PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
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Besides data messiness (in direct proportion with the company size), another common data-related challenge that every organization nowadays is trying to tackle is how applicable self-service BI is to their business and to what extent it should be used. The tools are here and they are readily available. For example, given that Power Pivot is now natively integrated with Excel 2013, your power users will…
Read articleI'll be speaking at the SQL Server Innovators Guild group in Greenville, SC on September 3rd. If you happen to be in the area, please join us to learn best practices for implementing an enterprise BI solution. Please confirm attendance at https://ssig201309.eventbrite.com/
Read articleSemantics relates to discovering the meaning of the message behind the words. In the context of data and BI, semantics represents the user's perspective of data: how the end user views the data to derive knowledge from it. As a modeler, your job is to translate the machine-friendly database structures and terminology into a user-friendly semantic layer that describes the business problems to be solved…
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Variance calculations are a common BI requirement but good reference material is lacking. How do we create them in DAX? Let's say you need to calculate the variance between this month sales and the previous month sales. DAX date functions require a Date table. They won't work if you don't have a separate Date table. They also require that you tell PowerPivot (or Tabular) about…
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A couple of SharePoint-related questions from students taking my PowerPivot class that are worth sharing. Question: Can I import data from and auto-refresh an Excel file deployed to a SharePoint library in PowerPivot? Answer: Yes, if you use WebDAV and specify the UNC path to the file. WebDAV requires the Windows Server Desktop Experience feature to be installed and the WebClient service to be started:…
Read articleRelationships in analytical models (Multidimensional and Tabular) are both a blessing and a curse. Once defined by the modeler, relationships power "slicing and dicing" data. The analytical tool doesn't have to worry about and include the relationships in the query because they are defined in the model and the server "knows" how to use them to aggregate the data. On the other hand, as they…
Read articleA really impressive white paper/book with insights about Tabular performance and inner-workings. Kudos to the authors for producing this colossal resource. "Tabular models hosted in SQL Server 2012 Analysis Service provide a comparatively lightweight, easy to build and deploy solution for business intelligence. However, as you increase the data load, add more users, or run complex queries, you need to have a strategy for maintaining…
Read articleI'll be speaking at Atlanta Code Camp on August 24th. Given the developer-oriented nature of the event, I settled on a more code-intensive topic: Real-time BI with StreamInsight. "So, you have (or heard of) classic BI, self-service BI, Big Data BI, descriptive, predictive or even prescriptive BI, but do you have real-time BI? Real-time business intelligence (BI) has become one of the top priorities for…
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Off the BI path but I wanted to save this tip for future generation and my sake in case I forget and I run into the same issue in Windows.NEXT or a new laptop. My $3,500 HP 3-year old EliteBook 8540w is prone to overheating. If a task puts a sustained pressure on the CPU, e.g. 10% or more, the fan engages and produces a…
Read articleExpanding its Office 365 feature set, Microsoft introduced Power BI. Power BI is an umbrella name of the following BI offerings in the cloud: Power Pivot, PowerView, Power Query (previously known as Data Explorer), and Power Map (previously known as GeoFlow), plus more. Microsoft demonstrated Power BI at WPC yesterday (scroll to the 30th minute marker to see the Amir's heart attack-provoking demo) or see…
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