MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on March 4th, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. The main presentation will be "Power BI Architecture" by Paco Gonzalez from SolidQ. Eric Flamm will do us Prototypes with Pizza on configuring a Power BI visual for mobile layout. SolidQ will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group…
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The 2019 Gartner Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms is out and Microsoft BI aficionados like your humble correspondent have all the reasons to rejoice. Say whatever you want about Gartner but the quadrant is a great testimonial for Power BI and I think the highest score was overdue. Microsoft still has tons of work on the visualization side of things but I'm glad that Gartner…
Read article MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on February 4th, Monday at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. The main presentation will be "Azure Data Lake for First Time Swimmers" by Samara Soucy from Innovative Architects. Julies Smith will do us Prototypes with Pizza on "Python Fuzzy Wuzzy for Master Data Identity Mapping". Innovative Architects will sponsor…
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xVelocity (the storage engine behind Tabular, Power BI and columnstore indexes) is an in-memory columnar database, and it's such it's not suitable for detail-level reports, such as transaction-level reports. I wrote about performance implications with xVelocity and detail-level reporting here and here. In general, the lower the report grain and the more columns you add to the report (customer first name, last name, invoice number,…
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I taught my Applied Power BI class last week to a group of smart data analysts. All of them were knowledgeable of T-SQL, which they have been using extensively for years to shape and transform the data and produce SSRS, Qlik and now Power BI reports. They haven't previously used Power Query, but they liked my overview of its features. However, they were rightfully confused…
Read article MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on January 7th, Monday at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. The main presentation will be "Predictive Analytics with Power BI". I'll walk you through the existing Power BI features for predictive analytics. Mark Tabladillo will show you exiting AI features that are coming up soon. CDATA will sponsor the…
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I'm excited to announce the fourth edition of my Applied Microsoft Power BI book! When the original book was published in January 2016, it was the first Power BI book at that time and it had less than 300 pages. Since then, I helped many companies adopt or transition to Power BI and taught hundreds of students. It's been a great experience to witness the…
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Power BI lets you share content directly with external users for B2B and B2C scenarios. When the benefits of this sharing option outweigh its limitations (read-only reports, requiring Azure AD federated access, per-user licensing, rendering the report inside Power BI), this is the easiest way to share Power BI content with an external party. However, the documentation, which is otherwise excellent, doesn't explain the steps…
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Happy Holidays! I hope you're enjoying this special time of the year. According to Gartner, "poor data quality is hitting organizations where it hurts – to the tune of $15 million as the average annual financial cost in 2017". Data integration is another huge challenge, you know it and I know it. Microsoft hopes that Power BI dataflows will help data analysts tackle these issues…
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If you have used SSRS, you know that paginated reports are very customizable, and you can make almost any property expression-based. Power BI is yet to deliver expression-based properties to change settings based on runtime condition, such as to change the font style based on the actual value or user selection. Currently, there are two places where you can use a DAX measure for expression-based…
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