Blog – Page 7 – Prologika

Fixing SSIS Crashes

April 2, 2023 / No Comments »

I've spent hours on this so someone else might find the solution useful. I've developed an SSIS package that uses a ForEach Loop container. Then, I closed Visual Studio and reopen it. The SSIS designer opens the package, thinks for a few seconds if it likes it or not, and then it crashes Visual Studio. I've noticed that the VS status bar shows a message that it validates the ForEach Loop container, which was an important clue. How do we fix this horrible issue? Initially, I was thinking that it was interference from Visual Studio 2022 that someone else has recently installed. So, I upgraded, uninstalled, repaired, tried VS 2022, etc. to no avail. Finally, I open the package code in text editor and added "DTS:DelayValidation="True" to the container task to disable the upfront validation on package open. This fixed the issue although I had no idea what caused the...
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on April 3rd (Power BI Dashboard in an Hour)

March 28, 2023 / No Comments »

Please join us for the next meeting on Monday, April 3rd, at 6:30 PM ET. Your humble correspondent will revisit Power BI important fundamentals in a demo-packed session. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE THAT OUR IN-PERSON MEETING LOCATION HAS CHANGED! WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO ATTEND THE EVENT IN PERSON FOR BEST EXPERIENCE. ALTERNATIVELY, YOU CAN JOIN OUR MEETINGS ONLINE VIA MS TEAMS. WHEN POSSIBLE, WE WILL RECORD THE MEETINGS AND MAKE RECORDINGS AVAILABLE AT HTTPS://BIT.LY/ATLANTABIRECS. PLEASE RSVP ONLY IF COMING TO OUR IN-PERSON MEETING. Presentation: Power BI Dashboard in an Hour (DIAH) Date: April 3rd Time: 18:30 – 20:30 ET Place: Onsite and online Level: Beginner Food: Food and drinks will be available for this meeting Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (events, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15 Main presentation 20:15-20:30 Q&A ONSITE (RECOMMENDED) Improving Office 11675...
Working with Large Tables in SQL Server

March 24, 2023 / No Comments »

Warning: This blog contains old tricks of an old dog. Scenario: Suppose you have a large table in SQL Server, e.g. hundreds of millions or even a billion rows. DML operations (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) take long time. How do you speed them up? Do you split the large table into multiple tables? Or, do you ask for better hardware? Or, do you start looking for a new job with less data? Solution: It's nothing new but I see clients struggle with this all the time because they don't know any better. The solution is to partition the table and use partition switching that SQL Server has supported since time immemorial. Cathrine Wilhelmsen has a great step-by-step blog covering different scenarios, but the process goes like this: Configure page compression for the large table (see benefits here). Partition the large table, such as by month. Create a not-partitioned staging table...
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on March 6th (The Semantic Lakehouse: Power BI and Databricks)

March 3, 2023 / No Comments »

Please join us for the next meeting on Monday, March 6th, at 6:30 PM ET. Leo Furlong (Senior Solutions Architect at Databricks) will share their point of view on why “the best data warehouse is a lakehouse.” For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE THAT OUR IN-PERSON MEETING LOCATION HAS CHANGED! WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO ATTEND THE EVENT IN PERSON FOR BEST EXPERIENCE. ALTERNATIVELY, YOU CAN JOIN OUR MEETINGS ONLINE VIA MS TEAMS. WHEN POSSIBLE, WE WILL RECORD THE MEETINGS AND MAKE RECORDINGS AVAILABLE AT HTTPS://BIT.LY/ATLANTABIRECS. PLEASE RSVP ONLY IF COMING TO OUR IN-PERSON MEETING. Presentation: The Semantic Lakehouse: Power BI and Databricks Date: March 6th Time: 18:30 – 20:30 ET Place: Onsite and online Level: Intermediate Food: Food and drinks will be available for this meeting Agenda: 18:15-18:30 Registration and networking 18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (events, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing) 19:00-20:15...
Presenting at SQL Saturday Atlanta 2023

February 17, 2023 / No Comments »

I'm presenting at SQL Saturday Atlanta 2023 - BI & Data Analytics Edition on February 25th at 9 AM (the very first slot in the very first room for very first early birds). I'll do a Power BI Dashboard in an Hour this time to revisit the basics. I hope to see some of you there. Targeting novice Power BI users, this hands-on, no-slide session covers important Power BI fundamentals and best practices. If you're already a Power BI user, you'll probably learn a new trick or two. And if you like a challenge, bring your laptop and try to keep up through the steps to create a Power BI dashboard! Join us and learn how to: • Design your BI model • Acquire and transform data • Turning data into valuable and interactive insights • Sharing your visualizations with others Download the session files from here.
Demystifying Power BI Dataset Scale-out

February 15, 2023 / No Comments »

Microsoft announced a public preview of Power BI Dataset scale-out (DSO) for Power Premium, Premium per User (PPU), and Power BI Embedded. In the comments below the announcement, the article implies that this feature is a replacement for the Azure Analysis Services scale-out. "If you have an AAS scale out and you migrate your databases (aka models aka datasets aka cubes) to Power BI Premium, you get scale out automatically and at no extra cost." Scaling out for free? Sure, where do I sign? But then further down the comments, we have this clarification "[Power BI DSO happens] if a dataset is on peak load and the vcores of your capacity aren't maxed out. Keep in mind that scalability on a single instance isn't linear. By scaling out, we can achieve a better utilization of available CPU resources for high workloads. On the other hand, if your vcores are already...
Data Lakehouse: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

February 8, 2023 / No Comments »

There has been a lot of noise surrounding a data lakehouse nowadays, so I felt the urge to chime in. In fact, the famous guy in cube, Patrick LeBlanc, gave a great presentation on this subject to our Atlanta Power BI Group and you can find the recording here (I have to admit we could have done better job with the recording quality, but we are still learning in the post-COVID era). What is a Lakehouse? According to Databricks which are credited with this term, a data lakehouse is "a new, open data management architecture that combines the flexibility, cost-efficiency, and scale of data lakes with the data management and ACID transactions of data warehouses, enabling business intelligence (BI) and machine learning (ML) on all data." It other words, it's a hybrid between a relational data warehouse and a data lake. Sounds great, right? Visualizing this in Microsoft parlor, the...
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on February 6th (Lakehouse in an Hour)

January 31, 2023 / No Comments »

Please join us for the next meeting on Monday, February 6th, at 6:30 PM ET. Patrick LeBlanc (Principal Program Manager at Microsoft and Guy in a Cube) will show you how to implement a lakehouse with Delta lake, Azure Data Factory, and Synapse. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. WE ARE RESUMING IN-PERSON MEETINGS AT THE MICROSOFT OFFICE IN ALPHARETTA. WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO ATTEND THE EVENT IN PERSON FOR BEST EXPERIENCE. PLEASE NOTE THAT GUESTS ENTERING MICROSOFT BUILDINGS IN THE U.S. MUST PROVIDE PROOF OF VACCINATION OR SELF-ATTEST WITH HEALTHCHECK (HTTPS://AKA.MS/HEALTHCHECK). ALTERNATIVELY, YOU CAN JOIN OUR MEETINGS ONLINE VIA MS TEAMS. WHEN POSSIBLE, WE WILL RECORD THE MEETINGS AND MAKE RECORDINGS AVAILABLE AT HTTPS://BIT.LY/ATLANTABIRECS. PLEASE RSVP ONLY IF COMING TO OUR IN-PERSON MEETING. Presentation: Lakehouse in an Hour Date: February 6th Time: 6:30 – 8:30 PM ET Place: Onsite and online ONSITE Microsoft Office (Alpharetta)...
Implementing “Generic” Percent of Grand Total in DAX

January 26, 2023 / No Comments »

Suppose you need to calculate a percentage of grand total measure. Easy, you can use the Power BI "Show value as" without any DAX, right? Now suppose that you have 50 Table visuals and each of them require the same measure to be shown as a percentage of total. Although it requires far more clicks, "Show value as" is still not so bad for avoiding the DAX rabbit hole. But what about if you need this calculation in another measure, such as to implement a weighted average? Now, you can't reference the Microsoft-generated field because it's not implemented as a measure. That's exactly the scenario I faced while working on a financial report, although at the end I followed another approach to calculate the weighted average that didn't require a percentage of total. Anyway, the question remains. Is there a way to implement a "generic" percent of grand total for...
Solving iPad Issues with Power BI Secure Embed

January 24, 2023 / No Comments »

Scenario: You have an intranet web portal and use the Power BI secure embed feature (from the report menu, File->Embed report->Website or portal) to embed a report. However, the report doesn't render on iPad and iPhone devices. Instead, the user is perpetually asked to authenticate with Power BI. Solution: Apple has started preventing cross-site cookies to tighten up security. To resolve this horrible issue, each user must turn off this feature. On their iPad or iPhone device, go to Settings > your browser app, such as Safari or Chrome, and set Present Cross-Site Tracking to Off (assuming you are using Safari to render the web page).