Relocation to Australia

As some of my readers know, I recently moved from Moscow to Sydney. Huge change in my life, and it required a huge effort from me. From March I was busy with English exam, paper work, visa, preparation of goods transfer, then with transfer itself, then with finding apartment, buying furniture, household goods, taking over things at work, diving into new area and responsibilities, enrollment to school etc.

Thanks to Matt Allington for warm welcome in one of my first days in Sydney. For me it was like “coffee with legend”. After years of reading Matt’s articles, I could met him in person. This is inspiring!

Year ago I couldn’t even imagine such turn in my life.

So, I was a bit busy and had no time to write new posts.

However, I’m still passionate about Power Query, M, Excel, VBA, and Power BI will join this list very soon, as I’m officially start to work with it.

What is interesting, I’m now in “No-SQL world”, which means that I have no SQL Server to store data.

And I’m happy, as it is a chance to build reporting solution with no such luxury as servers.

Folders and Files – stored on local drive / network drive / SharePoint – great data base! There are million reasons why not, but it is still great!

Cheap, portable, flexible, scalable to a certain level, and what is important – still a good source for Power Query, no matter if resulting model is in Excel or Power BI.

Another important element from my point of view – availability to “small people”, analysts or reporting specialists, accountants etc. – people with no admin rights, knowledge of SQL etc.

I call it “Self-Service BI for poor”. Even when company is rich enough, has expensive ERP, IT governed business intelligence etc., I’m pretty sure, such Excel-DIY solutions appear here and there, as far not every analyst has access to serious IT solutions, or IT is not fast enough.

I still keep in mind one of old posts from Chris Webb: Why Corporate BI and Self-Service BI Are Both Necessary.

To wrap up, in near future you may expect posts covering interesting (and not) problems related to the situation when your data base is set of files.

Stay tuned!