PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
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A Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I'm thankful for your interest in and support of my work. I'm glad that Microsoft has recently updated the Power BI tenant export settings and thus mitigated the the complaints I had in my "A False Sense of Data Security" blog. Disabling the "Export to …" settings, which now applies also to paginated reports, no longer disables live…
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UPDATE 17-Feb-2022: Dynamic query parameters now support popular relational data sources, and I posted an updated blog. I had recently a Power BI advisory engagement for a large ISV. They had many customers. and each customer data was hosted in its own database for security reasons, with all databases having an identical schema. Power BI reports had to connect using DirectQuery to avoid refreshing data…
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I know that it's tempting to use the Folder connector to combine multiple files with the same schema and load them in Power BI Desktop with a few clicks – an idea promoted by Microsoft's own Power BI Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) training. But what happens if you want to automate the dataset refresh after uploading your model to Power BI Service? Suddenly, things…
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Scenario: You are merging two tables in Power Query on GUID columns with Text data type. In my case, the first table (UserDim) came from Azure SQL DB and the second (systemusers) from Dynamics CRM, but I believe the source is irrelevant. Then, you expand the second table in the next step after the merge, select the columns you need, and see expected results in…
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You've set up the Azure Data Factory self-hosted integration runtime to access on-prem data sources. You create a linked server, click Test Connection, and then get greeted with an error saying the security context can't be passed. On the on-prem VM, you use the Integration Runtime Configuration Manager and get a similar error or something to the extent that JSON can't be parsed. You spent…
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Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, October 5th, at 6:30 PM. Paco Gonzalez (CEO of SolidQ) will present and demonstrate the Power BI AI and ML capabilities. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget to RSVP (fill in the RSVP survey if you're planning to attend). Presentation: AI, ML and Power BI Date:…
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I am delivering a data governance assessment for an enterprise client. As a part of the effort to migrate reporting from MicroStrategy to Power BI, the client wants to improve data analytics. The gap analysis interviews with the business leaders revealed common pitfalls: no single version of truth, data is hard to come by, business users don't know what data sources exist, business users spend…
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My wife and I started section hiking the Appalachian Trail during weekends to escape the summer heat and the virus. A.T. runs for 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine, with 78.6 miles in Georgia. Today we finished the Georgia part and entered North Carolina. We actually covered twice the distance (averaging 10-12 miles per section) because we had to come back each time to where…
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Cloud deployments are the norm nowadays for new software projects, including BI. And Azure Synapse shows a great potential for modern cloud-based data analytics. Here are some high-level pros and cons to keep in mind for implementing Azure Synapse-centered solutions that I harvested from my real-life projects and workshops. The Good There is plenty to like in Azure Synapse which is the evaluation of Azure…
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I had an integration challenge recently. I set up Azure Data Lake Storage for a client and one of their customers want to use Python to automate the file upload from MacOS (yep, it must be Mac). They found the command line azcopy not to be automatable enough. So, I whipped the following Python code out. I configured service principal authentication to restrict access to…
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