Rounding up the wisdom from the inscriptions of the Apollo Temple (see the Nothing in Excess and Know Thyself posts), the last known famous inscription was "Make a pledge and trouble is at hand." Although the original intention was lost in time, it's believed that this inscription instructs us to understand our limits so we don't overpromise. Fast forward to modern data analytics, I remember…
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The February 2024 release of Power BI Desktop includes a preview of visual calculations. As its name suggests, a visual calculation is a visual-scoped DAX measure that works at the aggregate (visual) level. The Good Visual calculations make previously difficult tasks much easier. Consider the following matrix: Suppose you need a measure that calculates the difference between the product categories in the order they were…
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Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for the next meeting on Monday, March 4th at 6:30 PM ET. The famous Patrick LeBlanc (Guy in the Cube) will take a deep dive into the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, from Lakehouse to Warehouses and Power BI, ensuring you can make informed decisions about your data processing needs. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on…
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In my last post, I talked about the lessons learned from the ancient Greeks. The second inscription on the temple of Apollo in Delphi was "Nothing in Excess." Yet, inspired to be modern and embracing vendor's propaganda, it's my experience that companies tend to overdo their data architectures. I talked about this in this newsletter. Another excellent resource that could help you strike a balance…
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Last year my wife and I did a tour of Greece, and we had a blast. Greece, of course, is the place to go if you are interested in ancient history and the origin of democracy. One of the places we visited was Delphi. The ancient Greeks believed it to be the center of the universe. Now not much was left of it except lots…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, February 5th at 6:30 PM ET. Note that this will be an online meeting via MS Teams and non-Atlanta BI fans are also welcome. Kristyna Hughes (Senior Consultant with 3Cloud) will show us how to implement source control for Power BI reports. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI…
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Last year around this time, I went to Antarctica on an expedition ship. Although I got my fair share of icebergs, whales, and penguins, I found it interesting to reproduce some of the experience of the first explorers. On our way back, we got it pretty rough crossing the Drake passage. 80% of the passengers succumbed to sea sickness. There was a huge swell during…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, January 8th, at 6:30 PM ET. Eric Flamm will review paginated (SSRS) reports in Power BI. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Presentation: Getting Started with Power BI Paginated Reports Delivery: In-person Date: January 9 Time: 18:30…
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What a better way to spend a lazy holiday afternoon than to do more Fabric performance testing? In my previous post, I shared my results from a single-threaded ETL load test to gauge the F2 ingest performance and F2 did pretty well (or at least outperformed Azure SQL DB). Will F2 hold as parallelism increases? Throughput testing is especially important for report loads because parallel…
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As inspired by Amir Netz's encouragement to partners to test the Fabric F2 capacity performance, I got on a quest to test what it would do to ETL loads for Fabric Warehouse. I must admit that I was skeptical that a quarter of a core would take a warehouse off the ground, but as usual, life proved me wrong and "wrong" is a big understatement…
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