I'm excited to announce my latest book: "Applied DAX with Power BI: From zero to hero with 15-minute lessons". This book was born out of necessity. In my consulting practice, I had been teaching and implementing Power BI and Analysis Services Tabular, and people were constantly asking for DAX book recommendations. Indeed, DAX is not an easy topic and has its ways to humble even…
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Scenario: You have a dimension table and a fact table, and you want to generate some test data, such by randomly looking up a value from the dimension table for each row in the fact table. The following DAX formula should get the job done but RANDBETWEEN doesn't work (although it works as a standalone function outside LOOKUPVALUE). Specifically, you get either the same value…
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Business Performance Management (BPM) is a methodology to help the company predict its performance. An integral part of a BPM strategy is a process for Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting which is typically performed by the Finance department. When it comes to Finance, nothing is simple, and BPM is no exception. This diagram illustrates what typical data movement might look like to consolidate BPM areas into…
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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on May 6, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Patrick LeBlanc, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, will show us how to integrate Power BI and Flow for geospatial analytics. I'll showcase Power BI Report Builder. TEKSystems will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget…
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SSRS is near and dear to my heart. My first book ("Microsoft Reporting Services in Action" published in 2004 by Manning) was on this subject and I became an MVP because of my contributions around SSRS back in those days. Because of this and because every good thing should come in two, I rejoiced when I heard Microsoft announcing the Power BI Report Builder to complement the…
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If "XMLA" doesn't ring a bell especially in the context of Power BI, it stands for Extensible Markup Language for Analysis. Still puzzled? It's the protocol of Analysis Services (Multidimensional and Tabular). So, when an Excel or Power BI sends a query to a cube, it's encoded according the XMLA specification (an XML-based format). And, the XMLA endpoint is the web service endpoint that Analysis…
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Confused by magic quadrants? Curious about their internals, such as how companies move from one quadrant to another? GeekAndPoke came up with this much needed resource that explains it all. No words necessary! Happy April 1st!
Read article MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on April 1, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Considering all the the momentum behind machine learning, the main presentation will be "Microsoft Citizen Data Science with Power BI" by Stacey Jones, a Principal Data Solution Architect at Microsoft. I'll do a brief overview of the brand new Modeling…
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At least five of the top 10 IT trends in 2019 identified by Gartner involve machine learning in one form or the other. The list includes autonomous things, augmented analytics, AI-driven development, digital twins, and immersive experience. Gartner also predicts that by 2022, at least 40 percent of new application development projects will have machine learning (ML). Therefore, it's not surprising to see vendors making…
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Scenario: If you want to pass an input table to a DAX query. For example, you might have an application that lets the user specify a subset of customers and as-of dates for each customer. Your query needs to calculate certain metrics, such as Sales, for the list of customers but as of the user-specified date for each customer, and potentially other parameters. It's impractical…
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