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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on November 1st

Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting today (Monday, October 4th), at 6:30 PM ET.  Sandeep Pawar will explain how to use the Power BI AI visuals for predictive insights. And your humble correspondent will show you how to use the Power BI REST APIs.  For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Presentation: Demystifying…

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PolyBase Adventures

I'm setting SQL Server 2019 PolyBase for ODBC to JDBC access to a vendor data lake to virtualize entities as SQL tables. Overall, a smooth experience with a few gotchas: Data type mappings The vendor lake uses Oracle data types TIMESTAMP AT TIME ZONE and BOOLEAN that Java doesn't know how to map. The solution was to set up a view in the data lake…

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on October 4th

Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting today (Monday, October 4th), at 6:30 PM ET.  Reda Raz (RADACAD) will share best practices on semantic modelling with Power BI. And your humble correspondent will show two new features: Get Insights and Power BI Goals.  For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Presentation: Power BI Modeling…

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Drillthrough Paginated Reports

I'm helping a client convert a few SSRS reports from SharePoint to Power BI Premium Per User (PPU). SSRS is of course near and dear to my heart because of all the work I've done around it circa 2004-2010 (yep, it's been that long), books, MVP awards, etc. Since its humble beginnings, SSRS have had a solid architecture that excelled in extensibility. You'd be hardly…

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Chasing SSAS Connection Timeouts

Suppose you have a Tabular model and you send a massive DAX query to it that could run for hours, such as to calculate many measures (in our case hundreds) for each customer overnight so that you can cache the results and delight the user with super-fast lookups. This issue could also apply to Multidimensional although in this case Tabular was used. The server times…

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Azure Data Factory is Getting Better All the Time

Three years ago, I wrote that it would probably take a decade for to mature and close the gap with SSIS. To its credit thought, while it's still lagging in the area of extensibility, ADF added features that we don't have in SSIS so I'm developing a taste for it: Schema drift – Suppose you want to automatically stage new columns as they added to…

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on August 2nd

Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, August 2nd, at 6:30 PM.  Avi Singh (LearnPowerBI.com) will discuss how you can achieve a successful Power BI career.  For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Presentation: How to Create a Successful Power BI Career Without the Struggle (By "Niching Down") Date: August 2nd Time:…

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Interactive Excel Pivots in Power BI

A long-standing limitation of Power BI has been that Excel pivot reports connected to external Analysis Services models can't be interacted with when uploaded to Power BI Service. You get the cached pivot report but any attempt to interact with the report online (that is in Excel Online), such as to change a slicer or filter, would result in an error complaining that the connection…

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Cloud Inhibitors

In a previous blog, I said I consider it a travesty when a vendor's cloud offering prohibits direct access to the data in its native storage, which is typically a relational database, and therefore a perfect store for data analytics and integration, such as to run real-time analytics or export the data to load a data mart. There is nothing simpler than connecting to a…

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Synapse Serverless: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

When you a provision a Synapse workspace, you get a serverless endpoint for free (or almost free). This endpoint represents Synapse Serverless: a query service for ad-hoc exploration of data in CVS, Parquet, and JSON files stored in Azure Data Lake. The Good Being able to query files using SQL is great. Some of you might remember the U-SQL language that was introduced a few…

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