Looking for easy ways to create intelligent bots or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) apps? Microsoft Copilot Studio should help. After a year of letting it (and other Microsoft LLM offerings) simmer and inspired by the latest hoopla from the Ignite conference, I took another look at Microsoft Copilot Studio and share my findings in this newsletter. For the uninitiated, Copilot Studio lets you implement AI-powered smart bots…
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I’ve been recently impressed with xAI Grok compared to Microsoft Copilot. Grok performs better that Copilot which seems to be crippled with political correctness to a point of absurdity although it seems to be getting more permissive of late. But the most important Grok advantage is that it’s always recent… and it doesn’t crash every now and then. A couple of examples: Question: Where is…
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Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, February 3rd at 18:30 ET. Jeff Levy (Data Architect @ Protiviti) will present the core concepts, architectures, and use cases of the Fabric Warehouse and Fabric Lakehouse. Your humble correspondent will walk you through the most significant Power BI and Fabric enhancements of late. For more details and sign up, visit…
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I had the privilege to participate in the early preview program of the new TMDL View in Power BI Desktop which is currently in public preview in the latest January release of Power BI Desktop. Without reiterating what was said in the announcement, I’d like to mention three main benefits of this feature: Ability to access the entire model metadata - This includes features don’t…
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I conducted recently an assessment for a client facing memory pressure in Power BI Premium. You know these pesky out of memory errors when refreshing a biggish dataset. They started with P1, moved to P2, and now are on P3 but still more memory is needed to satisfy the memory appetite of full refresh. The runtime memory footprint of the problematic semantic model with imported…
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Some of the most difficult and tedious issues in almost every BI project are handling data quality issues (aka exceptions) and data enrichment. Examples of data quality issues typically originate from wrong data entries or violated business rules, such as misspelled and misclassified products. Data enrichment tasks may go beyond the design of the original data source, such as introducing new taxonomies for products or…
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"A momentary lapse of reason That binds a life to a life You won't regret, you will never forget There'll be no sleep in here tonight" "The Slip", Pink Floyd Happy Thanksgiving! What a better way for me to spend a Thanksgiving week than doing more AI? After a year of letting it (and other Microsoft LLM offerings) simmer and awaken by the latest AI…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us online for our next meeting on Monday, December 2nd at 5PM ET (please note the change to our usual meeting time to accommodate the presenter). Rui Romano (Product Manager at Microsoft) will discuss how the new TMDL language for Power BI models can unlock new scenarios that previously weren't possible. For more details and sign up, visit our group…
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I like SQL Server temporal tables for implementing ODS-style tables and change data tracking (CDS) for three main reasons: SQL Server maintains the system versioning. By contrast, I have witnessed erroneous Start/End dates for pretty much all home grown implementation. Further, SQL Server grains the changes at millisecond level. There is a clean separation between the current state of data and historical data. SQL Server…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, November 4th at 6:30 PM ET. Stacey Jones (Principal Data & AI Cross-Solution Architect at Microsoft) and Elayne Jones (Solutions Architect at Coca-Cola Bottlers Sales and Services) will explore the AI and Copilot capabilities within Microsoft Fabrics. And I'll help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. I will sponsor the…
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