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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As a part of a semantic model assessment, I got to experiment with different configurations of Azure Analysis Services. In this case, the largest fact table has almost 2 billion rows so it's a good size model. I was particularly interested the correlation between a higher performance tier and query performance. One thing that I like about PaaS is that it's easy to change and…
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Chris Webb wrote a great post today "Power BI Roadmap Announcements In the Dynamics 365 Spring '18 Release Notes" citing the many exciting new features coming to Power BI in the next few months and highlighting the huge momentum behind Power BI. I want to bring your attention to a couple of them: Incremental data refresh: Organizations can use incremental data refresh to scale datasets…
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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, March 26th at 6:30 PM. Leo Furlong will introduce you to implementing organizational semantic models with Azure Analysis Services. BlueGranite will sponsor the meeting. And your humble correspondent will demo several latest Power BI features: persistent filters, tooltip pages, and share to anyone. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget…
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I'm doing an assessment of a data mart and semantic layer for an organizational BI solution. I was given the source of the Analysis Services Tabular model. Upon opening it locally, it took Visual Studio several minutes to open the project. Even worse, after the project was finally loaded, my laptop CPU utilization went into 80-90% and all the 16 GB of memory got exhausted…
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Scenario: You use Azure Analysis Services and you want to trace events in the SQL Server Profiler. However, you run the Profiler, connect to AAS, and you get greeted with "Unable to locate trace definition file Microsoft Analysis Services TraceDefinition 15.0.0.xml". The prompt gives you an option to download the trace definition from the server, but nothing happens. You'll encounter the same issue if you…
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Azure SQL Database Managed Instance is available for public preview (for pricing see this page). It will play a very important role in the SQL Server cloud PaaS derivatives, which are now four: Azure SQL Database – A database-scoped service available in Basic, Standard, and Premium performance tiers. Azure SQL Data Warehouse – A scalable farm of Azure SQL databases that has roots in Microsoft…
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Scenario: An interesting scenario came today from a client. Consider the following schema. You have a fact table InternetSales and two dimension tables (Customer and SalesTerritory). You want to produce a report ranking each customer based on their sales for each territory. In addition, you want the rank to change as you filter the report, such as filter specific customers or specific territories, so you…
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Microsoft selected and published two Prologika Power BI-related consulting offers on Microsoft AppSource. And their price is right; they are both free! Power BI for Your Organization: 2 HR Assessment – Prologika will evaluate your data analytics objectives to determine how Power BI can empower your organization to understand better and improve its business. Power BI for Business Performance: 2-Hr Briefing – Prologika will provide you with…
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The 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms is out. I read the report and followed the dots. I personally hoped to see the Microsoft dot higher than the overrated Tableau, given everything I said here, here, and here. I'm glad that Gartner finally realized what I have been saying all along that Tableau lacks "complex data model support" among many other things. Anyway, this is a…
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While we're waiting for the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Analytics (should be out any moment), two others related to data analytics were released. 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics This one evaluates "complete software system that supports and manages data in one or more file management systems (usually databases)". So, think of traditional and cloud-based data warehousing. I'm surprised to…
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