After an appetizer of embedded Power View reports , Microsoft proceeded to the main course that is a true Christmas gift – a pubic preview of what's coming in its Power BI offering. For the lack of a better term, I'll call it Power BI.NEXT. In this newsletter, you'll see why Power BI.NEXT is much more than just an incremental release of the Office 365…
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According to Gartner, one main data analytics trend this year and beyond will be predictive analytics. "Increasing competition, cost and regulatory pressures will motivate business leaders to adopt more prescriptive analytics, making business decisions smarter and more repeatable and reducing personnel costs". Prologika has been helping our customers implement predictive analytics for revenue forecasting, outlier detection, and train data scientists in predictive analytics. This newsletter…
Read article During the Day 1 keynote at the 2014 BA Conference, Microsoft committed to BI on your terms. They said that all new features will be eventually available both on premises and in the cloud. We've also learned that hybrid scenarios will be possible in near future, such as hosting Power View and SSRS reports in the cloud connected to on-prem data sources. Based on my…
Read article I hope you are enjoying the beginning of the spring. The focus of this newsletter is self-service BI with Microsoft Power BI. But before I start, I strongly encourage those of you in the Southeast USA to register and attend the SQL Saturday Atlanta event which will be held this year on May 3rd. We had a record attendance last year with some 570 people…
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As I'm enjoying my vacation in tropical Cancun, Mexico, I hope you've been enjoying the holidays and planning your BI initiatives in 2014. Speaking of planning, you may have heard that Microsoft is working hard on next release of SQL Server, version 2014, which is expected in the first half of next year. Naturally, you may wonder what's new in the forthcoming release in the…
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I hope you had a great summer. The chances are that your organization has a centralized data repository, such as ODS or a data warehouse, but you might not use it to the fullest. Do you want a single version of truth? Of course, you do. Do you want to empower your business users to create their own reports and offload reporting effort from IT? I bet this…
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The summer is finally here. With everything coming to fruition, there are exiting news in the Microsoft BI land, the most important of which I’d like to recap in this newsletter. Before I start, I want to mention the availability of my Best Practices for Implementing Enterprise BI Solution presentation that you might find interesting. POWER VIEW MULTIDIMENSIONAL Also known as DAXMD, Power View has…
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Implementing Dashboards Many organizations are considering digital dashboards for a quick 1000-foot view of the company performance. In this newsletter, I’ll review at a high level the options available in the Microsoft BI Platform for implementing dashboards and discuss how they compare. PerformancePoint Services PerformancePoint Services has been the Microsoft’s premium tool for implementing dashboards and scorecards in the SharePoint environment. Geared toward BI pros,…
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What's New in Excel 2013 and SharePoint 2013 BI Microsoft released Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 in October 2012. The logical question you might have is how the latest versions apply to your business intelligence needs. Here are some of the most important features that I believe might warrant your interest. Excel 2013 The latest release reinforces the Excel status is the Microsoft premium…
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Big Data Big Data is getting a lot of attention nowadays. My definition of Big Data is a dataset (or a collection of datasets) that is so large that exceeds the capabilities of a single symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) server and traditional software to capture, manage, and process it within a reasonable timeframe. The boundaries of what defines a "large set" are always shifting upwards, but…
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