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Analyzing Power Pivot Models with Tableau
February 24, 2014 / No Comments »
Now that Tableau has been highly praised by Gartner, you might be looking for ways to make the best of both self-service BI tools: the great data modelling capabilities and programming richness of Power Pivot and the visualization strengths of Tableau. Interestingly, besides published to SharePoint Power Pivot workbooks, Tableau can connect to local Power Pivot models and send MDX queries (as it does when connected to Multidimensional and Tabular). This works thanks to the Tableau PowerPivot Connector wrapper (Microsoft SQL Server 2012 PowerPivot for Excel) that you can install from the Tableau website. Read this document to decide which one to use.
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2014 BI Outlook: Who’s Hot, Who’s Not
February 24, 2014 / No Comments »
While Microsoft has fallen a bit in the Gartner's eye, according to InformationWeek, it's the hottest BI vendor in 2014. I guess the reason is that Gartner focuses predominantly on visualization, which is just one of the BI manifestations, while InformationWeek looks at the entire BI ecosystem.
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Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2014 Released
February 24, 2014 / No Comments »
Gartner released the 2014 update of the Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms Magic Quadrant. Interestingly, Gartner moved the predictive capabilities to a new Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms and dropped scorecards. The most interesting aspect of this report for me was the Market Overview section at the end. According to Gartner, the most prevalent future BI trends will be: 7% BI annual growth all the way until 2017 Visual data discovery Easier data preparation Collaboration and social analysis Growth in Cloud BI Real-time BI Deemphasizing the BIG DATA hype Join me at the Atlanta MS BI Group meeting tonight to discuss item 5 and at SQL Saturday in Atlanta on May 3rd to talk about item 6.
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Atlanta MS BI Group Meeting on February 24th
February 21, 2014 / No Comments »
Atlanta BI fans, Join us for the next Atlanta MS BI Group meeting on Monday, February 24th. Lance England will present "introduction to MDX". Computer Associates will sponsor our meeting and show us the latest Erwin release. I'll also talk briefly and present Power BI now that it went live. Spread the word and invite your coworkers but RSVP on our website so we can plan food accordingly. Also, don't forget to register for the SQL Saturday precons that will take place on May 2nd, the day before SQL Saturday Atlanta. Main Presentation: MDX Fundamentals Level: Intermediate Date: Monday, February 24th, 2014 Time 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET Place: South Terraces Building (Auditorium Room) 115 Perimeter Center Place Atlanta, GA 30346 Overview: MDX is a powerful language, but the price of that power is a higher degree of complexity. The key to understanding MDX is to learn the fundamental...
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When Dynamic Sets Are Not Dynamic
February 19, 2014 / No Comments »
In my "Optimizing Dimension Data Security" blog, I've mentioned that converting static sets to dynamic could reduce the connection initialization time. To my surprise, using Excel to connect to the cube triggered the executing of dynamic sets and end users reported long wait times for the connection to initialize. It turned out that when Excel connects to the cube, it issues DISCOVER statements to query the metadata. One of these statements queries MDSCHEMA_SETS to find out what sets are available in the cube. For some obscure reason, this triggers the actual set evaluation for dynamic sets. If the set is expensive, e.g. touches all partitions, the DISCOVER statement can surely delay the connect time. It turned out that other users are experiencing the same issue even if security is not applied. Greg Galloway found a workaround and extended the Analysis Services Stored Procedure project with a CurrentCommandIsDiscover method. You can...
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The Office Click-To-Run Setup
February 18, 2014 / No Comments »
As you've probably head, Office 2013 supports now two installation options: the traditional MSI-based installation and the new Click-To-Run streaming installation. Chris Webb mentioned about it here and Melissa Coates describes how it works in more details here. The MSI setup is a perpetual one (you pay for a version once and you're entitled to fixes for it) while the C2R setup is a subscription-based Office 365 setup (you continuously pay for using the software and you're entitled to fixes and the latest features within the SKU you're subscribed to). Perpetual installations will get updates (cumulative updates and service packs) just like they're used to but they are meant primarily to be fixes rather than features. On the other hand, Office 365 subscribers have the benefit of getting fixes and new features as long as their subscription is active. Currently, there is no way to switch your existing Office installation...
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Best Visualization Tool for Dashboards?
February 16, 2014 / 3 Comments »
More and more organizations are planning and adopting dashboards. And, the question "which visualization tool is the best for dashboarding?" has been asked more frequently. The visualization aspect of BI has been rapidly evolving. There are plenty of vendors and plethora of tools out there. And, they keep on leap-frogging each other and each one has its strong sides and limitations. More than likely, the darlings of today will be forgotten in a few years. So, a quest to find the perfect tool that does it all is likely to fail or it will be short-lived. I'm not a visualization expert. When it comes to visualizations, I listen to guidance from experts. If you navigate to slide 30 of my "Best Practices for Implementing Enterprise BI Solution", you'll see a mockup of a sales dashboard by Stephen Few that is taken from his excellent "Information Dashboard Design" book. This is...
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Drill Your Way with Power View
February 11, 2014 / No Comments »
Although it might not be immediately obvious, Power View supports various options for exploring data in more details. Although some scenarios are not natively supported, workarounds could be available. Drilling Down Drilling down involves navigating through multiple fields from the same or different dimensions to explore data at a lower granularity. Every interactive tool supports drilling down (and drilling up) and Power Pivot is no exception. For example, if you have a visualization that has multiple fields in a given zone, such as the AXIS zone, you can double-click a series to drill down to the next level. In the example below, I can double-click the Year series to see the data by Month. Drilling down is not automatically enabled for Table and Matrix visualizations because by default they show all fields in separate columns. What if you want one column but still be able to drill down? If you...
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Announcing Prologika Match
February 1, 2014 / No Comments »
Data is your biggest asset and today's currency but the data can be messy. You know it and we've seen it. The messier the data, the bigger the headache. At Prologika, we believe that data quality issues should be addressed as early as possible and the validation process should start with the source systems. You need a solution to detect possible duplicated entries without ETL, custom validation code, and exhaustively hard-coded rules. This is why I'm excited to announce today the availability of Prologika Match! Data is "dirty" because of misspellings, truncations, missing or inserted tokens, null fields, unexpected abbreviations, and other irregularities. Prologika Match uses approximate string matching (fuzzy lookup) to detect potential duplicate entries to help you improve data quality at the point of data entry. When the user attempts to save a data entry that is similar to what's already in the database, Prologika Match can detect...
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Presenting at SQL Saturday Atlanta
February 1, 2014 / No Comments »
The next Atlanta SQL Saturday will be on May 3rd. I'm doing a "Deep Dive into the Microsoft BI Semantic Model (BISM)" pre-conference session on May 2nd. You can register using this link. The organizers set up a promotion code for $10 off registration, good for the first 10 users – the code is "AtlantaBI". Teo Lachev: Deep Dive into the Microsoft BI Semantic Model (BISM) SQL Saturday #285 - Atlanta Friday, May 2, 2014 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM (EDT) "The chances are that your organization has a centralized data repository, such as ODS or a data warehouse, but you might not use it to the fullest. Join this insightful full-day event to understand the importance of having a semantic layer that bridges users and data. In the Microsoft BI world, BISM consists of Power Pivot, Tabular, and Multidimensional. We'll start by comparing these technologies to understand their...
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