Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on November 1st

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Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting today (Monday, October 4th), at 6:30 PM ET.  Sandeep Pawar will explain how to use the Power BI AI visuals for predictive insights. And your humble correspondent will show you how to use the Power BI REST APIs.  For more details and sign up, visit our group page.

Presentation:Demystifying Power BI AI Visuals
Date:November 1st
Time:6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Click here to join the meeting
Overview:Power BI has several powerful AI visuals that allow business analysts to create insightful reports that include predictive capabilities without writing any code. In this session, we will take a deeper look at these visuals, discuss how exactly they work, when & how you should use them effectively and importantly when not to use them. We will look at the algorithms driving them and understand how to use them in your reports. We will look at forecasting, key influencer visual, clustering, decomposition tree, anomaly detector in detail. We will also look at how to validate the outputs of these visuals.
Speaker:Sandeep Pawar is a data science professional. He currently works at Cree Lighting, WI as a Data Analytics engineer. He has experience creating data analytics solutions using BI and ML tools.

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PolyBase Adventures

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I’m setting SQL Server 2019 PolyBase for ODBC to JDBC access to a vendor data lake to virtualize entities as SQL tables. Overall, a smooth experience with a few gotchas:

Data type mappings

The vendor lake uses Oracle data types TIMESTAMP AT TIME ZONE and BOOLEAN that Java doesn’t know how to map. The solution was to set up a view in the data lake (luckily the vendor supports that) to cast these data types to NVARCHAR and INTEGER.

NullPointerException

Once the table is finally set up what do we get when querying it?

105082;Generic ODBC error: java.lang.NullPointerException .

How do we fix this horrible issue? Upgrade SQL Server and PolyBase to the latest cummulative update (CU).

The final mystery that I haven’t been able to crack yet is that for some obscure reason, PolyBase adds quite a bit of performance overhead to the query execution. So, if a query in DBeaver directly connected to the lake (or Power BI Desktop directly corrected to the ODBC driver) takes eight seconds, PolyBase expands it to a minute. Examining the DMVs shows that the actual query does execute in line with DBeaver, but there is some additional overhead from PolyBase that would require a support case with Microsoft.

Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on October 4th

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Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting today (Monday, October 4th), at 6:30 PM ET.  Reda Raz (RADACAD) will share best practices on semantic modelling with Power BI. And your humble correspondent will show two new features: Get Insights and Power BI Goals.  For more details and sign up, visit our group page.

Presentation:Power BI Modeling 101
Date:October 4th
Time:6:30 – 8:30 PM ET
Place:Click here to join the meeting
Overview:Getting started with a report in Power BI is easy. However, soon you will face challenges of having multiple tables, the relationship between tables, the direction of relationship, active or inactive relationship and so on. You also soon realize that you need a proper data model called star-schema which is combination of fact and dimension tables. But, wait a second, you never learned all these fundamentals. What should you do? This session is build exactly for you, to help you understand the fundamentals of Power BI modelling and start from a good foundation.
Speaker:Reza Rad is a Microsoft Regional Director, an Author, Trainer, Speaker, and Consultant. He has a BSc in Computer engineering; he has more than 20 years of experience in data analysis, BI, databases, programming, and development mostly on Microsoft technologies. He is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP for 11 continuous years (from 2011 till now) for his dedication in Microsoft BI. Reza is an active blogger and co-founder of RADACAD. Reza is also co-founder and co-organizer of Difinity conference in New Zealand, and the Power BI Summit (the biggest Power BI conference)

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