on using Autoscale in Power BI Premium

• A real life example of a capacity migration used to re-balance content across two capacities

• Best practices for Fabric developers when using capacities - to safeguard performance for everyone else and minimise cost.

About Robert Robert Hawker is an independent Power BI / Fabric consultant and trainer, with a specialism in governance and administration. The first half of Rob's career was in Data Management, covering the areas of master data management, data quality, metadata management for household name end user organisations, before moving into data leadership roles. In one of those leadership roles, Rob learned Power BI and enjoyed it so much that decided to focus on the Microsoft Data Platform.  That was in 2019, and Rob has spent all of his time in Power BI and now Fabric since, applying some of the learnings from data management to Power BI. Rob is the author of the book "Practical Data Quality", released in September 2023.

We all look forward to seeing you there!!

This is an Online event, the Teams link is on the right of this page for those who have registered.

18:15- 18:30 - Networking 18:30: VisOps with PBI Inspector – Nat Van Gulck 19:30: Break 19:35: Fabric for the Power BI User – Chris Webb

Session details: 1. VisOps with PBI Inspector Testing the visual layer of Power BI reports has usually been a manual task. Thanks to the new Power BI Project file format however there is an opportunity to automatically check for visuals' issues around accessibility, consistency and performance and thereby align with your organizations Power BI Centre of Excellence guidelines. In this session we will see how PBI Inspector, an open-source community tool, supports this process. PBI Inspector GitHub repository -- https://github.com/NatVanG/PBI-Inspector Tutorial: PBI Inspector as part of an Azure DevOps pipeline: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/projects/projects-build-pipelines

2. Fabric for the Power BI user So you’re an experienced Power BI user. You’ve heard about Fabric and it seems cool, but what’s in it for you – especially if you’re not going to start writing Python or building warehouses any time soon? In this session we’ll focus on the bits of Fabric that will make your life as a Power BI developer easier, in particular Dataflows gen2 and the new Direct Lake mode for datasets.

Bios: Nat Van Gulck I started my career over twenty years ago as a .NET Software Developer while also developing an interest for Data Visualization. This led me to work on Qlik and Tableau data projects. Then Power BI became so compelling that I had to join Microsoft. As a Cloud Solutions Architect I help customers be successful with Power BI; PBI Inspector is part of this endeavour. The adventure continues with Microsoft Fabric.

Chris Webb Chris is a member of the Fabric Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft. He has been using Microsoft BI tools for over twenty years and is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups all over the world. He blogs about Microsoft BI at https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/

When: Thursday 25th of January 2024 Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt Location: Number 1 Spinningfields, 1 Hardman Street, Manchester, M3 3EB Session will not be streamed over MS Teams Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts & sponsors Robert Walters

January's PBIMCR will feature Microsoft's Ian Pike and Chris Webb.

Session 1 - Ian Pike - Microsoft Fabric : Notes From the Field A dive into Microsoft Fabric. Working closely with Customers to understand the benefits of using Microsoft Fabric and the learnings to get you started or avoid the pain points. Microsoft Fabric is GA so people are going on a journey to see how it can be implemented in existing platforms, or for a greenfield project. A look at the customer use cases working with UK Enterprise customers.

Speaker Details - Ian Pike Storytelling with customers and data tools at Microsoft. I am a Technical Specialist working in Data & AI looking at Data, Databases and Cloud Technologies. The areas he focuses on include: ► Power BI: Adoption, Implementation and Governance ► Microsoft Fabric ► Azure DevOps / DataOps ► SQL Server and Azure DB ► Azure and Cloud practices I have been at Microsoft for over 5 years working with customers to implement and understand the technologies and solutions available. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ipike Twitter: https://twitter.com/IanPike

Session 2 - Chris Webb - Fabric Direct Lake Deep Dive One of the coolest things about Microsoft Fabric is the new Power BI Direct Lake mode, where you can build reports on data in your data lake without needing to import it. In this session you'll learn all about Direct Lake mode: how it works, why you might not get it to work, how to monitor it and more!

Speaker Details - Chris Webb Specialist in Fabric, Power BI, Analysis Services, MDX, Power Pivot, DAX, and Power Query. Chris been blogging about Microsoft BI for over 10 years, and racked up over 1500 posts here! He also speaks at a number of conferences including SQLBits, the PASS Summit, the PASS BA Conference, SQL Saturdays and user groups.

Session Details:

Fabric for the Power BI user

So you’re an experienced Power BI user. You’ve heard about Fabric and it seems cool, but what’s in it for you – especially if you’re not going to start writing Python or building warehouses any time soon? In this session we’ll focus on the bits of Fabric that will make your life as a Power BI developer easier, in particular Dataflows gen2 and the new Direct Lake mode for datasets.

Chris Webb works on the Fabric Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft. He has 25 years of experience working with Microsoft BI tools and is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups.

His sessions always inspire me and I learn so much from his content.

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/ https://twitter.com/cwebb_bi

This is an Online event, the Teams link is on the right of this page for those who have registered. To register to attend in person, please use Fabric for the Power BI user \| Technical Storytelling Techniques (In Person)\, Wed\, Sep 20\, 2023\, 6:15 PM \| Meetup

18:15- 18:30 - Networking and Refreshments 18:30: Fabric for the Power BI user – Chris Webb 19:30: Break 19:45: Freddy Krueger's Not A Great Bedtime Story - Ben Pearce 20:45: Prize draw

Session details: 1. Fabric for the Power BI user So you’re an experienced Power BI user. You’ve heard about Fabric and it seems cool, but what’s in it for you – especially if you’re not going to start writing Python or building warehouses any time soon? In this session we’ll focus on the bits of Fabric that will make your life as a Power BI developer easier, in particular Dataflows gen2 and the new Direct Lake mode for datasets.

2. Freddy Krueger's Not A Great Bedtime Story You wouldn't read Nightmare on Elm Street to a kid before bedtime: it's too gory, too scary and frankly inappropriate. But how often do we do that to our customers and decision makers? We tell the wrong story, in the wrong way to the wrong person. In this session we'll investigate how you tell the right story, in the right way to the right audience. In the tech world we sometimes need to tell deep tech stories, we sometimes need to tell high level business outcome stories, but we always need to tell engaging stories. We'll cover some awesome techniques that help you engage, energise and influence the people that matter to you.

Bio: Chris Webb Chris is a member of the Fabric Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft. He has been using Microsoft BI tools for over twenty years and is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups all over the world. He blogs about Microsoft BI at https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/

Ben Pearce Ben is a coach, trainer, keynote speaker, creator and founder of Elevated You. He spent 20 years at Microsoft, 10 years as a deep technical consultant and 10 years leading high performing teams. He's a regular voice in the community, contributes a bucket load of great content and created the popular Technical Storytelling course and community. www.elevatedyou.live https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpthoughts/ https://www.elevatedyou.live/podcasts/elevated-you

This is the link to register to attend in person. To register to attend online, please use Fabric for the Power BI user \| Technical Storytelling Techniques (Online)\, Wed\, Sep 20\, 2023\, 6:15 PM \| Meetup

18:15- 18:30 - Networking and Refreshments 18:30: Fabric for the Power BI user – Chris Webb 19:30: Break 19:45: Freddy Krueger's Not A Great Bedtime Story - Ben Pearce 20:45: Prize draw

Session details: 1. Fabric for the Power BI user So you’re an experienced Power BI user. You’ve heard about Fabric and it seems cool, but what’s in it for you – especially if you’re not going to start writing Python or building warehouses any time soon? In this session we’ll focus on the bits of Fabric that will make your life as a Power BI developer easier, in particular Dataflows gen2 and the new Direct Lake mode for datasets.

2. Freddy Krueger's Not A Great Bedtime Story You wouldn't read Nightmare on Elm Street to a kid before bedtime: it's too gory, too scary and frankly inappropriate. But how often do we do that to our customers and decision makers? We tell the wrong story, in the wrong way to the wrong person. In this session we'll investigate how you tell the right story, in the right way to the right audience. In the tech world we sometimes need to tell deep tech stories, we sometimes need to tell high level business outcome stories, but we always need to tell engaging stories. We'll cover some awesome techniques that help you engage, energise and influence the people that matter to you.

Bio: Chris Webb Chris is a member of the Fabric Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft. He has been using Microsoft BI tools for over twenty years and is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups all over the world. He blogs about Microsoft BI at https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk

Ben Pearce Ben is a coach, trainer, keynote speaker, creator and founder of Elevated You. He spent 20 years at Microsoft, 10 years as a deep technical consultant and 10 years leading high performing teams. He's a regular voice in the community, contributes a bucket load of great content and created the popular Technical Storytelling course and community. www.elevatedyou.live https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpthoughts/ https://www.elevatedyou.live/podcasts/elevated-you