PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
Explore the latest articles
Power BI incremental refresh (a Power BI Premium feature) refreshes a subset of a table with imported data. The main goal is to reduce the refresh time so that new data becomes available online faster. Patrick LeBlanc has a great video about how to make the incremental refresh even more incremental by using the "Detect data changes" feature and he explains in detail how it…
Read article
A few months ago, I did an assessment for a large company that was advised by an undisclosed source that they should use their Dynamics Financials and Operations (F&O) system as a data warehouse. Recently, I came across a similar wish to use SAP as a data warehouse. I understand that people want to do more with less and shortcuts are tempting. But ERP systems…
Read article
Load testing and troubleshooting Analysis Services often requires capturing a query trace. The lightweight option to do so is to create an Extended Events (xEvents) session. Let's say you want to capture all query traffic for 24 hours. You might opt to use the SQL Server Profiler, but it's implemented as a desktop app (there must be an active Windows session but what happens if…
Read article
MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on November 4, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Stacey Jones will present Power BI options with Python. Accelebrate will sponsor the meeting. And I will share some tips demoing the latest Power BI Desktop features, such as the new ribbon, decomposition tree and AI integration. For more…
Read article
At Ignite 2019 Microsoft announced the public preview of large datasets in Power BI Premium. This is a significant milestone as now datasets can grow up to the capacity's maximum memory (previously, the max size was 10 GB with P3 plan), thus opening the possibility of deploying organizational semantic models to Power BI. I consider this feature mostly suitable for organizational BI as I don't imagine…
Read article
Now that SQL Server 2019 is officially here, I was eager to try it out. My upgrade/reinstall experience ran into several issues that I thought might be worth sharing: Upgrade/reinstall fails with "An error occurred for a dependency of the feature causing the setup process for the feature to fail." With no indication what dependency failed. I solved it by extracting the iso file into…
Read article
My wife bought a pack of replacement water filters from Amazon. It was tagged as "Amazon's choice". The product listing showed the manufacturer name and it had a nice product photo advertising genuine filters. Except that there were all fake, which we discovered quickly by the output water pressure. The water coming out of a filter should have lower pressure while there was no difference…
Read article MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on November 4, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Andy Lawrence will share best practices for impactful Power BI Dashboards. CCG Analytics will sponsor the meeting. 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: Best Practices…
Read article
Every now and then I get a question about how to secure Power BI report pages. A business analyst has created a multi-page report that requires limited access to some sensitive information in one or more report pages. I always cringe at this idea and recommend securing the data instead. That's because report-level or dashboard-level security can be easily compromised. For example, if the user…
Read article
Power BI lets you filter the visual data by a measure, such as by a measure that dynamically calculates the customer's rank. This is convenient but there are performance implications related to the way Power BI autogenerates the DAX query. If a visual has a visual-level filter on a measure, Power BI Desktop defines a variable table filter that includes all measures in the visual.…
Read article
