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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What's New in SQL Server 2016 for BI? On a personal note, I'm excited to announce the launch of the new Prologika website (https://prologika.com), which adds a slew of new features to connect better with customers and readers, including site-wide search, responsive web design, case studies, book and blog discussion lists, and more to come. Although the old blog feed should still work, please update…
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Power BI and You I'm excited to announce the availability of my latest (7th) book - Applied Microsoft Power BI! Currently, this is the only book on Power BI. The book page has more information about the book, including the front matter (with foreword by Jen Underwood), source code, and a sample chapter (Chapter 1 "Introduction to Power BI"). You can order the paper copy…
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Is ETL (E)ating (T)hou (L)ive? Before we get to the subject of this newsletter, I'm happy to announce the availability of my latest class - Applied Power BI Service. As you've probably heard by now, Power BI Service (or Power BI 2.0) is the Microsoft latest cloud-based analytics service with a simple promise: 5 seconds to sign up, 5 minutes to wow! If you're ready…
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What's New for BI in Office 2016? While you might be still trying to convince management to upgrade to Office 2013, the next version of MicrosoftOffice (Office 2016) is on the horizon and scheduled to be released sometime in the Fall. Meanwhile, you can download and test the Public Preview. Naturally, you might wonder what's new for BI given that Excel is the Microsoft premium…
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A while back I met with a client that was considering overhauling their BI. They asked me if the traditional data warehousing still makes sense or should they consider a logical data warehouse, Big Data, or some other "modern variant". This newsletter discusses where data warehousing is going and explains how different data architectures complement instead of compete with each other. QUO VADIS DATA…
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After an appetizer of embedded Power View reports , Microsoft proceeded to the main course that is a true Christmas gift – a pubic preview of what's coming in its Power BI offering. For the lack of a better term, I'll call it Power BI.NEXT. In this newsletter, you'll see why Power BI.NEXT is much more than just an incremental release of the Office 365…
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According to Gartner, one main data analytics trend this year and beyond will be predictive analytics. "Increasing competition, cost and regulatory pressures will motivate business leaders to adopt more prescriptive analytics, making business decisions smarter and more repeatable and reducing personnel costs". Prologika has been helping our customers implement predictive analytics for revenue forecasting, outlier detection, and train data scientists in predictive analytics. This newsletter…
Read article During the Day 1 keynote at the 2014 BA Conference, Microsoft committed to BI on your terms. They said that all new features will be eventually available both on premises and in the cloud. We've also learned that hybrid scenarios will be possible in near future, such as hosting Power View and SSRS reports in the cloud connected to on-prem data sources. Based on my…
Read article I hope you are enjoying the beginning of the spring. The focus of this newsletter is self-service BI with Microsoft Power BI. But before I start, I strongly encourage those of you in the Southeast USA to register and attend the SQL Saturday Atlanta event which will be held this year on May 3rd. We had a record attendance last year with some 570 people…
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