[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSczHlIH-ig]

You can read more about “Q&A” here.

Q&A builds upon Microsoft's first in class Business Intelligence platform and allows the use of natural language to discover, understand, and report over your own datasets.

In this preview release Q&A is configured to work over two sample Excel models: one pertaining to summer Olympics medalists between 1896 and 2012 and another containing retail bar sales.

Let's introduce Q&A's through a series of examples using these 2 datasets. You can try these out for yourself if you head over to http://www.powerbi.com and register for the preview. If you are already registered, log on, enable the sample spreadsheets, and try it out for yourself.

First, let's find all the medalists that participated in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics:

"Show Beijing athletes"

In this example, the Excel workbook with data about summer Olympics has been saved to Office 365. Q&A interprets the search query and displays the corresponding information from the workbook to create a list of athletes that participated at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

It's nice to get a list of medalists but maybe you want to total number of medalists in a given summer Olympics. Let's try that with the 2012 London Olympics.

"Show the total number of medalists at the London 2012 games"

Similarly this sentence is being interpreted to count the number of distinct athletes that won medals at the last London Olympics.

Beyond being able to ask for a count of medalists, you can ask a number of interesting questions with Q&A that provide far deeper insights. Let's start with finding the number of medals that have been won at each summer Olympics.

"How many medals were won each year?"

Further, Q&A automatically chooses a suitable visualization based on what is requested. In the above example, Q&A plots a line chart that shows the number of medals that were awarded throughout the years. There may be times where you want to control the specific visual that Q&A uses when rendering the answer to your question.

"Show number of medalists by year as column chart"

One can easily direct the system to display a different visualization. In the above example, "as column chart" changed the visualization type from a line chart to a column chart.

Q&A can understand the deeper meaning of questions. Take for example the following question:

"Which athletes won the most gold medals in London 2012?"

Here, Q&A interpreted what gold medals are and intelligently decided that the result should be sorted by the medal count to reflect the true meaning of "most" in this context.

Beyond being able to intelligently understand sorting and the specific meaning of "most" in the above question, Q&A has the ability to understand questions about time in a number of different ways.

"How many medals did Michael Phelps win in the past 5 years?"

Q&A understands the context of the question based on the timeframe, the model, and the data within it.

All of these aspects of Q&A integrate well together from choosing the most appropriate visualization to applying the correct time intelligence to the question.

"Show the number of medalists from Europe who competed in 2004 vs. 2012 by their countries"

In this example Q&A automatically chose to display 2 maps one for each Olympic games. It opted to display maps because the country column is marked as a geography data column.

When using natural language there are often cases where the question posed contains significant ambiguity. For example:

"Who from Vietnam won what when?"

Here, Q&A is correctly mapping "Who" to the medalists from Vietnam, "What" to the events that they had won and "When" to the year in which they won those medals.

The Summer Olympics model allows a number of interesting questions, however, Q&A can be used across a variety of datasets and domains. Let's walk through a number of examples using the retail bar sales sample model. I will begin with a question that requires some context:

"Popular Rum drinks"

In this example, "Rum drinks" is understood as any drinks that contains Rum as an ingredient and "popular" is defined as an adjective over the drinks entity that sorts the result by the "popularity" column.

Also "number sold" is defined as the main synonyms of the popularity column ensuring that it is used instead of "popularity" in the restatement highlighted in blue.

As you see, Q&A is adaptable to a wide range of questions.

"Which bartenders had the highest sales for non-alcoholic drinks?"

Here "highest sales" is understood as a request to sort the results by "total sales" in a descending order.

The next example combines a few of the features we saw earlier into a pretty common Business Intelligence question where an aggregate function is applied to a numeric value grouped by a particular dimension and filtered down to a time window:

"Total beer and liquor sales by hours since opening for 2010 and 2011 as a line chart"

So what will you need to get Power BI Q&A to work with your organization's dataset?

You'll need an Excel spreadsheet with a Power Pivot model saved to your Power BI site in Office 365. If you are using Excel and Power Pivot today, you are on the right track to use Q&A over your own data once it is available.

In the meantime, head over to http://www.powerbi.com and register for the preview. If you are already registered, log on, enable the sample spreadsheets, and try it for yourself. You can also read more about Power BI here.

Pedram Rezaei

Software Architect on Power BI Q&A

“Show London clients”

In this example, an Excel workbook with data about customers and their locations has been saved to Office 365. Q&A is interpreting the search query and displaying corresponding information from the workbook to create a list of customers that are based in London.

“Show number of products”

Similarly, “show number of products” is being interpreted to count the number of products found in the data source.

“Number of songs per year”

Further, Q&A automatically chooses a suitable visualization based on what is requested.

“Total number of employees for finance, HR, marketing in Europe by employee country”

In this example, Q&A automatically chose to display three maps, one for each division. It opted to display maps because the country column is marked as a geography data column.

“Show our sales pipeline with opportunity size greater than $20,000”

So what will you need to get Power BI Q&A to work with your organization’s dataset? An Excel spreadsheet with a Power Pivot model saved to a Power BI site in Office 365. So, if you are using Excel and Power Pivot today, you are on the right track to use Q&A over your own data once it is available.
I’ll be posting more about the features included in Power BI so stay tuned here for more updates. In the meantime head over to http://www.powerbi.com and register for the preview.

Pedram Rezaei

Software Architect - Power BI Q&A

Update:

• Read more here

Pedram Rezaei

Software Architect, Microsoft

A while ago, at SQL PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, WA, I demoed turning any random surface or wall into a touch screen using a single Microsoft Kinect device. I also demoed controlling Microsoft’s latest BI reporting tool which provides easy data exploration, visualization and presentation capabilities, Power View, through natural language and simple gestures.

Let’s start with a video of the above scenarios (You hear me say the word "Crescent" in the video. Crescent is the code-name for Power View):
[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShyNV9hHPpo&feature=youtu.be]

Using Kinect to turn any wall into a touch screen

Using the Skeletal Tracking feature of the official Kinect for Windows SDK, it is possible to track the position of “joints” such as arms and hands. The data points provided for each joint include depth. It is, therefore possible to gather enough calibration data to correctly map the position of the hand to screen coordinates. It is also possible to calculate how far the projection surface area is from the Kinect allowing for the detection of the touch gesture: 

The part that is not demoed in the above video is the calibration stage. Currently it takes about a couple of minutes for one to calibrate the system by touching the wall at different locations. One could imagine advancing the algorithm to remove the need for that level of calibration.

Using Kinect and Microsoft Speech to control Power View

In the second section of the video, you saw some really interesting ways of controlling Power View through voice. As you saw, we can navigate between the views, sort different data regions, and filter the selected view based on the attributes in the semantic model.

The voice is picked up by the microphone array built into Kinect, and then passed onto Microsoft Speech for recognition. The rest is pretty straight forward: voice commands are converted to commands within Power View.

Pedram Rezaei

Pedram

(A slightly modified version of this article was published in the August 2008 edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter)

Dual, quad, and eight-core processors are becoming the norm. Is your application capable of utilising all available processors? In order to achieve this level of utilisation on an n-processor machine, an application ideally needs at least n threads concurrently performing operations.

Although writing multi-threaded applications has become simpler over the years, many still find it challenging. Also many of the constructs such as the .NET ThreadPool have deficiencies that make them less suitable as the manycore shift begins to accelerate.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has been hard at work developing a new set of parallel extensions for .NET, aptly named Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework. One of the additions is a set of lightweight and scalable thread-safe data structures and synchronization primitives such as a concurrent dictionary and a spin lock.

It also includes an implementation of LINQ-to-Objects that automatically executes queries in parallel, scaling to utilise most or all of the available processors without developers explicitly managing the distribution of work across all processors. This technology is called Parallel LINQ or PLINQ and the query syntax is almost identical to that of LINQ-to-Objects.

var q = from c in customers.AsParallel()

        join r in regions on c.RegionID equals r.RegionID

        where c.City == "London" && r.Name == "Kingston"

        select c;

When a repetitive computation can be parallelised, the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework offers a few interesting data-oriented operations such as For and ForEach that execute a loop in which iterations may run in parallel on parallel hardware. For example the following classic foreach loop can easily be converted to a parallel foreach:

The actual parallelisation of actions is managed by the Task Parallel Library (TPL) that provides an abstraction layer on top of raw threads. TPL uses the notion of Task that is the smallest unit of work and could potentially be executed by any thread owned by TPL. Therefore correctly identifying tasks that could be executed in parallel is crucial. It is then the job of the scheduler component of TPL to decide whether those tasks should execute sequentially or in parallel. This decision is usually made based on available system resources and possible user preferences.

// Create a task to call Calculate(object o) and schedule it for execution

Task t = Task.Create(Calculate);

// Other activities...

// Wait for this task to complete

t.Wait();

Developing concurrent applications requires a shift in mindset. For example, only a single exception can be thrown at any one time when sequentially executing a for loop. However executing the same loop in parallel may warrant the need for dealing with multiple concurrent exceptions. There are also a few parallelism blockers that should be avoided if you are planning to benefit from Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework when it is released.

ADO.NET Data Services can deploy consistent representations of data regardless of the underlying data source. This approach has made CLR-based data models first class citizens. See here for a comprehensive guide on using CRL-based data models.

Imagine the following class diagram that represents two entities:

As you can see, Library has a collection of Books. Therefore Library.Books can be considered a one-to-many resource navigation link to a collection of Books.

public class Library

{

  public int LibraryID { get; set; }

  public string LibraryName { get; set; }

  public List<Book> Books { get; set; }

}

public class Book

{

  public int BookID { get; set; }

  public string BookTitle { get; set; }

}

A simple Data Services’ resource container exposing a list of libraries may look similar to the following:

This article was written based on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta.

As far as the CLR is concerned, there is no semantic attached to this attribute. However Visual Studio does not step through methods or classes that are decorated with this attribute. Although you could still use breakpoints in those methods or classes, they are never hit.

And here is how breakpoints would look in Visual Studio 2008:

This attribute can be applied to methods, property accessors, classes and structs. I found it to be extremely useful when I wanted to step through a method without first stepping through all property accessors used as parameters or the source instance of the method. In the example below, a.Value and b.Value are not stepped through when pressing F11 in Visual Studio. It is only the Add method that is fully debugged:

var a = new SomeValue(10);

var b = new SomeValue(150);

...

Add(a.Value, a.Value);

class SomeValue

{

  ...

  public int Value

  {

    [DebuggerStepThrough]

    get { return value; }

  }

}

Enjoy!

public class RelationService : IRelationService

{

  public Relation[] GetRelations()

  {

    var factory = new WebChannelFactory<ICustomerService>(

      new Uri("http://localhost/customerservice/customers.svc"));

    var proxy = factory.CreateChannel();

    using ((IDisposable)proxy)

    using (new OperationContextScope((IContextChannel)proxy))

    {

      var customers = proxy.GetCustomers();

      return customers.Select(c => new Relation(c.Name, c.Age)).ToArray();

    }

  }

}

In the above example, GetRelations() is a RESTful service operation calling into another RESTful service located at the Uri shown above.

Without using the new context, you may get an exception similar to the following:

ProtocolException: The remote server returned an unexpected response: (405) Method Not Allowed.

When investigating further, you may notice that WCF could be using an incorrect HTTP verb for communicating with the service that exposes the GetCustomers() operation.

As it happens, here is how ICustomerService service contract looks like:

[ServiceContract]

public interface ICustomerService

{

  [OperationContract]

  [WebGet(

      UriTemplate = "/customers",

      ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml,

      BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare

  )]

  List<Customer> GetCustomers();

}

As you can see it is expecting the GET verb. Without creating a new context, WCF ends up using the POST verb which will eventually cause the above exception.