Skip to articles

PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD

Making sense of data.
Sharing what we learn.

Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.

Explore the latest articles

Drill Your Way with Power View

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…

Read article

Announcing Prologika Match

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,…

Read article

Presenting at SQL Saturday Atlanta

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…

Read article

Divorce Your Methodology

At the Atlanta BI meeting last night, there was a question from the audience about differences between Inmon and Kimball and which methodology should be followed when implementing a data warehouse. I'll recapture my thoughts and the feedback I shared. As BI practitioners, most of us use methodologies and it's easy to fall in love with a specific methodology. But sometimes methodologies conflict each other.…

Read article

Is SharePoint Overkill for BI?

As you know, Microsoft BI is tightly interwoven with Excel on the desktop and SharePoint on the server. Most complaints about SharePoint fall in two categories: Complexity – SharePoint is like the ocean. The further you go, the deeper it gets. Troubleshooting is no fun. You know it and I know it. Cost – Most BI features require SharePoint Server Enterprise. Besides the product cost,…

Read article

"Bus Matrix – the Foundation of your Dimensional Data Model" Atlanta BI Presentation

Our next Atlanta Microsoft BI meeting will be on Monday, January 27th. The main presentation is "Bus Matrix - the Foundation of your Dimensional Data Model" the speaker is Bill Anton. The meeting will be sponsored by TEK Systems. I hope you can make it. The Bus Matrix is the cornerstone of a successful Dimensional Data Modeling strategy. It serves many purposes: from communicating requirements,…

Read article

Auto-generating SCHEMA.INI

Power Pivot (and Tabular) uses the Access Connectivity Engine (ACE) provider to import from text files. This provider was originally designed for Microsoft Access databases and it's limited to import files no larger than 2 GB (or 4 GB with the Office cumulative update from April 2012) as explained here. The Power Pivot Table Import Wizard allows you to import from delimited files and only…

Read article

Pick List in SSRS

A customer is moving from Impromptu to SSRS. One of the SSRS missing features that was very important for this customer was the Imprompu pick list that allows users to copy a list of parameter values, such as a list entered in Notepad, to the parameter prompt. For example, the user might get a list of account codes via e-mail and this list may vary…

Read article

Teo’s Best and Worst of Microsoft BI in 2013

In the spirit of the last day of 2013, I'm sipping eggnog and contemplating on BI in 2013. BEST Microsoft leads the Gartner's 2013 Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant. Microsoft leads the Gartner's 2013 Data Warehouse Magic Quadrant. Power View connectivity to Multidimensional (DAXMD) released in CU4 of SQL Server 2012 SP1. SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse appliance released with Hadoop support at very attractive…

Read article

SharePoint 2010 and Excel 2013 Power Pivot

I've start seeing customers moving to or considering Office 2013 for self-service BI. Naturally, the end users would like to share their Excel 2013 self-service data models by deploying to SharePoint. Does SharePoint 2010 support this scenario? Unfortunately not. The user can upload Excel 2013 files and view the embedded reports. However, when he attempts to perform an interactive action (triggers all backend services involved…

Read article