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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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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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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Problem: Consider the following Power BI report that shows the sum of ResellerSales[SalesAmount] by SalesTerritory[SalesTerritoryCountry], Employee[FullName], and ResellerSales[SalesOrderNumber]. This report is based on the following schema consisting of three tables. However, If there isn't a direct relationship between ResellerSales and Employee, the moment you add an unsummarized field from the second table on the many side, such as Employee[FullName] after adding SalesTerritoryCountry and ResellerSales[SalesOrderNumber), you'll…
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Got awarded for Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Data Platform again. This will make my 15th consecutive year to be recognized by Microsoft for my expertise and contributions to the community! Learn more about the MVP program at https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/Overview.
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A large company uses the SAP HANA ERP system. Users requires real-time access to transactional data. To avoid performance degradation, SLT replication (trigger-based change data capture) replicates data to another SAP HANA system that is used solely for reporting. The problem is that the more detailed the report gets and the more columns it has, the slower it gets and SAP HANA throws out of…
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Microsoft Common Data Services BI and data integration projects often benefit from an operational data source (ODS), whose benefits and design I discussed in my "Designing an Operational Data Store (ODS)" newsletter. A corporate ODS typically fall into the organizational BI area, which means that it's implemented and sanctioned by IT. Wouldn't be nice to let Business stage the data needed for business applications and…
Read article MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, June 25th at 6:30 PM. Your humble correspondent will share 10 ways Power BI can help augment your existing or envisioned Power BI strategy. DevScope will sponsor the meeting and demo their PowerBI Robots offering. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget to RSVP (use the RSVP survey on…
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UPDATE 11/15/2018: Common Data Service for Analytics is superseded by Power BI dataflows. Find the updated review here. In a previous blog I discussed the Common Data Service for Apps (CDS for Apps). I explained that CDS for Apps is more suitable for OLTP-type applications, which is why its main client is PowerApps apps saving data in normalized tables. Since good things shouldn't come alone,…
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Power BI churns out new features fast but not all features are available everywhere. As one of the most confusing aspects of Power BI, feature availability depends on the data acquisition method (data import vs live connections) and across Power BI product offerings (Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Power BI Report Server, and Power BI Mobile). Microsoft has left gaps in the product documentation…
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