I’m helping an enterprise client modernize their data analytics estate. As a part of this exercise, a SSAS Multidimensional financial cube must be converted to a Power BI semantic model. The challenge is that business users ask for almost real-time BI during the forecasting period, where a change in the source forecasting system must be quickly propagated to the reporting the layer, so the users…
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Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, February 2nd at 18:30 ET. Sukhwant Kaur (Product Manager at Microsoft) will show you how supercharge your Power BI reports with translytical taskflows. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. CloudStaff.au will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up,…
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Happy New Year with oldies but goodies…especially given that this technique might be hard to find elsewhere! How do you implement a tooltip page that shows only the measure the end user hovers over? Consider this matrix with three measures on columns grouped by product categories on rows. The user wants to see a trend chart for the measure they hover over. Understanding the challenge…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, January 5th at 18:30 ET. Dean Jurecic will show you how Power BI visual calculations can simplify the process of writing DAX. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. Key2 Consulting will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up,…
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Telegraph sang a song about the world outside Telegraph road got so deep and so wide Like a rolling river… The Telegraph Road, Dire Straits At Ignite in November, 2025, Microsoft introduced Fabric IQ. I noted to go beyond the marketing hype and check if Fabric IQ makes any sense. The next thing I know, around the holidays I’m talking to an enterprise strategy manager…
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What performance and cost considerations should you keep in mind if you are currently on Power BI Pro/PPU, but Fabric looks increasingly enticing and you want to upgrade an existing workspace to Fabric? For example, let's say you've started with a pay-per-user workspace, but now you want that workspace to have Fabric features, such as Copilot, Lakehouse, etc. Or, as a typical use case for…
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If Microsoft Fabric is in your future, you need to come up with a strategy to get your data in Fabric OneLake. That’s because the holy grail of Fabric is the Delta Parquet file format. The good news is that all Fabric data ingestion options (Dataflows Gen 2, pipelines, Copy Job and notebooks) support this format and the Microsoft V-Order extension that’s important for Direct…
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What credentials do you use to refresh your Power BI semantic models from Azure SQL SKUs, such as Azure SQL Database. Probably your credentials or a designated Entra account? Both are not ideal for a variety of reasons, including requiring a password. More advanced users might be using service principals, which are more secure but require secret renewal after a maximum of 24 months, which…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, December 1st at 18:30 ET. I'll show you how to Fabric DirectLake semantic models can help you tackle long refresh cycles and scalability headaches. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. Improving will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign…
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“We are sailing to Philadelphia A world away from the coaly Tyne Sailing to Philadelphia To draw the line The Mason-Dixon line” “Sailing to Philadelphia”, Mark Knopfler As I’ve said in the past, I consider it a travesty when a SaaS provider disallows direct access to the data in its native storage, such as by ODBC and OLE DB providers, and force you to use…
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