This Friday at SQL Saturday Philadelphia, I will be presenting a precon on implementing Power BI. I’m excited about it because it’s the kind of presentation I would have attended two years ago.

One of the big challenges of learning Power BI is that everyone wants to sell the sizzle (great visuals) and not the steak (Infrastructure). And because of how it is to get started with Power BI, you can get a nice looking dashboard together in a  few hours. But the hard part is answering “What’s next?”.

In my precon I break it up into two pieces Data Wrangling and Administration. Power BI works great when you can just drag and drop, but most of the time the data we have to work with is just plain ugly. Power BI gives you two languages for cleanup and modeling and both require a new mindset to understand.

Once you have your data cleaned up, you have to deploy and administer the thing. And boy are there a lot of ways to deploy it. And there are gotchas too. Like the fact that you need a pro license to deploy that content, even if you have Power BI Premium or Power BI On-Prem. Nobody get’s excited about data governance, but if you want a production solution you’ll need to learn the ins and outs.

If you are interested, there is still time to sign up.