The Cold Open as presented at the BI Power Hour 2018 at the PASS Summit. This was the intro to the BI Power Hour session.

For those that aren’t familiar with the BI Power Hour, it has a long history and is legendary in its comedic value and fact that you won’t learn anything of value. This is a session for folks to tell an incredible story using Microsoft Business Intelligence products. The room is always packed, and tons of swag is handed out. It is always a good time at a given conference.

Fun fact, the Cold Open originally wasn’t going to be in the Power Hour and came together 2 days before PASS Summit 2018. That’s how the BI Power Hour rolls.

Special thanks to Matthew Roche (@SQLAllFather) and Matt Masson (@mattmasson).

The Cold Open

Alright!

Artificial intelligence, absolute anarchy. Advanced analytics and aggregation aggravation, anyone? Another annoying Azure analyst arrives.

But…

Business! Business intelligence. Building better businesses before breakfast, bravely breaking barriers.

Careful…

Create a cube. Calculate a column. Cap cloud capacity. Craft crazy constraints and consume crappy conference coffee.

Don’t.

Data. Database, dataflow, data bricks, data this, data that. Data definitions, data diagrams, data dictionaries for dark data delivered by dumb DBAs.

Excellent.

Execute encryption everywhere, entirely, end to end, every evening.

Fuh…

Forget formatting facts. Find forgotten fragments of forbidden files for forensic forays. Fudging a fantastic fill factor? Figure it out.

Great…

Gigabytes of GUIDs galivanting gayly gave Ginger Grant a great GitHub glow.

Help?

Highly available hyperscale heuristics help horribly harmful heap hierarchies.

Interesting…

Intelligence increases integration insulated from intrinsic ingrained institutional ignorance.

Jeez…

JPEGs. Joins. Jump, jamming jolly JSON jobs in the Java JVM.

K?

Kilobytes to Kilobits for Kilograms of kilt data. Kernel. Kerberos Karaoke.

Lovely.

Line charts living large with layered logic. Logic apps lovingly leveraging lineage lost in leviathan layers of low-layer Linux lock load, loathing latency.

More?

Metadata makes marvelous maps more meaningful. Many models manage many more measures and multiple measures, mercifully minimizing mid-manager meddling. Manowar, mighty metal masters.

No!

Never neglect network nodes. It’s now November, nearly no new notable nuggets of news. NOT!

Oh?

Over and over open oversight overtly opposes old operations. Only ongoing oppression overshadows ops.

Premium.

Power BI. PowerPoint, PowerShell, Power Query, Power Pivot. PivotTables and PivotCharts provide powerful prioritized pointers to precise processes. Pro or Premium? Probably predicated on private preview Polybase permissions.

Q?

Quickly query the quality queue, Quentin. Question the quantity with Q&A.

Really?

Roger. Rapidly replace, rebuild or remove rampant rogue reports. Recurring refresh results. Redesigning relationships requires repeatable revisions.

So?

SQL Server Something Something Services. Several small self-service scripting solutions slide slowly south. SET STATISTICS IO and seriously scale some SQL SELECT scripts.

Today?

Today Tableau technology takes a terrible toll on too-talented technologists. Tabular table totals trump temporary tallies.

U?

UPDATE. Unpivot. Understanding unsigned integer underpins unbound upsert. Upsize to unearth unoptimized unions.

Very.

Volume. Variety. Velocity. Veracity. Vertipaq veritably vanishes volumes of vacuous variant and varchar variable values for visually virtualized velociraptors.

What?

When and where? With world wide web warriors wailing weekly, we will wonder why we waited.

X?

XMLA, xevents and xVelocity, eXecuting our Excel eXtensions, eXtremely eXceptional.

Y?

Yearning yearly Y-axis, year over year yields year to date.

<awkward pause> uhh, Z?

‘Zactly.

(Walks off stage)