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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on August 28

MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, August 28th, Tuesday at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta (our regular venue room is being renovated). If you haven't been at the new MS office, prepare to be impressed! Mark Tabladillo, Ph.D, from Microsoft will show you how to advanced analytics with Power BI. Accelebrate will sponsor…

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Conducting Two General Enrollment Workshops in Atlanta

I rarely teach classes open to the public so take advantage of this exclusive opportunity to increase your data IQ! After course completion and by the end of the year, all course attendees will receive a free, one-hour, follow-up consultation with me on any Power BI or SQL Server related topic. Register today for these in-person and instructor-led training events as seating is limited. 2-Day…

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Finding Data Movement Bottlenecks

As you've heard, data volumes are increasing and putting pressure on BI practitioners to do more with less within ever shrinking processing windows. I've provided some ETL best practices in various blogs, such as my "Is ETL (E)ating (T)hou (L)ive?" newsletter. A few additional considerations regarding data movement bottlenecks came from two recent projects targeting SQL Server. Slow Network If you're loading data from data…

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A First Look at Power BI Aggregations

During the "Building a data model to support 1 trillion rows of data and more with Microsoft Power BI Premium" presentation at the Business Applications Summit, Microsoft discussed the technical details of how the forthcoming "Aggregations" feature can help you implement fast summarized queries on top of huge datasets. Following incremental refresh and composite models, aggregations are the next "pro" feature that debuts in Power…

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Understanding Power BI Dual Storage

The July release of Power BI Desktop introduced composite models, which I wrote about in my blog "Power BI Composite Models: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly" Composite models make data acquisition much more flexible but also more complex. A Power BI table can now be configured in one of these storage modes: Import – The table caches the data. All Power BI features work.…

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Great Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting Last Night

A good turnout last night for our Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group July meeting. Some 60+ attended the meeting at the MTC office at Avalon. Kudos to Scott Fairbanks for the great presentation and CCG for sponsoring the meeting. Thanks to Microsoft for hosting us. We'll make the slides available shortly at http://atlantabi.pass.org/Resources.aspx.

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Power BI News from the Microsoft Business Applications Summit

If you haven't done so, watch the "Power BI and the Future for Modern and Enterprise BI" presentation from the Business Applications Summit (July 22-24) to find where Microsoft is bringing Power BI in the next few months. Power BI Service Scale and Adoption 19M data models hosted 58M monthly publish to web views 8M+ report and dashboard queries/hour Power BI a top 10 fastest…

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Power BI Composite Models: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The July 2018 preview of Power BI Desktop delivers two killer preview features that solidify the Power BI position as the best data modeling tool for personal BI on the market. First, Microsoft relaxes the Power BI relationship limitations by letting you create M:M joins between two tables. Second, you can now create a composite (hybrid) data model with different storage modes, such as from…

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on July 30

MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, July 30th at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta (our regular venue room is being renovated). If you haven't been at the new MS office, prepare to be impressed! Scott Fairbanks from CCG will show you how to create a tailored user experience with Power BI. Your…

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Implementing a Default Date Filter in Tabular and Power BI

Problem: A long standing limitation in Analysis Services Tabular and Power BI is the lack of default members, such as to default a Date dimension to the last date with data. Users find this annoying, especially for time calculations which require a date context and won't produce results until you add a date-related field to the report one way or other. To aggravate things even…

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