I'm presenting "7 Ways to Integrate Excel with Power BI" for the Atlanta Modern Excel Group on April 19th at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Prologika and Microsoft are sponsoring the event. Please RSVP here. Power BI is gaining a momentum but Excel still rules the corporate world. Fortunately, Power BI and Excel are not exclusive choices. Join me to learn how you can preserve…
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I was doing a Power BI Embedded demo for a customer and lo and behold, being an ever-changing cloud technology, Power BI Embedded surprised me in a great way. When you install and run the Embedded Sample, it adds a nice "Embed and play with current report using Embedded Live Sample" link to the Page Navigation section. This brings you to the Power BI Embedded…
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Analysis Services Tabular has gained a lot of momentum for implementing organizational semantic models but its toolset has been lacking. SSRS developers had to rely previously on the MDX Query Designer to send MDX queries to Tabular. If DAX queries were preferred (and they often are for better performance since DAX is the native Tabular query language), developers had to type in DAX manually. And if…
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I'm presenting "Embed Interactive Reports in Your Apps" at Birmingham SQL Saturday 2017, on March 18th at 1 PM. I'll discuss different options to embed Power BI reports in internal and external apps. You have the app. You have the data. What if your app could put the power of analytics everywhere decisions are made and allow your customers to gain insights? Modern apps with…
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15 Reasons Why Microsoft is Leading the BI Space I hope you're enjoying the beginning of 2017 and you're staying healthy and busy. It's been a hectic and exciting period for me. I published the second edition of my "Applied Microsoft Power BI" book in January to keep it up to date. It's great to see all the momentum and interest surrounding Power BI. Just…
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Lots of things to like in the just released March update of Power BI Desktop! My favorite? We can now implement header-details text reports using the updated Matrix visual. Previously, Table and Matrix visuals wouldn't allow you to select a row to cross filter other sections. Now, you can use the Matrix visual for the header section. When you click a row in the "header",…
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It's a good practice to have a custom ETL framework that augment the SSIS capabilities. ETL frameworks come in different shapes and sizes but what I'd like to see in a framework is: Configurable parallelism – Does your ETL take hours? The chances are that your packages run sequentially. Or, disconnected flows in the master package's control flow support limited parallelism, while your server probably…
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MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, February 27th at 6:30 PM. Paco Gonzales from SolidQ will introduce to Azure Cognitive Services and walk us through the process to build a bot. SolidQ will sponsor the event. I'll show two existing new Power BI features: clustering and binning. Rate this meeting http://aka.ms/PUGSurvey, PUG ID: 104…
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I'm a big fan of Analysis Services and I'm doing a lot of work lately with Tabular. I rejoiced a lot after Microsoft included Tabular in SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition to increase its adoption but my enthusiasm was dampened by its maximum memory size of 16 GB. Interestingly, Multidimensional enjoys 64 GB of RAM in Standard Edition although you probably never need that much…
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Power BI is enjoying a tremendous momentum and unprecedented popularity. Just within this month, your humble correspondent has been teaching Power BI four times in a row. It looks like industry observers are taking notice of this momentum. As Kamal Hathi (General Manager, Microsoft BI) announced, the newly released Garner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Data Analytics gave Microsoft a very high score. The image below…
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