I'm excited to announce the fifth edition of my Applied Microsoft Power BI book! When the first edition was published in January 2016, it was the first Power BI book at that time and it had less than 300 pages. Since then, I helped many companies adopt or transition to Power BI and taught hundreds of students. It's been a great experience to witness the momentum…
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Happy Holidays! I hope you're enjoying this special time of the year. A few months ago, I did an assessment for a large company that was advised by an undisclosed source that they should use their Dynamics Financials and Operations (F&O) system as a data warehouse. Recently, I came across a similar wish but this time to use SAP as EDW. Can we do this?…
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Bring your data to life today and learn how Power BI changes the way everyone gains insights from data. Publication date: 1/1/2020 Size: 528 pages, 7.5" x 9.25" Price: $49.99 ISBN 10: 1-7330461-1-9 ISBN 13: 978-1-7330461-1-4 Introduces information workers, data analysts, IT pros, and developers to Microsoft Power BI — a cloud-hosted, business intelligence and analytics platform that democratizes and opens BI to everyone, making it free…
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Organized by Microsoft and Dynamic Communities, the Power Platform World Tour will take a place in Atlanta from 2/10-2/12, 2020. I'm teaching Power BI Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) on Feb 10 for a full day. Although this is a paid event ($599), you should get a great business value as the audience will probably be smaller and I'll be able to provide more personal…
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Power BI incremental refresh (a Power BI Premium feature) refreshes a subset of a table with imported data. The main goal is to reduce the refresh time so that new data becomes available online faster. Patrick LeBlanc has a great video about how to make the incremental refresh even more incremental by using the "Detect data changes" feature and he explains in detail how it…
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A few months ago, I did an assessment for a large company that was advised by an undisclosed source that they should use their Dynamics Financials and Operations (F&O) system as a data warehouse. Recently, I came across a similar wish to use SAP as a data warehouse. I understand that people want to do more with less and shortcuts are tempting. But ERP systems…
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Load testing and troubleshooting Analysis Services often requires capturing a query trace. The lightweight option to do so is to create an Extended Events (xEvents) session. Let's say you want to capture all query traffic for 24 hours. You might opt to use the SQL Server Profiler, but it's implemented as a desktop app (there must be an active Windows session but what happens if…
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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on November 4, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Stacey Jones will present Power BI options with Python. Accelebrate will sponsor the meeting. And I will share some tips demoing the latest Power BI Desktop features, such as the new ribbon, decomposition tree and AI integration. For more…
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At Ignite 2019 Microsoft announced the public preview of large datasets in Power BI Premium. This is a significant milestone as now datasets can grow up to the capacity's maximum memory (previously, the max size was 10 GB with P3 plan), thus opening the possibility of deploying organizational semantic models to Power BI. I consider this feature mostly suitable for organizational BI as I don't imagine…
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Now that SQL Server 2019 is officially here, I was eager to try it out. My upgrade/reinstall experience ran into several issues that I thought might be worth sharing: Upgrade/reinstall fails with "An error occurred for a dependency of the feature causing the setup process for the feature to fail." With no indication what dependency failed. I solved it by extracting the iso file into…
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