Blog – Page 3 – Prologika

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...
SaaS Losers and Winners: Workday and NetSuite

June 29, 2025 / No Comments »

“Well, I'll be damned Here comes your ghost again But that's not unusual…” “Diamonds and Rust”, Joan Baez I’ve said in the past that I consider it a travesty when a SaaS provider doesn’t give you direct access to the data in its native storage, such as by ODBC and OLE DB providers, and forcing you to use file extracts or APIs (often horrible). 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. Let’s look at how two popular vendors have approached data access. SaaS Loser: Workday Workday is a popular HR cloud platform. Unfortunately, the only way to get your data out is via their horrible APIs, as a large law firm has discovered. If you use Workday, I recommend you explore the Workday Query Language (WQL) so you don’t have to parse...
Live Monitoring of Fabric Mirroring

June 10, 2025 / No Comments »

A current project called for mirroring a Google BigQuery dataset to Fabric. This feature is currently in private preview so don’t try to find it. However, the tips I share here should be applicable to other available mirroring scenarios, such as mirroring from Azure SQL Database. One of the GBQ tables was a transaction fact table with some 130 million rows. The issue was that the mirroring window would show this table as normally replicating table with Running green status, but we waited and waited and nothing was happening... First, the “Rows Replicated” counter is not continuously updating (doesn’t report live mirroring info). Instead, it’s updated when the table is fully replicated. That’s because the Delta table operations are atomic in nature. So, how do we do live monitoring of the initial synchronization then? We can use the Azure Storage Explorer to access directly the delta files of the mirrored database...
Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on June 2nd (Power BI monitoring with Log Analytics Workspace)

May 26, 2025 / No Comments »

Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, June 2nd at 18:30 ET. Akshata Revankar (Senior Data & Applied Scientist with Microsoft) will show us how to streamline and optimize your Power BI environment using Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and Kusto Query Language (KQL). 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: Are you an admin overseeing multiple Power BI workspaces and dealing with the challenge of monitoring activities and performance across all of them in a unified view? This session is designed precisely for you. Join us as we delve into...
First Look at Fabric Translytical Task Flows

May 20, 2025 / No Comments »

The May release of Power BI Desktop includes a new feature called Translytical Task Flows which aims to augment Power BI reports with rudimentary writeback capabilities, such as to make corrections to data behind a report. Previously, one way to accomplish this was to integrate the report with Power Apps as I demonstrated a while back here. My claim to fame was that Microsoft liked this demo so much that it was running for years on big monitors in the local Microsoft office! Are translytical flows a better way to implement report writeback? I followed the steps to test this feature and here are my thoughts. The Good I like that translytical flows don’t require external integration and additional licensing. By contrast, the Power Apps integration required implementing an app and incurring additional licensing cost. I like that Microsoft is getting serious about report writeback and has extended Power BI...
App Integration Tools and Patterns

May 14, 2025 / No Comments »

“...That's when the teardrops start, fella… …Dirty deeds and they're done dirt cheap” “Dirty deeds done dirt cheap”, AC/DC A few months ago, I did an assessment for a large organization seeking to modernize their data analytics processes. As a part of standardizing the toolset, the client was considering Salesforce MuleSoft for both application and data integration. After all, the vendor told them the tool can do “everything”. Indeed, taken from the vendor page, we learn that “MuleSoft is a platform that gives IT the tools to automate everything. This includes integrating data and systems, automating workflows and processes, and creating incredible digital experiences — all on a single, easy-to-use platform.” Let’s parse this claim. Defining integration types Quick as a bunny and excited that I finally have one tool that does it all, we hop to the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools. Surprise, Salesforce MuleSoft is not...
Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on May 5th (Optimize Power BI Reports and Semantic Models Using External Tools)

April 29, 2025 / No Comments »

Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, May 5th at 18:30 ET. Lakshmana R Boya will show us how to optimize Power BI reports by identifying the performance and size issues using “Measure Killer” community app. Your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the Power BI and Fabric enhancements of late. 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: We will deep dive into how we can optimize Power BI reports and semantic models by identifying the performance and size issues using the “Measure Killer” app. Sponsor: Prologika (https://prologika.com) helps organizations of all sizes to make sense of data by delivering tailored BI solutions that...
Two Takeaways from FabCon 2025

April 4, 2025 / No Comments »

The 2025 Fabric Community conference has just concluded. There were many announcements but I found two of them intriguing to make a case for Fabric more compelling should a suitable project comes around: OneSecurity – Analysis Services Tabular and Power BI semantic models have long supported a comprehensive and flexible row-level security (RLS), such as to support scenarios requiring dynamically denying rows. Unfortunately, column-level security (aka object-level security) has been less flexible as I explain in more detail here. I hope OneSecurity will prove more flexible over time. Currently, it doesn’t support dynamic security, but I hope it eventually will, such as by allowing a SELECT statement to evaluate runtime conditions. So, keep an eye out for OneSecurity as it evolves over time if you face more complex column-level security requirements. Copilots for all F SKUs – Previously, I complained that Microsoft has established that AI must require premium pricing...
Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on April 7th (Source Control for Power BI)

April 1, 2025 / No Comments »

Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, April 7th at 18:30 ET. Neel Pathak will explain how to do source control for Power BI with Git integration. Your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the Power BI and Fabric enhancements of late. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Presentation: Source Control for Power BI 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: The days of sharing pbix files and copying in changes are gone. Git integration now enables development teams to collaborate and provides version control/rollbacks. Speaker: Neel Pathak (Senior Consultant with 3Cloud) a BI and analytics professional with an expertise in Power BI and guiding clients through their analytics transformation journeys. Sponsor: 3Cloud is the #1...