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Power BI Embedded Dashboards Without Authentication UI
October 19, 2015 / 16 Comments »
UPDATE: An updated sample is included in the Chapter 12 source code of my "Applied Power BI" book. One of the biggest Power BI strengths is its open architecture. In addition to opening the visualization framework, Power BI introduced REST APIs that let developers embed dashboard tiles in custom web applications (embedded reports will probably follow soon). Microsoft provided a sample application (Integrate-a-tile-into-an-app) on GitHub to demonstrate how dashboard tile embedding works. This application navigates the user to an authentication UI where the user signs it to Power BI before the application can access the user content. However, there are plenty of embedded reporting scenarios where this isn't desirable. For example, you might have a web application that already authenticates users with Forms Authentication and you don't want to ask the user to log in to Power BI again. Instead, you might want to pass the identity of the authenticated...
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SQL Server MVP for 12 Years
October 6, 2015 / No Comments »
Microsoft awarded me again with the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for SQL Server. This is an annual prestigious award given to selected individuals worldwide in recognition for their expertise and contribution to the community. Currently, there are 371 SQL Server MVPs worldwide and only 85 in the USA. This makes it 12 consecutive years for me as SQL MVP!
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Atlanta MS BI Group September 28th Meeting
September 26, 2015 / No Comments »
Come and join us on Monday, September 28th, for our next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting. The topic this time is "Enhancing Data Analysis and Predictive Analytics with NoSQL" delivered to you by RDA Consulting. Presentation:Enhancing Data Analysis and Predictive Analytics with NoSQL Level: IntermediateDate:Monday, September 28th, 2015Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ETPlace:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room) 115 Perimeter Center Place Atlanta, GA 30346Overview:The pervasiveness of Big Data has created significant challenges for companies that have historically utilized relational database management systems to perform data analysis and predictive analytics. This presentation outlines the challenges that stem from Big Data as it relates to deriving value from data, the types of NoSQL data stores available and how NoSQL can serve as a data platform that enhances the data analysis and predictive analytics capabilities of companies.Speaker:Cornell A. Emile is a Senior Software Engineer with RDA Corporation. Since 2001, he has designed, developed, and maintained...
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Power BI Report Embedding on the Horizon
September 26, 2015 / No Comments »
For years I've been harassing Microsoft to support embedding interactive reports connected to SSAS on custom apps. This feature has been sorely missing in the Microsoft BI stack. Yet, it's a must-have feature that enables a wide range of integration scenarios, such as customer-facing reporting. Imagine your customers being able to ask natural questions for data exploration. This is a killer feature! It looks like Power BI might finally bring some relief. I while back, I posted an Embedding Reporting feature wish on the Power BI discussion list. It now has 643 votes and it's one of the most voted for features. Recently, when asked to provide feedback, I communicated to Microsoft how I envision report embedding to work: Developers must have the ability to embed reports/dashboards in applications. This should be conceptually similar to how they can do this now with ReportViewer. However, instead of an ASP.NET control, I'd...
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Azure D-Series VM Prices Go Down
September 21, 2015 / No Comments »
I'm optimizing a SQL Server OLTP mirrored database hosted on an Azure VM. After load testing, it was clear that CPU is the primary resource constraint so I suggested an upgrade to a higher A-series machine alongside other reconfiguration and storage changes. Meanwhile, I've noticed that starting in October, the D-Series pricing goes down. Moreover, D-series include a SSD temporary drive to host the temp database and buffer extensions. And, according to Microsoft, D-series have "60% faster processors than the A-series". In this case, to save the customer money, I recommended a D-Series VM with less cores than the A-series VM upgrade I had in mind.
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Load Testing Azure Applications
September 2, 2015 / No Comments »
Scenario: You're conducting a capacity planning effort and load testing an Azure website (Azure App Service) that saves data to SQL Server running on Azure VM. You've created a load test, e.g. using Visual Studio, and you've realized that the throughput caps for no obvious reason. SQL Server and Azure performance counters indicate that both layers are not under pressure. Solution: Although no specifics are provided by Microsoft, it appears that Azure throttles user loads to prevent denial-of-service attacks. Based on my observations, Azure detects that the requests come from the same IP and caps the requests. As a workaround, consider conducting the load test using Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online allows you to distribute the test across multiple agents that can use different IP addresses (configurable as a test property). In our case, this allowed us to conduct successfully a stepped load test until we reached a performance...
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Atlanta MS BI Group 5th Anniversary
August 27, 2015 / No Comments »
Our next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting will be on August 31st. This happens to be our 5th anniversary! Thanks for everybody who contributed to the group success! We've come a long way since our first meeting with a dozen people to the attendance we enjoy today of 60-70+. Come and join the festivities and learn about sentiment analysis with Big Data & Machine Learning. Presentation:Tone/Sentiment analysis with Big Data & Machine Learning Level: IntermediateDate:Monday, August 31th, 2015Time6:30 – 8:30 PM ETPlace:South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room) 115 Perimeter Center Place Atlanta, GA 30346Overview:People's sentiments and opinions are written in social networks. There are tweets, Facebook posts, book reviews, forum discussions, and more. These attitudes and feelings are communicated using text, with format depending on the social network. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters and use hash-tags and Facebook messages can be longer. This session reviews the different Natural Language Processing,...
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Offsetting Week Start Day
August 18, 2015 / No Comments »
Scenario: You have a date dimension table and typical date-related columns, such as DayOfWeek, WeekEndDate, etc. In US, weeks start on Sunday and end on Saturday (ISO weeks on the other hand start on Monday and end on Sunday). You have a requirement to overwrite the week start and end days for a Power Pivot, Tabular, or MD model. For example, while the Date table defines the week start day on Sunday, you might need to overwrite it to start on Monday. Solution: I typically derive as many of the date calculations in a SQL view on top of the Date table instead of saving the results in the table itself. For example, the WeekOfYear calculation might look like this: DATEPART(WEEK, [Date]) [WeekOfYear] If you have date calculations like this, instead of changing all week-related calculations to reflect the desired week start day, the easiest way to offset the week...
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Applied Power BI Service Class Available
August 12, 2015 / No Comments »
I'm happy to announce the availability of my latest training course – Applied Power BI Service. I believe that the new version of Power BI, known as Power BI Service or Power BI 2.0, is going to be very successful and it should warrant your serious interest. This one to two-day class is designed to help you become proficient with the Power BI Service and acquire the necessary skills to work with online and on-prem data, implement data models on a par with professional models created by BI pros, unlock the power of data by creating interactive reports and dashboards, and share insights with other users. No prior data modeling or reporting knowledge is assumed. Students are welcome to bring their own data to the second day of the class.
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Where Is My DQS KB Gone?
July 27, 2015 / No Comments »
Scenario: You use the DQS Cleansing Transformation in an SSIS package to integrate data cleansing with DQS. Once you are done developing, you export the DQS KB and then create a new DQS KB by importing and publishing the KB to another server. Or, you might have deleted and recreated the KB with the same name. When you open the DQS Cleansing Transformation Editor, although the KB name is the same, you find that the reference to your DQS KB is gone and you get a warning message "The data quality Knowledge Base property is empty. Specify a valid Knowledge Base". Naturally, you don't want to remap the KB and recreate all mappings as this a tedious process involving many steps with many columns. Solution: I'm not sure what design pattern was followed here, by SSIS identifies the KB by its identifier instead of by name. To fix the issue...
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