• SaaS Losers and Winners: Paylocity and Element

    November 19, 2025 / No Comments »

    “We are sailing to Philadelphia A world away from the coaly Tyne Sailing to Philadelphia To draw the line The Mason-Dixon line” “Sailing to Philadelphia”, Mark Knopfler As I’ve said in the past, I consider it a travesty when a SaaS provider disallows direct access to the data in its native storage, such as by ODBC and OLE DB providers, and force you to use file extracts or APIs (often horrible and typically designed for app integration and not DW loads). This greatly inhibits data integration scenarios, such as extracting data for data warehousing. I wrote on this subject many times, including here, here and here. Continuing on this subject, let’s consider two other vendors: Paylocity and Element. SaaS Loser: Paylocity Like Workday, Paylocity is a popular HR cloud platform. And like Workday, Paylocity doesn’t provide direct access to their database citing “security and IP concerns”. Instead, you must resort...

  • Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on November 3rd (Semantic Link Labs: A Link to the Future)

    October 29, 2025 / No Comments »

    Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, November 3rd at 18:30 ET. Jason Romans (Microsoft MVP) will show you how to use Semantic Link Labs to troubleshoot unreliable reports and semantic models. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. Improving will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: It’s dangerous to go alone—take Semantic Link Labs! When users are the first to discover that a Power BI report is broken, the damage is already done. Trust is lost, adoption slows, and credibility suffers. Instead of wandering into these traps unprepared, what if you had the Master...

  • Replicating BigQuery to Fabric

    October 3, 2025 / No Comments »

    A recent engagement required replicating some DW tables from Google BigQuery to a Fabric Lakehouse. We considered the Fabric mirroring feature (back then in private preview, now publicly available) and learned some lessons along the way: 1. 400 Error during replication configuration – Caused by attempting to use a read-only GBQ dataset that is linked to another GBQ dataset but the link was broken. 2. Internal System Error – Again caused by GBQ linked datasets which are read-only. Fabric mirroring requires GBQ change history to be enabled on tables so that it can track changes and only mirror incremental changes after first initial load. 3 (Showstopper) The two permissions that raised security red flags are bigquery.datasets.create and bigquery.jobs.create. To grant those permissions, you must assign one of these BigQuery roles: • BigQuery Admin • BigQuery Data Editor • BigQuery Data Owner • BigQuery Studio Admin • BigQuery User All these...

  • Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on October 9th (Everything You Want to Know About SQL Databases in Fabric)

    October 3, 2025 / No Comments »

    Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Thursday, October 9th (note that we are meeting on Thursday for this meeting) at 18:30 ET. Sukhwant (Senior Product Manager, Microsoft) will explain why you should consider Fabric SQL databases. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics platform, right? Wrong! With the introduction of SQL databases last year, we now have an all-in-one data platform. During this session you will hear directly from the product team about why we added SQL databases to Fabric, who should be using them, how...

  • Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on September 8th (End-to-End Azure DevOps for Data Engineering in Microsoft Fabric)

    September 5, 2025 / No Comments »

    Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, September 8th at 18:30 ET. Jeff Levy (Data Architect @ Protiviti) will show us how to implement Azure DevOps for data engineering projects in Microsoft Fabric. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: This session explores how to implement Azure DevOps for data engineering projects in Microsoft Fabric. You'll learn the following: Version Control Lakehouse assets (Pipelines / Notebooks / SQL Objects) Manage environments with reusable YAML templates Apply CI/CD Practices via the DevOps Build and Release Pipelines The session is ideal for data engineers and...

  • Migrating Fabric Import Semantic Models to Direct Lake (Part 2)

    August 24, 2025 / No Comments »

    I’ve previously shared my experience with migrating a Fabric imported semantic model to Direct Lake. This blog follows up with additional observations about performance. The following screenshot is taken from the Fabric Capacity Metrics app and it shows the maximum metrics over 14 days. The two enclosed items of interest are the original imported semantic model (the first item on the list) and its DL counterpart (the seventh item on the list). Memory utilization As I explained in the first part, the whole reason for taking this epic journey was to solve the out-ot-memory blowouts and constant pressure to climb the Fabric capacity ladder. With 1/5 of the user audience testing the dataset in production environment, that dataset grew to a maximum of 25 GB memory utilization which is in line with the imported model. It could have been interesting to downgrade the capacity, such as to F64, and observe...

  • From Prompt to Insight: My Daily Dance with AI

    August 10, 2025 / No Comments »

    “I go checking out the reports, digging up the dirt You get to meet all sorts in this line of work And when I find the reason, I still can't get used to it And what have you got at the end of the day? What have you got to take away?” Private investigations, Dire Straits Here we go Me: “Write code to do this and that.” LLM: “I’m glad to help. Here is the code.” Me: “It doesn’t work because of this error <nasty error message follows>” LLM: “You get this error because…Here is the correct code.” Me: “Doesn’t work again because of this new error <nastier error message follows>.” LLM: “You get this error because…Here is the correction of the corrected code.” After N iterations and mutual blame, we either get eventually to working code or give up and start cursing each other. LLM usually quits first, claiming...

  • Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on August 4th (Power BI Built-in Gems: Time-Saving Features You Should Be Using)

    July 30, 2025 / No Comments »

    Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, August 4th at 18:30 ET, which marks the 15th anniversary of the Atlanta Microsoft BI Group! Lakshmi Ponnurasan (a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and a Certified Power BI specialist) will show us how to apply Power BI time-saving built-in features to create stunning and impactful reports in less time. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: Power BI is like a treasure chest packed with powerful built-in features- except these gems are often hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered. These time-saving built-in...

  • Migrating Fabric Import Semantic Models to Direct Lake

    July 20, 2025 / No Comments »

    I’ve recently written about strategies for addressing memory pressures with Fabric large semantic models and I mentioned that one of them was switching to Direct Lake. This blog captures my experience of migrating a real-life import semantic model to Direct Lake. About the project In this case, the client had a 40 GB semantic model with 250 million rows spread across two fact tables. The semantic model imported data from a Google BigQuery (GBQ) data warehouse. The client applied every trick in the book to optimize the model, but they’ve found themselves forced to upgrade from a Power BI P1 to P2 to P3 capacity. I’ve written in the past about my frustration with Power BI/Fabric capacity resource limits. While the 25 GB RAM grant of a P1/F64 capacity for each dataset is generous for smaller semantic models, such as for self-service BI, it’s inadequate for large organizational semantic models....

  • Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on July 7nd (Getting Started with Copilot in Microsoft Fabric)

    July 1, 2025 / No Comments »

    Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, July 7nd at 18:30 ET. Shabnam Watson (BI consultant and Microsoft MVP) will introduce you to Microsoft Fabric copilots. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Delivery: In-person Level: Intermediate Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A Overview: Microsoft Fabric is revolutionizing data analytics, and Copilot is here to make it even smarter! Now available across all Fabric capacities, Copilot is more accessible than ever, allowing users at all levels to take advantage of AI-driven efficiencies. This session is a beginner-friendly introduction to Copilot within Microsoft Fabric, showcasing how AI can streamline data workflows, enhance insights, and...

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