Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, September 11th, at 6:30 PM ET. Shabnam Waston (BI Consultant and Microsoft MVP) will introduce us to the Lakehouse engine in Microsoft Fabric. Shabnam will also sponsor the meeting. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE…
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Currency conversion is a common requirement, such as when implementing analytics on top of ERP sales data recorded in multiple currencies. The most flexible approach is to allow the user to select a currency and perform the conversion at runtime, ideally by centralizing the conversion code in Power BI calculation groups. However, this approach has several shortcomings: Based on my experience, the most common requirement…
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Poor data quality is one of the most challenging hurdles for successful data analytics. The story typically goes like this. The client has a flexible line of business system that people tend to use and abuse, such as entering garbage in free-form text fields that shouldn't be free-form to start with. There is no data stewardship or data entry oversight. I'm not blaming anyone because…
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I've done a few BI integration projects extracting data from ERPs running on IBM Db2. Most of the implementations would use a hybrid architecture where the ERP would be running on an on-prem mainframe while the data was loaded in Microsoft Azure. Here are a few tips if you're facing this challenge: IBM provides JDBC, ODBC, and OLE DB drivers. The JDBC driver is not…
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This took a while to figure out…so someone might find it useful. Scenario: You have set up two Azure Data Factory instances for DEV and PROD environment. The DEV environment uses a self-hosted integration runtime to read data from on-prem data sources. The day has come to deploy your masterpiece to PROD. You share the DEV self-hosted runtime with the production ADF instance. You export…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, August 7th, at 6:30 PM ET. James Serra (Data & AI Solution Architect at Microsoft) will join us remotely to introduce us to Microsoft Fabric. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE A CHANGE TO OUR MEETING POLICY. WE HAVE DISCONTINUED ONLINE MEETINGS VIA TEAMS. THIS GROUP MEETS…
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Did I disappoint you? Or leave a bad taste in your mouth? You act like you never had love And you want me to go without U2 In previous posts, I shared my initial impression of the recently announced Microsoft Fabric and its main engines. Now that we have the Fabric licensing and pricing, I'm ready to wrap up my review with a few parting…
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In retrospect, I'd say I owe 50% of my BI career to Analysis Services and its flavors: Multidimensional, Tabular, and later Power BI. This is why I closely follow how this technology evolves. Fast forwarding to Fabric, there are no dramatic changes. Unlike the other two Fabric Engines (Lakehouse and Warehouse), Power BI datasets haven't embraced the delta lake file format to store its data…
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Is it getting better? Or do you feel the same? Will it make it easier on you now? You got someone to blame U2 Likely influenced by the Gartner's Fabric vision, Microsoft Fabric is eclipsing all things Power BI nowadays to the extent of replacing the strong Power BI brand and logo with Fabric's. Now that the red star Synapse has imploded into a black…
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Oops, I did it again I played with your heart Got lost in the game… Britney Spears In previous posts, I shared my thoughts about Fabric OneLake, Lakehouse, and Data Warehouse. They are of course useless if there is no way to get data in and out of Fabric. Data integration and data quality is usually the most difficult part of implementing a BI solution,…
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