SQL Saturday Atlanta next Saturday might break the attendance record with over 900+ people registered! Kudos to the organizers. It's not easy to organize an event of this size with a modest budget. I'll present "What's New for BI in SQL Server 2019" at 1 PM. "SQL Server 2019 delivers important data analytics features and enhancements. Join this session to discover what BI features are…
Scenario: You have a dimension table and a fact table, and you want to generate some test data, such by randomly looking up a value from the dimension table for each row in the fact table. The following DAX formula should get the job done but RANDBETWEEN doesn't work (although it works as a standalone function outside LOOKUPVALUE). Specifically, you get either the same value…
Business Performance Management (BPM) is a methodology to help the company predict its performance. An integral part of a BPM strategy is a process for Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting which is typically performed by the Finance department. When it comes to Finance, nothing is simple, and BPM is no exception. This diagram illustrates what typical data movement might look like to consolidate BPM areas into…
MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on May 6, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Patrick LeBlanc, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, will show us how to integrate Power BI and Flow for geospatial analytics. I'll showcase Power BI Report Builder. TEKSystems will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget…
SSRS is near and dear to my heart. My first book ("Microsoft Reporting Services in Action" published in 2004 by Manning) was on this subject and I became an MVP because of my contributions around SSRS back in those days. Because of this and because every good thing should come in two, I rejoiced when I heard Microsoft announcing the Power BI Report Builder to complement the…
If "XMLA" doesn't ring a bell especially in the context of Power BI, it stands for Extensible Markup Language for Analysis. Still puzzled? It's the protocol of Analysis Services (Multidimensional and Tabular). So, when an Excel or Power BI sends a query to a cube, it's encoded according the XMLA specification (an XML-based format). And, the XMLA endpoint is the web service endpoint that Analysis…
Confused by magic quadrants? Curious about their internals, such as how companies move from one quadrant to another? GeekAndPoke came up with this much needed resource that explains it all. No words necessary! Happy April 1st!
MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on April 1, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. Considering all the the momentum behind machine learning, the main presentation will be "Microsoft Citizen Data Science with Power BI" by Stacey Jones, a Principal Data Solution Architect at Microsoft. I'll do a brief overview of the brand new Modeling…
Scenario: If you want to pass an input table to a DAX query. For example, you might have an application that lets the user specify a subset of customers and as-of dates for each customer. Your query needs to calculate certain metrics, such as Sales, for the list of customers but as of the user-specified date for each customer, and potentially other parameters. It's impractical…
Just when I started thinking that there won't be any new BI features in SQL Server 2019, Christian Wade announced DAX calculation groups in CTP 2.3. His excellent post helped me try them out with Tabular Editor and Power BI Desktop and whip out this cool report. As Chris Webb pointed out, DAX calculation groups let us implement time calculations as in Multidimensional with a…