Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, October 5th at 18:30 ET. Sivakumar (Director Digital, Data, and Analytics at Clarkston Consulting) will share best practices from the field on how to build a Fabric medallion architecture. Prologika will sponsor this meeting. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Advanced Food: Pizza and…
My “Open Semantic Interchange (OSI)” post was an intro to the this relatively new standard. Fast forward, OSI was accepted into the Apache Incubator in June 2026 and is now known as Apache Ossie. Lo and behold, Microsoft is now prominently listed on ossie.apache.org/ecosystem. In fact, Microsoft engineers authored a bidirectional Power BI / Fabric converter that merged into the project on September 16, 2026.…
Snowflake is an increasingly popular option for data warehousing. One nice Snowflake feature is the ability to configure a table to save its data in Iceberg file format in the Snowflake own managed storage or external storage, including S3, GCS, ADLS Gen 2, and OneLake. As I wrote in the post “Give Me Your Data!”, Fabric supports shortcuts to Iceberg tables, in which case the…
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…
