I’ve covered my first impression about Microsoft Fabric in a series of blogs starting with this one. In the recap, I said that certain features might benefit organizations that are already on Power BI Premium because all Fabric features are available in Power BI Premium plans. However, as they stand, features such as Lakehouse Copy to Table (no automated synchronization), ADF pipelines (no connectivity to…
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Microsoft Fabric is upon us with a grand fanfare. You can get a good overview of its vision and capabilities by watching the Microsoft Fabric Launch Digital Event (Day 1) and Microsoft Fabric Launch Digital Event (Day 2) recordings. Consultants and experts are extolling its virtues and busy fully aligning with Microsoft. There is a lot of stuff going on in Fabric and I'm planning…
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Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems capture a wealth of information from main business processes within an organization, such as Sales, Inventory, Orders, etc. Therefore, a BI journey typically starts with analyzing the ERP data, with revenue analytics usually taking the center stage because of its vital metrics, such Revenue, Margin, Profit. In fact, this scenario has repeated so often for the past few years that…
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There has been a lot of noise surrounding a data lakehouse nowadays, so I felt the urge to chime in. In fact, the famous guy in cube, Patrick LeBlanc, gave a great presentation on this subject to our Atlanta Power BI Group and you can find the recording here (I have to admit we could have done better job with the recording quality, but we are still learning in…
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A few days ago an exalted customer shared that they've acquired Synapse and now they're ready for Power BI modeling. He just wasn't sure how to give business users access to Synapse so cool self-service BI can finally start. In the process of the conversation, it became clear that he opened Synapse Studio and was left with the impression that Synapse has semantic modeling features.…
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BI implementation shortcuts are tempting and disguise themselves as cost-effective. True, you can slap a Power BI dataset on top of your data (the cornerstone of self-service BI), but most BI implementations will greatly benefit from a datamart, irrespective of the propaganda of self-service BI vendors. I explain the benefits of datamarts vs Power BI datasets directly on data sources in my blog “Datasets vs.…
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The workhorse of any modern BI solution is the semantic model that provides unparallel performance and contains business logic and security roles. Microsoft BI gives us three options to host semantic model: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), Azure Analysis Services (AAS), and Power BI. This newsletter explains why it might be beneficial to consider AAS and includes a script for automating resuming, processing, and synchronizing a…
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Nowadays, it’s unlikely to envision a data analytics solution without ingesting data from some cloud vendor. Unfortunately, as many of you have found out the hard way, moving to the cloud, such as moving your on-prem ERP system to the vendor's cloud offering, comes at a huge burden – you relinquish control to the vendor and lose access to your data. In this letter, I'll…
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Happy Holidays! More and more organizations consider data virtualization to abstract the underlying storage and integrate siloed sources. In this letter, I'll discuss a real-life project that used PolyBase to expose third-party ERP data as SQL tables. Before I get to the subject of this newsletter, I'm excited to announce the seventh edition of my "Applied Microsoft Power BI" book. It should be available on…
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LabCorp operates one of the largest clinical laboratory networks in the world. It also has an Interactive Response Technology system that healthcare vendors can use to conduct case studies. Thanks to the cloud data analytics solution implemented by Prologika, LabCorp and its vendors can now analyze data across case studies. Read this newsletter to learn more about the solution architecture and business value. Business…
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