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PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD

Making sense of data.
Sharing what we learn.

Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.

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First Look at Power BI AutoML

In my previous "First Look at the New Power BI Integration with Azure ML" blog, I showed you how Power BI will make it very easy to integrate it with Azure Machine Learning and Cognitive Services. Data scientists today have plenty of options to create predictive models but all of them have one thing in common: expertise in data science and statistics. The promise of…

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First Look at the New Power BI Integration with Azure ML

Currently, Power BI doesn't integrate natively with Azure ML so you must resort to using the Web connector to call the experiment's web service. I demonstrate how you can do this in a singleton way (one row at a time) in chapter 11 of my latest Power BI book (you can download the code from the book page). Microsoft announced several forthcoming Machine Learning enhancements,…

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on March 4th

MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on March 4th, Monday, at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. The main presentation will be "Power BI Architecture" by Paco Gonzalez  from SolidQ. Eric Flamm will do us Prototypes with Pizza on configuring a Power BI visual for mobile layout. SolidQ will sponsor the event. For more details, visit our group…

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2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms

The 2019 Gartner Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms is out and Microsoft BI aficionados like your humble correspondent have all the reasons to rejoice. Say whatever you want about Gartner but the quadrant is a great testimonial for Power BI and I think the highest score was overdue. Microsoft still has tons of work on the visualization side of things but I'm glad that Gartner…

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on February 4th

MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on February 4th, Monday at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. The main presentation will be "Azure Data Lake for First Time Swimmers" by Samara Soucy  from Innovative Architects. Julies Smith will do us Prototypes with Pizza on "Python Fuzzy Wuzzy for Master Data Identity Mapping". Innovative Architects will sponsor…

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How Filters Affect DAX Measures

xVelocity (the storage engine behind Tabular, Power BI and columnstore indexes) is an in-memory columnar database, and it's such it's not suitable for detail-level reports, such as transaction-level reports. I wrote about performance implications with xVelocity and detail-level reporting here and here. In general, the lower the report grain and the more columns you add to the report (customer first name, last name, invoice number,…

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T-SQL, Power Query, or DAX?

I taught my Applied Power BI class last week to a group of smart data analysts. All of them were knowledgeable of T-SQL, which they have been using extensively for years to shape and transform the data and produce SSRS, Qlik and now Power BI reports. They haven't previously used Power Query, but they liked my overview of its features. However, they were rightfully confused…

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Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on January 7th

MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on January 7th, Monday at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft office in Alpharetta. The main presentation will be "Predictive Analytics with Power BI". I'll walk you through the existing Power BI features for predictive analytics. Mark Tabladillo will show you exiting AI features that are coming up soon. CDATA will sponsor the…

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Applied Power BI Book (4th Edition)

I'm excited to announce the fourth edition of my Applied Microsoft Power BI book! When the original book was published  in January 2016, it was the first Power BI book at that time and it had less than 300 pages.  Since then, I helped many companies adopt or transition to Power BI and taught hundreds of students. It's been a great experience to witness the…

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Power BI External Users and Data Security

Power BI lets you share content directly with external users for B2B and B2C scenarios. When the benefits of this sharing option outweigh its limitations (read-only reports, requiring Azure AD federated access, per-user licensing, rendering the report inside Power BI), this is the easiest way to share Power BI content with an external party. However, the documentation, which is otherwise excellent, doesn't explain the steps…

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