You may have seen it pop up throughout our blogs and webinars in the past few months: the World Cup 2018 in Russia! Philippe Van Rillaer and I created a dashboard in Power BI about the historical results of previous World Cups, as well as results of the qualifiers for this year’s World Cup, the current teams that qualified, etc.

Op 22 juni zakte een delegatie van veertien Koherianen af naar het Duitse Lingen om het SQLGrillen 2018-event bij te wonen. Collega Ludo Bernaerts was ook van de partij. Lees zijn verslag van een dagje vol databases, bratwurst en bier.

On June 22 a delegation of fourteen Koherians went to Lingen in Germany to attend the event SQLGrillen 2018. Colleague Randi Vertongen joined the club. Read his report of a day full of databases, bratwurst and beer.

For the moment, SSRS (SQL server reporting services) is currently not an Azure component. Will it be available in the near future…? I don’t know. SSRS- functionalities become available in other dashboards and reporting tools like Power BI. Today, you’ll need to work with an on-premise installed SSRS server or you'll have to setup one in an Azure VM.

One little step in a migration track from on-premise to Azure is related to binary files like images, pdf and others. These files are often stored on many different places. When these files are stored in SQL, you probably have already created a variety of SQL procedures. But you can also use Azure blob-storage.

Attractive reports are not only showing the hard material statistics and numbers. Visualization of your data leads more and more to graphical decision making. One particular part of your reports are images for logo’s, product images etc. When moving to the cloud, where do we need to store and find our data and images?

I truly believe in the azure environment. The possibilities are huge and growing every day. Do we all need to migrate to the cloud ‘sito-presto’…yes, I think so. Why I’m so sure about this, is easy to explain. The most important reasons for me are: cost-efficient architecture possibilities and lower maintenance due to very stable architecture solutions.

With Analysis Services, you can mashup and combine data from multiple data sources, define metrics, and secure your data in a single, trusted semantic data model. The data model provides an easier and faster way for your users to browse massive amounts of data with client applications.

One of the most challenging tasks in data mining or machine learning is how to get seasonality into the mix. Therefore I created a construct that can insert the seasonality for the Flemish part of Belgium in SQL. With some minor alterations, this can easily be adapted for the Brussels or Walloon regions.