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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I love performance optimization. It's exciting to peek under the hood and take a deep dive in the mysterious world of how Microsoft designed things. And it always humbles me by bringing forth gaps in my knowledge. Scenario: You have SSRS reports that query Analysis Services Multidimensional cubes. When users request reports in Report Manager (aka Web Portal starting with SSRS 2016) and … the…
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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on February 26th at 6:30 PM. Stacey Jones will explain how Power BI can integrate with other systems, such as Dynamics and Salesforce. SentryOne will sponsor the meeting. And your humble correspondent will show you two latest Power BI features: report sharing and date tables. For more details, visit our group page and don't…
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To compete more effectively with Power BI, Tableau acquired a database technology called HyPer. Like the Microsoft xVelocity in-memory technology (formerly known as VertiPaq), which powers Analysis Services Tabular, Power BI, and SQL Server Columnstore, HyPer is an in-memory database system. Hyper was initially developed as a research project at the Technical University of Munich. Tableau explains that "with Hyper, transactions and analytical queries are…
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Scenario: You've created a dashboard-looking Power BI report that has a filter. Most visuals on a report page need to show only data for the selected filter but some must ignore the filter. Solution: There are several solutions to achieve this goal depending on requirements. Let's start with the no-brainer and move down in complexity. Move the unfiltered visuals to another report page -- Slicers…
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Planning to attend the PASS Summit this year? The PASS Summit is the go-to conference for data professionals that will take place November 6-9, in Seattle, WA. You have two options to register: Early bird registration priced at $1,699 has started and it will continue until March 23, 2018. As a bonus, use code LGSTRMZB8 at registration to get streaming access to all PASS Summit 2017…
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Scenario: You want to overwrite the formatting of some field in a Power BI Visual, such as in the case of showing the field in one visual with decimals and then in another without decimals. Or, you might want to overwrite the default format when connected live to a semantic model. You search left and right, bing the Internet, and still no clue as to…
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In my "Understanding Dates in Power BI Quick Measures" blog, I mentioned that having a Date table is a best practice but Quick Measures didn't support it. Fortunately, the February update of Power BI Desktop fixes this. Now you can mark a Data table as such, as you've been able to do in Excel Power Pivot since the beginning. Marking a date table accomplishes three…
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Scenario: You have a concatenated field stored in a table. For example, a medical claim might have several denial reasons. Instead of representing this as a Many-to-Many relationship, you've decided to store this a comma-delimited field, such as to allow the user to see all codes on one row. However, users are asking to produce counts grouped by each reason code, such as this one:…
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A while back I wrote about the ROI for BI and this blog happened to be one of my post popular blogs. I'm a big fan of a BI semantic model for the reasons I outlined in my "Why Semantic Layer" newsletter. Although written five years ago, these are still valid reasons and a semantic model plays a prominent role in every organizational BI solution.…
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A week ago, I wrote that Power BI sharing improved by giving you the ability to include specific reports and dashboards in an app. Recall that that there are three ways to share Power BI content: workspaces, apps, and dashboard sharing. Only the last two lets you share content out of a workspace, such as by sharing with free users if the workspace is in…
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