Microsoft Fabric is upon us with a grand fanfare. You can get a good overview of its vision and capabilities by watching the Microsoft Fabric Launch Digital Event (Day 1) and Microsoft Fabric Launch Digital Event (Day 2) recordings. Consultants and experts are extolling its virtues and busy fully aligning with Microsoft. There is a lot of stuff going on in Fabric and I'm planning…
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For years users have been asking for Excel tables (not pivots) connected to SSAS so they can simply browse the data in a tabular format not subjected to the shortcomings of pivots. And for years Excel has been supporting just pivots that natively understand only SSAS OLAP cubes. Is Power BI changing things? Somewhat. Enter refined Excel connected tables. They look great on the surface.…
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I ranted many times about SaaS vendors preventing direct access to data in its native storage, which is typically a relational database. It's sort of like going to a bank, handing them over your money, and they telling you that you can only get your money back in cash, in Bitcoin, in ₿100 bills but no more than ₿1,000 per withdrawal, or whatever madness suits…
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Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, September 11th, at 6:30 PM ET. Shabnam Waston (BI Consultant and Microsoft MVP) will introduce us to the Lakehouse engine in Microsoft Fabric. Shabnam will also sponsor the meeting. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE…
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Currency conversion is a common requirement, such as when implementing analytics on top of ERP sales data recorded in multiple currencies. The most flexible approach is to allow the user to select a currency and perform the conversion at runtime, ideally by centralizing the conversion code in Power BI calculation groups. However, this approach has several shortcomings: Based on my experience, the most common requirement…
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Poor data quality is one of the most challenging hurdles for successful data analytics. The story typically goes like this. The client has a flexible line of business system that people tend to use and abuse, such as entering garbage in free-form text fields that shouldn't be free-form to start with. There is no data stewardship or data entry oversight. I'm not blaming anyone because…
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I've done a few BI integration projects extracting data from ERPs running on IBM Db2. Most of the implementations would use a hybrid architecture where the ERP would be running on an on-prem mainframe while the data was loaded in Microsoft Azure. Here are a few tips if you're facing this challenge: IBM provides JDBC, ODBC, and OLE DB drivers. The JDBC driver is not…
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This took a while to figure out…so someone might find it useful. Scenario: You have set up two Azure Data Factory instances for DEV and PROD environment. The DEV environment uses a self-hosted integration runtime to read data from on-prem data sources. The day has come to deploy your masterpiece to PROD. You share the DEV self-hosted runtime with the production ADF instance. You export…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, August 7th, at 6:30 PM ET. James Serra (Data & AI Solution Architect at Microsoft) will join us remotely to introduce us to Microsoft Fabric. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE A CHANGE TO OUR MEETING POLICY. WE HAVE DISCONTINUED ONLINE MEETINGS VIA TEAMS. THIS GROUP MEETS…
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Did I disappoint you? Or leave a bad taste in your mouth? You act like you never had love And you want me to go without U2 In previous posts, I shared my initial impression of the recently announced Microsoft Fabric and its main engines. Now that we have the Fabric licensing and pricing, I'm ready to wrap up my review with a few parting…
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