Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on May 6th

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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on May 6, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Patrick LeBlanc, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, will show us how to integrate Power BI and Flow for geospatial analytics. I’ll showcase Power BI Report Builder.  TEKSystems will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group page and don’t forget to RSVP (use the RSVP survey on http://atlantabi.pass.org if you’re planning to attend).

Presentation:

Using the Power Platform to Enhance Spatial Granularity

Date:

May 6, 2019, Monday

Time

6:30 – 8:30 PM ET

Place:

Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)

8000 Avalon Boulevard Suite 900
Alpharetta, GA 30009

Overview:

Join this session to see how you can use the Power Platform to solve a real world customer problem. With a growing mobile workforce, many organizations are trying to figure out how to properly arm them with the correct tools. In this session we will explain and demonstrate how you can leverage the Power BI Mobile app and Microsoft Flow to build a solution that enables them to quickly identify locations near and far. We will demonstrate how the solution was built step-by-step, detailing how and why certain technologies and solutions were selected or not.

Speaker:

Patrick LeBlanc is a currently a Data Platform Solutions Architect. Along with his 15+ years’ experience in IT he holds a Master of Science degree from Louisiana State University. He is the author and co-author of five SQL Server books and one of the only two guys in the cube. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was awarded Microsoft MVP award for his contributions to the community. Patrick is a regular speaker at many SQL Server Conferences and Community events.

Sponsor:

People are at the heart of every successful business initiative. At TEKsystems, we understand people. Every year we deploy over 80,000 IT professionals at 6,000 client sites across North America, Europe and Asia. Our deep insights into IT human capital management enable us to help our clients achieve their business goals – while optimizing their IT workforce strategies. We provide IT staffing solutions, IT talent management expertise and IT services to help our clients plan, build and run their critical business initiatives!

Prototypes
with pizza

“Power BI Report Builder” with Teo Lachev

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Power BI Report Builder

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SSRS is near and dear to my heart. My first book (“Microsoft Reporting Services in Action” published in 2004 by Manning) was on this subject and I became an MVP because of my contributions around SSRS back in those days. Because of this and because every good thing should come in two, I rejoiced when I heard Microsoft announcing the Power BI Report Builder to complement the work they do to bring paginated reports to Power BI. Although lacking in interactivity, there are a few good reasons to favor SSRS paginated reports as they continue to be the most extensible and feature-rich report type in the Microsoft BI ecosystem, as I explained in more detail in my “Choosing a Reporting Tool” blog.

Like Power BI Desktop, we now we have two Report Builder tools. The SSRS Report Builder continues to support to full feature set of SSRS and targets deployment to a report server. Power BI Report Builder is tethered to Power BI (Power BI Premium to be precise since you can deploy paginated reports to Power BI Premium only for now). Not all SSRS features are currently supported in Power BI, such as shared datasets and shared data sources, drillthrough reports and subreports, but Microsoft is working hard to close the gap. For more information about the current limitations, refer to this article (however, besides a subset of data sources, I didn’t see any other feature restrictions).

I ran into two issues with the recently released update to Power BI Report Builder. First, when running a report, the tool throws an error “This method explicitly uses CAS policy, which has been obsoleted by the .NET Framework”. The simple workaround is to uninstall Power BI Report Builder and install it again.

Second, the Power BI XMLA point is currently down so don’t attempt to connect the Report Builder (or any other tool) to Power BI datasets published to a premium workspace. You’ll get an Unauthorized error. According to the current advisory, April 28th is the rough estimate when the fix will be deployed worldwide.

Power BI XMLA Endpoint

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If “XMLA” doesn’t ring a bell especially in the context of Power BI, it stands for Extensible Markup Language for Analysis. Still puzzled? It’s the protocol of Analysis Services (Multidimensional and Tabular). So, when an Excel or Power BI sends a query to a cube, it’s encoded according the XMLA specification (an XML-based format). And, the XMLA endpoint is the web service endpoint that Analysis Services listens for upcoming requests.

Now that I cleared the terminology, Microsoft announced the public preview of the XMLA endpoint in Power BI Premium. Since Power BI uses Analysis Services Tabular to scale and hosts the Power BI Desktop models you deploy, this means you can now access that Analysis Services backend instance which wasn’t accessible before. Or, at least read-only for now, meaning that you can only query it and not deploy organizational Tabular models to it.

What it’s in there for you? Here are some scenarios that this management feature enables:

  • Besides Excel, you can connect any client that support Analysis Services, such as Tableau, to your published Power BI datasets if you’re looking for ways to diversify reporting. Chris Finlan mentions this as one scenario worth considering for the near-and-dear to my heart Report Builder (aka Power BI Paginated Report Builder).
  • You can profile your Power BI published datasets by connecting the SQL Server Profiler.
  • You can stress test your Power BI datasets, such as to ensure that they support the expected workload.
  • And my favorite, I can script any Power BI model to see how all these hidden features, such as grouping and binning, are coded.

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Microsoft is probably finding it increasingly difficult to maintain multiple deployments for Analysis Services: SSAS, AAS, and Power BI. Once the Power XMLA endpoint is writable and Power BI dataset sizes increase, I expect them to nudge customers to deploy organizational Tabular models to Power BI Premium, to be on the latest and greatest on a single platform. I hope that it won’t require Power BI Premium too when it goes GA.

Magic Quadrant for Dummies

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Confused by magic quadrants? Curious about their internals, such as how companies move from one quadrant to another? GeekAndPoke came up with this much needed resource that explains it all. No words necessary!

Happy April 1st!