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'm presenting in person "What's New for BI in SQL Server 2016" for the SQL User Group in Birmingham, AL tomorrow, July 19th starting at 6 PM local time. Steel City SQL July 2016 Meeting Language: English Event Type: In-Person Online Meeting URL: None RSVP URL: https://steelcitysqljul2016.eventbrite.com Join us Tuesday the 19th in Room 311 of Russell Hall on the Samford University campus for the July meeting of Steel…
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Sometimes, you might run into a scenario that requires an aggregate over an aggregate. Consider the following report: The AvgOrderAmount has a simple calculation: SUM(Sales)/SUM(Qty). This calculation is applied uniformly. The Total line would divide 300/7 and will return 42.86. However, what is the user wants the result in the DesiredAvgOrderAmt column which produces a simple average over the details (50+40)/2. This could be accomplished by…
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One great feature of Microsoft BI has been the continuum from personal BI to organizational BI. For example, a business user can start small with an Excel Power Pivot model which IT can restore at some point to a scalable Tabular model. In fact, if you know Microsoft personal BI (Power Pivot or Power BI Desktop), you already know 80% (or even more) of SSAS…
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A large publicly-traded organization is currently standardizing on Power BI as a single BI platform as a replacement of Qlik and Tableau. They analysts have prepared a gap analysis of Power BI missing features. On the list was QlikSense variables. The idea is simple. The user is presented with a slicer that shows a list of measures. When the user selects a measure, all visualizations…
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SQL Saturday Chattanooga will take place on June 25st at UT Chattanooga EMC Building, 784 Vine Street, Chattanooga, Tennessee, 37403, United States. Your humble correspondent will sponsor the event and present "What's New for BI in SQL Server 2016" scheduled to start at 3:45 PM (the organizers decided to keep the best for last J). Join me for an hour of coverage of my favorite…
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DAX is very powerful but it could entail a steep learning curve for novice users. Power BI Desktop has started on the road of delivering pre-packaged calculations. The first one is Percent of Grand Total. Once you add a measure to the Values zone, you can expand the measure drop-down and click Quick Calc. This is similar to how you would pick one of the…
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I helped a customer to implement ADOMD.NET connection pooling with the goal to increase significantly the query throughput. Their predictive service platform had to scale to thousands of queries per minute. However, as it stands, ADOMD.NET doesn't have connection pooling. Normally, this is not an issue (see the implementation details of how SSAS handles connections here), but in this case the application was constantly opening…
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In my opinion, every mid-size to large organization should have a solution for master data management. Based on my observations, data quality issues have reached a pandemic level. Ironically, putting a "lipstick on the pig" with some cool visualizations appears to have a higher priority on the BI roadmap but it's just masking the underlying issues. The focus should be on centralizing data management and improving…
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I taught Power BI to a large organization this week. Naturally, they were interested in sharing content across multiple departments and even entire organization. Let's revisit the sharing options available in Power BI which I summarize in the following table. Simple sharing – This is the only option available in Power BI Free. It allows sharing real-only dashboards and underlying reports to a small audience,…
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MS BI fans, join me for the next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting on May 23th and 6:30 PM. I'll present the self-service data shaping and transformation capabilities in Power BI. Then Alteryx, who is also sponsoring the event, will show us how to bring Power BI data transformation and analytics even further with their products. I'll also showcase two interesting Power BI new features:…
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