Microsoft's Power BI visualization service arrives July 24

Microsoft's Power BI data visualization and business intelligence service will be generally available in two weeks, marking a major milestone for the new product.

The launch will bring a smorgasbord of new features, including new chart types, a refreshed desktop application and support for collaborating in groups on shared sets of data. Power BI was first released to the public as a beta earlier this year, and is designed to provide ordinary business users with powerful tools to visualize information from diverse data sets in live-updating dashboards.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2946688/business-intelligence/microsofts-power-bi-visualization-service-arrives-july-24.html

SQL Server 2016: Live Query Statistics

A database query times out and you don’t know why. The estimated query plan is revealing the problem, so you remove the timeout entirely. An hour later it is still running and you are no closer to getting the actual execution plan. If only there was a way to find out what is actually happening inside the server.

With Live Query Statistics in SQL Server 2016 you can now answer that question. This new feature offers the DBA a live version of the execution plan with annotations detailing which steps are currently being performed.

read more at http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/07/Live-Query-Stats

Top three third-party SQL Server security auditing tools

For most companies, SQL Server's security auditing tools aren't always enough to meet regulation requirements. The answer is third-party products.

more at http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/Top-three-third-party-SQL-Server-security-auditing-tools