Have you looked at your BI spend recently? Sometimes, I'm puzzled by the enormous spending in "this is how we've always done it" initiatives that probably could be replaced and done much more efficiently with modern technology and cloud computing. I had a recent conversation with a Chief Analytical Officer of one of the US largest financial organizations. They have outsourced hosting of their 5…
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I'm presenting in person "What's New for BI in SQL Server 2016" for the SQL User Group in Birmingham, AL tomorrow, July 19th starting at 6 PM local time. Steel City SQL July 2016 Meeting Language: English Event Type: In-Person Online Meeting URL: None RSVP URL: https://steelcitysqljul2016.eventbrite.com Join us Tuesday the 19th in Room 311 of Russell Hall on the Samford University campus for the July meeting of Steel…
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Sometimes, you might run into a scenario that requires an aggregate over an aggregate. Consider the following report: The AvgOrderAmount has a simple calculation: SUM(Sales)/SUM(Qty). This calculation is applied uniformly. The Total line would divide 300/7 and will return 42.86. However, what is the user wants the result in the DesiredAvgOrderAmt column which produces a simple average over the details (50+40)/2. This could be accomplished by…
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One great feature of Microsoft BI has been the continuum from personal BI to organizational BI. For example, a business user can start small with an Excel Power Pivot model which IT can restore at some point to a scalable Tabular model. In fact, if you know Microsoft personal BI (Power Pivot or Power BI Desktop), you already know 80% (or even more) of SSAS…
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A large publicly-traded organization is currently standardizing on Power BI as a single BI platform as a replacement of Qlik and Tableau. They analysts have prepared a gap analysis of Power BI missing features. On the list was QlikSense variables. The idea is simple. The user is presented with a slicer that shows a list of measures. When the user selects a measure, all visualizations…
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DAX is very powerful but it could entail a steep learning curve for novice users. Power BI Desktop has started on the road of delivering pre-packaged calculations. The first one is Percent of Grand Total. Once you add a measure to the Values zone, you can expand the measure drop-down and click Quick Calc. This is similar to how you would pick one of the…
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Why Choose Power BI as BI Platform Are you deciding which BI platform to adopt? With so many vendors and products, you are not alone and the choice is far from easy. For the past few months, I've consulted with and mentored several large publicly traded companies to help them understand the benefits of Power BI and teach their staff on how to get the most…
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I helped a customer to implement ADOMD.NET connection pooling with the goal to increase significantly the query throughput. Their predictive service platform had to scale to thousands of queries per minute. However, as it stands, ADOMD.NET doesn't have connection pooling. Normally, this is not an issue (see the implementation details of how SSAS handles connections here), but in this case the application was constantly opening…
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In my opinion, every mid-size to large organization should have a solution for master data management. Based on my observations, data quality issues have reached a pandemic level. Ironically, putting a "lipstick on the pig" with some cool visualizations appears to have a higher priority on the BI roadmap but it's just masking the underlying issues. The focus should be on centralizing data management and improving…
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I taught Power BI to a large organization this week. Naturally, they were interested in sharing content across multiple departments and even entire organization. Let's revisit the sharing options available in Power BI which I summarize in the following table. Simple sharing – This is the only option available in Power BI Free. It allows sharing real-only dashboards and underlying reports to a small audience,…
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