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Solving the ACE Driver Bitness Madness
January 19, 2016 / No Comments »
Scenario: You have installed Office 32-bit (I'm yet to see a company that installs 64-bit as IT loves default paths). Then, you install Power BI Desktop 64-bit. Upon trying to connect to some Office file, such as Access or Excel, you get a compatibility error. You try to install the 64-bit Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable but then you are greeted with "You have a 32-bit version of Office installed". Solution: Install the 64-bit Redistributable with the passive overwrite: Download the 64-bit Microsoft Access Database Engine redistributable. Open Command Prompt to the download location and execute the following command:AccessDatabaseEngine_X64.exe /passive You can use a similar procedure to force the 32-bit driver if you have Office 64-bit.
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Online Applied Power BI Class Forming
January 18, 2016 / No Comments »
Your 2016 resolution: bring your data to life! Don't know where to start? I can help wherever you are! The first online run of Applied Power BI class is scheduled for early February. No travel, no hotel expenses, just 100% content delivered right to your desktop! Our intensive online classes teach you the skills to master Microsoft BI to its fullest. Use the opportunity to ask questions and learn best practices. NEW! Applied Power BI Online Training ClassDate: February 8 – February 9, 2016Time: Noon – 4:00 pm EDT; 9 am – 1:00 pm PDTDelivery: Online presentation with access to recorded content For more information or to register click here! Power BI is a Microsoft cloud-hosted BI platform that opens BI to everyone without reliance on IT. And most of it is free! This class is designed for business users and data analysts. You'll learn: What is Power BI and why it'll disrupt the...
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Prologika is a BI and Analytics Innovation Awards Finalist!
January 16, 2016 / No Comments »
Content will be added soon.
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Teo Lachev is MVP for 12 years!
January 16, 2016 / No Comments »
Microsoft has been awarding Teo Lachev the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable (MVP) award every year since 2004 for his expertise and contribution to the community.
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Presenting at SQL Saturday BI Atlanta
January 16, 2016 / No Comments »
Come and join me on Saturday, January 9 th at the first SQL Saturday BI edition in Atlanta. You'll learn about the exiting new BI changes coming to SQL Server 2016 and the Microsoft on-premises roadmap!
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The Best Self-Service BI Tools of 2015
January 16, 2016 / No Comments »
I came across this interesting PC Magazine article that just came up to compare 10 popular self-service BI tools. And the winner is? Power BI, of course, rubbing shoulders with Tableau for the Editor Choice award! The author, David Strom, did a great job reviewing the tools (this is not a trivial undertaking) but a few Power BI conclusions deserve clarifications: Cons: "Cloud version has a subset of features found in Windows version" – The cloud version is meant to be simple on purpose so that business users can start analyzing data without any modeling. Sharing: "Microsoft relies on the shared Microsoft OneDrive at Microsoft cloud service (or what it calls a "content pack") to personalize and share your dashboard and reports via unique URLs" Power BI doesn't rely on OneDrive for collaboration. Instead it supports three ways to share content: simple dashboard sharing, workspaces, and content packs. Custom visuals:...
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Getting Rid Of Custom Visuals
January 10, 2016 / No Comments »
Scenario: You might have imported a custom visual in Power BI Desktop, tested it, and decided not to use it. However, even if your reports don't use the visual anymore, Power BI will still prompt you if you want to enable custom visual with "This report contains a custom visual not provided by Microsoft…". This is a security warning to avoid malicious code because custom visuals are deployed in Javascript. Currently, there is no way in Power BI to disable this prompt. To make things worse, neither Power BI Service nor Power BI Desktop have a feature to get rid of the custom visual once it's added to a Power BI Desktop file. Solution: Here are the manual steps are followed to get rid of custom visuals in Power BI Desktop file for good: Copy the Power BI Desktop (*.pbix) file. Rename the file to have a zip extension, e.g....
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Implementing User Friendly Names in Tabular
January 7, 2016 / No Comments »
Scenario: You'd want to have user-friendly field names in Tabular, Power Pivot, and Power BI Desktop, such as Claim Amount as opposed to database column names, such as ClaimAmount or Claim_Amount. Multidimensional has a feature that automatically delimits words with spaces when it detects a title case or underscore but Tabular lacks this feature. While you can rename fields in Tabular on field at the time, each step requires a commit action, thus taking long time to rename all fields. Solution: While I'm not aware of a tool for renaming fields, the following approach should minimize the tedious work on your part: Wrap your table with a SQL view. It's a good practice anyway. Alias the table columns. If you have a lot of columns, the easiest way to alias your columns is to use vertical copy and paste. In SSMS, script the table as SELECT TO. This generates the...
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Microsoft Acquires Metanautix
January 1, 2016 / No Comments »
If you've missed the announcement from a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft acquired Metanautix – a startup founded by ex-Google engineers who worked on BigQuery (aka Dremel). Technical details are scarce at point. In fact, the Metanautix website doesn't exist anymore but there are YouTube videos and slides, such as this one. A while back, I wrote about logical data warehouses, which come in different shapes and names, such as software-defined data marts, distributed data, and, what I call, brute-force queries, such as Amazon QuickSight. It looks like that with this acquisition, Microsoft is hoping to make a step in this direction, especially when it comes to Big Data analysis. From I was able to gather online to connect the pieces, Metanautix Quest uses a SQL-like language to define tables that point to wherever the data resides, such as in HDFS, flat files, or RDBMS. The syntax to define a...
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SSRS Treemap and Sunburst Charts
December 23, 2015 / No Comments »
Years ago, I wrote a blog about how, with some code wizardry, you can create heat maps with Reporting Services. Moving to SSRS 2016, you don't have to do this anymore thanks to the new Treemap chart type! Speaking of new charts, SSRS also adds a Sunburst chart.
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