MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, December 5th at 6:30 PM. I'll review the tremendous success that Microsoft BI had in 2016. We'll took a glimpse of the new Power BI navigation experience. Julie Smith will talk about Azure Data Factory Slices for our Prototypes with Pizza. Enjoy catering by Subway, thanks for Microsoft…
Read article
Only two weeks to register for my "Dashboard in a Day" precon on December 9th for Atlanta BI SQL Saturday. A whole day of hands-on Power BI training for only $150! Power BI Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) is designed to accelerate your Power BI experience with a comprehensive training program in a single day. All you have to do is bring your Windows-based laptop and…
Read article
Next to the question "How do I offload reporting effort from IT?" is "Which MS reporting tool should my users use?". Granted, Microsoft BI is not shy of reporting tools and they number is increasing! And with Power BI reports soon to be available in SSRS, the choice is getting even more difficult. The following diagram illustrates how I position reporting tools. The Y-axis represents…
Read article
From the glimpse to the first public preview…it's great to see one of most requested feature coming to life: ability to render online Power BI reports in on-premises SSRS. Alas, Microsoft is keeping us in suspense and no official date and release vehicles have been announced yet but we can now see and test it using the VM that Microsoft put on Azure (read the…
Read article
Let's face it, the larger the company, the more difficult is to achieve the dream of single enterprise data warehouse (EDW). In a typical mid-size to large organization, data is found in many data repositories and integrating all this data is difficult. I'm doing an assessment and strategy engagement now for a unit in a large organization, and they need access to at least 10…
Read article
I'm doing a full-day Power BI Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) for SQL Saturday BI on Friday, December 9th for only $129. I'm also sponsoring the event and presenting "Embed Interactive Reports in Your Apps" presentation on Saturday at 9 AM. SQL Saturday Atlanta BI Edition is proud to announce this full day training, register at https://powerbidiad.eventbrite.com today! Power BI Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) is a…
Read article
Despite the mantra you might hear elsewhere, my experience shows that the best self-service BI is empowering users to create reports from trusted semantic models sanctioned and owned by IT. Most of the implementation work I do involves Analysis Services in one form or another. Analysis Services has a very important role in your BI ecosystem as I explain in the "Why Semantic Layer" newsletter.…
Read article
Power BI Desktop is becoming an increasing popular tool for self-service reporting. But it has a glaring gap. Unlike Excel, it doesn't currently support an object model for automating tasks. Yet, there are a variety of scenarios that call for task automation, such as refreshing imported data. For example, one customer wanted to show a Power BI Desktop dashboard on a shared monitor that will…
Read article
The first public demo of the highly anticipated Power BI report embedding feature in SSRS 2016 on premises came from Microsoft Ignite. Scroll to the 58 minute in the Ricardo Muti's "Create a modern enterprise reporting and mobile BI solution with SQL Server 2016" video and enjoy! I expect more details at SQL PASS SUMMIT at the end of this month. Thanks to Dan English…
Read article
The September update of Power BI Desktop adds one of the most requested features – time series forecasting on single line charts. You can control the confidence interval and seasonality. To use forecasting, make sure that you add a field of Date data type to the chart axis. Only when a date field is used, then you'll see the Forecast section added to the Analytics…
Read article
