Blog – Page 49 – Prologika

Prologika is a BI and Analytics Innovation Awards Finalist!

January 16, 2016 / No Comments »

Content will be added soon.
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.
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!
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:...
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....
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...
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...
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.
Integrate SSRS 2016 Reports with Power BI

December 18, 2015 / No Comments »

As I said in the "Microsoft Unveils BI Roadmap" blog, SSRS will play an important role of the on-premises BI portal. With this post, I'll start covering the new SSRS 2016 features. One of the Power BI features announced at the PASS Summit was the forthcoming integration between SSRS 2016 and Power BI that will allow users to pin SSRS report items to Power BI dashboards. You can test pining reports items to Power BI with SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.0 and later. The newly released CTP 3.2 also features the new sleek SSRS portal (we've come a long way!). The items you can pin currently include charts, gauge panels, maps, and images. Pinning a report item takes a few clicks: Open the report and click the Power BI button (a new toolbar button in SSRS 2016). If this is the first time you do this, you'll be asked to...
The One and Only Power BI Book

December 16, 2015 / No Comments »

To me, Power BI is the most exciting milestone in the Microsoft BI journey since circa 2005, when Microsoft got serious about BI. Power BI changes the way you gain insights from data; it brings you a cloud-hosted, business intelligence and analytics platform that democratizes and opens BI to everyone. I'm happy to announce my latest (7th) book – Applied Microsoft Power BI. Currently, the one and only book on Power BI. Some people discouraged me to write this one. After all, trying to cover a product that changes every week is like trying to hit a moving target. However, I believe that the product's fundamentals won't change and once you grasp them, you can easily add on knowledge as Power BI evolves over time. Because I had to draw a line somewhere, "Applied Microsoft Power BI" covers all features that were announced at the PASS Summit 2015 and that...