• What’s New for BI in Office 2016?

    July 9, 2015 / No Comments »

    While you might be trying to convince management to upgrade to Office 2013, the next version of Microsoft Office (Office 2016) is on the horizon and scheduled to be released sometime in the Fall. Meanwhile, you can download and test the Public Preview. Naturally, you might wonder what's new for BI given that Excel is the Microsoft premium BI desktop tool. In my newsletter, I'm sharing my favorite Excel 2016 BI features (most significant listed first).

  • Disaster Recovering

    July 9, 2015 / No Comments »

    Over the last couple of weeks, I learned a thing or two about disaster recovery. My server crashed and it had to be replaced. While we were able to get Prologika.com up and running quickly, the community site was down for a while. I am happy to report that while there are some kinks remaining, for the most part the community site has been restored.

  • Cool Visualizations Coming To You This Summer

    June 12, 2015 / No Comments »

    I welcome every news about better visualizations in Microsoft BI so I rejoiced to read this blog by Ariel Netz, Group Program Manager in the Power BI Designer team. "The Power BI Designer team is working on our first update for the summer. That update will be significant, and will signal a new phase in our product development. To date we have mostly invested in the modeling and query capabilities, but starting with the first summer release users will see heavy investments in the Data Exploration & Reporting capabilities in the product. While it might be bit premature to go into detail, it's not premature to provide a teaser… " And the teaser screenshot in the blog shows more visualization gadgets with the ability to change chart series colors. I hope they thrown in conditional formatting as well. Confused which visualization tool to use? You probably are with so many...

  • Where Are My Storage Pool Disks?

    June 6, 2015 / No Comments »

    I've been doing quite a bit of SQL Server performance work lately, helping customers embrace the cloud. One great feature of Windows Server 2012 and above is the ability to implement a storage pool combining multiple disks. This greatly simplifies disk striping to distribute I/O and deprecates RAID configurations, as explained in more details in the "Performance Guidance for SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines" whitepaper from Microsoft. In this case, the client has an A7 Azure VM which allows attaching up to four 1TB data disks. Another great Azure feature is that you only pay for what you use. What it means to you is that you cut cost because you have all of this storage available but you are charged only for the actual storage and not for the capacity. In the process of configuring the storage pool, you might find that none or some of the...

  • What’s New for BI in SQL Server 2016 CTP2?

    May 28, 2015 / No Comments »

    The first public preview of SQL Server 2016 (CTP2) got announced yesterday. The natural question for BI pros is what's new for BI. The "What's New in …" topics in the SQL Server 2016 Books Online provides the detailed description of the BI features that made the CTP2 cut. To summarize the major features: SSAS Process partitions within a Tabular table in parallel. Previously, partitions within a table were processed sequentially. New DAX functions. The join-related ones, such as NATURALINNERJOIN, NATURALLEFTOUTERJOIN, UNION, will be useful. SSRS Subscription enhancements, such as Enable/disable subscriptions (New user interface options to quickly disable and enable subscriptions), change subscription owner, shared credential for file share subscriptions. Report Builder for SQL Server 2016 supports High DPI SSIS Incremental Package Deployment – ability to deploy individual packages to the SSIS catalog. AlwaysOn support – ability to host the SSIS catalog on a database configured for AlwaysOn for...

  • Power BI 2.0 User Provisioning

    May 15, 2015 / No Comments »

    As a continuation to my "Power BI vNext (let's now call it Power BI 2.0 to align terminology with Microsoft) SSAS Connector and Security" blog, you might wonder how Power BI provisions users. For example, if a user signs with his business e-mail and a coworker shares BI artifacts with him, what happens when the user leaves the company? Can he still gain access? As it turns out, when the user signs to Power BI, Microsoft adds the user transparently to the Azure AD (AAD). Syncing AD with AAD is not a requirement. This is why you don't need to extend your AD to Azure or synchronize it when you want Power BI reports to connect to on-prem Tabular models. If you do not sync your AD with Azure AD and remove user from AD, they continue to exist in Azure AD. If the tenant is a managed tenant (i.e....

  • What’s New in SQL Server 2016 BI

    May 11, 2015 / No Comments »

    Lots of announcements and roadmap updates coming from Microsoft Ignite which replaced TechEd and other conferences with one event. My favorites are the What's New sessions with the BI-specific ones below. Microsoft SQL Server BI Drill Down Microsoft BI Overview What's New in Master Data Services (MDS) and Integration Services (SSIS) in SQL Server What's Next for Business Analytics in Microsoft Excel Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse Overview What's Next for Visualizations in Microsoft Office

  • SQLSaturday Atlanta

    May 11, 2015 / No Comments »

    SQL Saturday Atlanta is around the corner. I'm presenting "Increase your BI productivity with community tools" scheduled in the first time slot at 8:15 AM. "Microsoft has always provided a comprehensive toolset for BI developers but functionality gaps remain. In attempt to fill in some of these gaps, MVPs and community have implemented outstanding tools. Join this session to learn how to increase your developer productivity and improve your BI solutions by using some of the most prominent community tools, including BIDS Helper, DAX Studio, DAX Editor, Query Capture, and OLAP Extensions. This session assumes developer experience in designing and implementing BI solutions with SSAS, SSRS, and SSIS." If this sounds interesting but you can't attend, don't worry as a repeat is in order for the Atlanta BI Group on Monday, May 18th.

  • Plotting Goal in Power BI

    April 23, 2015 / No Comments »

    A customer wanted a bar chart where each bar shows the invoiced and realized sales and a marker to show a goal, as sketched below (notice the Budget marker). The chart had to render the data from SSAS. In SSRS, this of course can be done using a bullet gauge, which I hope one day will make its way to Excel and Power View. Because Excel PivotChart doesn't support XY Scatter charts when connected to SSAS, the compromise is to use a column chart, such as the one below, where the goal was plotted as a line chart with the line hidden and only markers visible. The closest Power View compromise would be the chart below. This requires the latest Power View build which is only available in Power BI 2.0. In Power BI, Power View supports a Combo Chart Stacked variation.

  • First Look at Datazen

    April 20, 2015 / 1 Comment »

    UPDATE: 1/1/2016   As Microsoft announced in the public BI roadmap (http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2015/10/29/microsoft-business-intelligence-our-reporting-roadmap.aspx), Datazen will be fully integrated with SSRS 2016 for delivering mobile reports, alongside paginated (traditional SSRS reports), and Power BI Desktop reports. To follow up on my blog announcing Datazen, I want to share some additional notes now that I had to chance to install it and take it out for a spin. Pros Easy installation experience – Installation can't be easier either although I'm not crazy about the Datazen decision to make the Publisher available in the Windows Store. I just don't like Windows Store applications, not the mention that they don't work by default with Windows Server (you need to enable the Desktop Experience feature and use a non-admin account). To share your dashboards, you can publish them to a server component (Datazen Enterprise Server). The server installs as an ASP.NET application running under IIS (no surprises...

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