Now that Tableau has been highly praised by Gartner, you might be looking for ways to make the best of both self-service BI tools: the great data modelling capabilities and programming richness of Power Pivot and the visualization strengths of Tableau. Interestingly, besides published to SharePoint Power Pivot workbooks, Tableau can connect to local Power Pivot models and send MDX queries (as it does when…
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While Microsoft has fallen a bit in the Gartner's eye, according to InformationWeek, it's the hottest BI vendor in 2014. I guess the reason is that Gartner focuses predominantly on visualization, which is just one of the BI manifestations, while InformationWeek looks at the entire BI ecosystem.
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Gartner released the 2014 update of the Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms Magic Quadrant. Interestingly, Gartner moved the predictive capabilities to a new Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms and dropped scorecards. The most interesting aspect of this report for me was the Market Overview section at the end. According to Gartner, the most prevalent future BI trends will be: 7% BI annual growth all…
Read articleAtlanta BI fans, Join us for the next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting on Monday, February 24th. Lance England will present "introduction to MDX". Computer Associates will sponsor our meeting and show us the latest Erwin release. I'll also talk briefly and present Power BI now that it went live. Spread the word and invite your coworkers but RSVP on our website so we can…
Read articleIn my "Optimizing Dimension Data Security" blog, I've mentioned that converting static sets to dynamic could reduce the connection initialization time. To my surprise, using Excel to connect to the cube triggered the executing of dynamic sets and end users reported long wait times for the connection to initialize. It turned out that when Excel connects to the cube, it issues DISCOVER statements to query…
Read articleAs you've probably head, Office 2013 supports now two installation options: the traditional MSI-based installation and the new Click-To-Run streaming installation. Chris Webb mentioned about it here and Melissa Coates describes how it works in more details here. The MSI setup is a perpetual one (you pay for a version once and you're entitled to fixes for it) while the C2R setup is a subscription-based…
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More and more organizations are planning and adopting dashboards. And, the question "which visualization tool is the best for dashboarding?" has been asked more frequently. The visualization aspect of BI has been rapidly evolving. There are plenty of vendors and plethora of tools out there. And, they keep on leap-frogging each other and each one has its strong sides and limitations. More than likely, the…
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Although it might not be immediately obvious, Power View supports various options for exploring data in more details. Although some scenarios are not natively supported, workarounds could be available. Drilling Down Drilling down involves navigating through multiple fields from the same or different dimensions to explore data at a lower granularity. Every interactive tool supports drilling down (and drilling up) and Power Pivot is no…
Read articleData is your biggest asset and today's currency but the data can be messy. You know it and we've seen it. The messier the data, the bigger the headache. At Prologika, we believe that data quality issues should be addressed as early as possible and the validation process should start with the source systems. You need a solution to detect possible duplicated entries without ETL,…
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The next Atlanta SQL Saturday will be on May 3rd. I'm doing a "Deep Dive into the Microsoft BI Semantic Model (BISM)" pre-conference session on May 2nd. You can register using this link. The organizers set up a promotion code for $10 off registration, good for the first 10 users – the code is "AtlantaBI". Teo Lachev: Deep Dive into the Microsoft BI Semantic Model…
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