Blog – Page 7 – Prologika

Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on June 5th (How to Fix an Inherited Power BI Report)

May 29, 2023 / No Comments »

Please join us for the next meeting on Monday, June 5th, at 6:30 PM ET. Kristyna Hughes (Senior data & analytics consultant at 3Cloud will join us remotely and share best practices for dissecting a complicated and broken Power BI report and a checklist of how to fix it. Improving will sponsor the meeting. Your humble correspondent will demonstrate how Power BI can integrate better with SharePoint and OneDrive. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. WE NOW MEET BOTH IN-PERSON AND ONLINE. WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO ATTEND THE EVENT IN PERSON FOR BEST EXPERIENCE AND BECAUSE AN EMPTY AUDIENCE IS DISCOURAGING TO SPEAKERS AND SPONSORS. ALTERNATIVELY, YOU CAN JOIN OUR MEETINGS ONLINE VIA MS TEAMS. WHEN POSSIBLE, WE WILL RECORD THE MEETINGS AND MAKE RECORDINGS AVAILABLE HERE. PLEASE RSVP ONLY IF COMING TO OUR IN-PERSON MEETING AND PLAN TO EAT Presentation: How to Fix an...
A First Look at Microsoft Fabric: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

May 28, 2023 / No Comments »

"May you live in interesting times" – Chinese proverb Microsoft Fabric is upon us with a grand fanfare. You can get a good overview of its vision and capabilities by watching the Microsoft Fabric Launch Digital Event (Day 1) and Microsoft Fabric Launch Digital Event (Day 2) recordings. Consultants and experts are extolling its virtues and busy fully aligning with Microsoft. There is a lot of stuff going on in Fabric and I'm planning to cover the technologies I work with and care about in more detail in future posts as Microsoft reveals more what's under the kimono. This post is about my overall impression on Fabric, in an attempt to cut through the dopamine and adrenaline-infused marketing hype. As always, please feel free to disagree and provide constructive criticism. The Good Let's just say that after 30 years working with Microsoft technologies, I'm very, very skeptical when I hear...
Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group Meeting on May 1st (Getting started with Power BI Deployment Pipelines)

April 19, 2023 / No Comments »

Please join us for the next meeting on Monday, May 1st, at 6:30 PM ET. Akshata Revankar (Data Engineer, Specialist at McKinsey & Company) will show you how to leverage Power BI deployment pipelines to promote content changes between environments, such as DEV and PROD. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. WE NOW MEET BOTH IN-PERSON AND ONLINE. WE STRONGLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO ATTEND THE EVENT IN PERSON FOR BEST EXPERIENCE AND BECAUSE AN EMPTY AUDIENCE IS DISCOURAGING TO SPEAKERS AND SPONSORS. ALTERNATIVELY, YOU CAN JOIN OUR MEETINGS ONLINE VIA MS TEAMS. WHEN POSSIBLE, WE WILL RECORD THE MEETINGS AND MAKE RECORDINGS AVAILABLE HERE. PLEASE RSVP ONLY IF COMING TO OUR IN-PERSON MEETING AND PLAN TO EAT Presentation: Getting started with Power BI Deployment Pipelines Date: May 1st Time: 18:30 – 20:30 ET Place: Onsite and online Level: Intermediate Food: Food and drinks will be available for this meeting Agenda:...
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...