Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Tuesday, September 8th at 18:30 ET. Eric Hood (Center of Excellence lead for Fabric Planning - PowerTable at Lumel) will introduce you to newly announced Fabric Planning, which brings enterprise planning directly into Microsoft Fabric and unifies analytics, planning, and decision making on a single trusted data foundation. Lumel will sponsor this…
In my last post, I ranted about Excel connected tables backed by Power BI semantic models. For years, I’ve heard from clients that all they wanted was to dump query results into regular Excel tables so they could use standard formulas. Connected tables achieved this using DAX instead of MDX for faster queries—except clients still wanted those tables to be interactive, just like PivotTables. On…
Ask a business user where they want to work with the data, and Excel would probably top the list. Regardless of how hard we try to lure users away from it, Excel remains the endpoint of self-service BI for many organizations. I have clients who have built custom apps or purchased Excel add-ins simply to get data into Excel—or manipulate it once it gets there.…
Atlanta BI fans, please join us online for our next meeting on Monday, August 3rd at 18:30 ET. Dean Jurecic will introduce you to Fabric IQ that helps organizations unleash AI on top of your enterprise data. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Beginner/Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:30-19:00 Organizer time (events, news, sponsor…
Atlanta BI fans, please join us online for our next meeting on Monday, July 6th at 18:30 ET. James Serra (Data & AI Solution Architect at Microsoft) will show you how AI can transform our interaction with structured data, providing practical applications for enhanced automation, decision-making, and efficiency in data analysis. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: Online via MS…
The June release of Power BI Desktop includes a preview of a new Power BI slicer configuration - Date Picker. It’s meant to solve two issues with report design. The first one is letting the user select a single date by configuring the Date Picker using the Manual selection. Yes, it took a decade, so we must appreciate the engineering effort to get this implemented,…
An excited enterprise client came back from a conference where Snowflake delighted them with AI demos and semantic views built on Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) standard. Snowflake even went further to show how their Cortex Analyst tool returns deterministic AI answers. Naturally, given their existing investments in Snowflake data lake and ODS, the client questioned why we don’t build everything in Snowflake instead of bringing…
If Microsoft Fabric was the Statue of Liberty, the inscription would be “Give me your data”. Fabric is obsessed with owning the data when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. As I wrote before, this pattern was probably borrowed from Palantir and to align Fabric with the push for “modern” medallion architectures. Or, to establish a permanent dependency on Fabric… Auto-replicating data to Fabric…
Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, June 1st at 18:30 ET. Elayne Jones (Senior Solution Engineer at Microsoft) will show you how to build enterprise-ready agents with Copilot Studio. These agents can source data from a variety of data sources including Fabric Data Agents. I will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up, visit our…
In a previous post, I referred to an engagement where we used the Fabric Copy Job activity to replicate Google BigQuery tables to Fabric, so we can use Direct Lake semantic models. A few months later, the client reported that they pivoted from the Copy Job to notebooks using the Spark BigQuery connector for two main benefits: Much better copy performance – Although the Copy…
