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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As you probably know by now, Microsoft unveiled the Office 2013 Technology Preview. As the portal page says, "we've Taken Self-Service BI to the Next Level". Indeed, this is where I believe we'll see Office 2013 emerging as a leading tool on the market for self-service BI. Based on my experience, business users love Excel 2010 with PowerPivot because of its familiar environment and ease…
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Consider the following calculated member definition added to the script in an Analysis Services cube: CREATE MEMBER CURRENTCUBE.[Measures].[Revenue TTM] AS ([Measures].[Revenue Amount USD], [Relative Date].[TTM]), FORMAT_STRING = "Currency", VISIBLE = 1; When you browse the member in Excel, you'll find that the member is not formatted as currency. However, when you use SSMS and query the member, when you double-click the member cell in the…
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Let's recap my thoughts on Hadoop. I've found the case studies presented in the chapter 16 of the "Hadoop: The Definitive Guide" book very useful to understand how organizations are currently using Hadoop. In general, the following deployment scenario emerges as a common pattern: An organization accumulates Big Data from various sources, such as web logs, sensors, website traffic, and so on. The organization decides…
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In my previous blog, I talked about Hive. Hive provides a SQL-like layer on top of Hadoop so you don't have write tons of MapReduce code to query Hadoop and to aggregate and join data. To facilitate working with Hive, Microsoft introduced a Hive ODBC driver (as of this writing, the driver is only available to Hadoop on Azure CTP subscribers). You can use this…
Read articleA long time ago, I wrote a blog about possible reasons for Reporting Services reports to time out. This issue raised its head again; this time in SharePoint 2010 environment where long running reports would time out after about 2 minutes. To resolve: On each Web Front End (WFE) server, edit the web.config file of the SharePoint web application. For the default web application, the…
Read articleWriting MapReduce Java jobs might be OK for simple analytical needs or distributing processing jobs but it might be challenging for more involved scenarios, such as joining two datasets. This is where Hive comes in. Hive was originally developed by the Facebook data warehousing team after they concluded that "… developers ended up spending hours (if not days) to write programs for even simple analyses".…
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In part 1 of my Hadoop adventures, I walked you through the steps of setting the Cloudera virtual machine, which comes with CentOS and Hadoop preinstalled. Now, I'll go through the steps to run a small Hadoop program for analyzing weather data. The program and the code samples can be downloaded from the source code that accompanies the book Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition)…
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With Big Data and Hadoop getting a lot of attention nowadays, I've decided it's time to take a look so I am starting a log of my Hadoop adventures. I hope it'll benefit Windows users especially BI pros. If not, at least I'll keep a track of my experience, so I can recreate it if needed. Before I start, for an excellent introduction to Hadoop…
Read articleScenario: A SharePoint 2010 scale-out farm with two application servers: APP1 – Runs Excel Calculation Services (ECS) APP2 – Runs PowerPivot for SharePoint (R2 or 2010) Do you need to start ECS on APP2 in order for PowerPivot for SharePoint to work? Answer: You don't but if you don't have the updated Analysis Services OLE DB Provider on APP01, you'll get the dreaded "Failed to…
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This is a blog post that I've been planning for a while. With the ever-increasing power of laptops and desktop computers and declining hardware prices, personal BI is on the rise. Typically, a new technology usually has a self-propelled upward spiral to a point – vendors are talking about it to clients, executives are talking about it on golf courses, consultancies are talking about it,…
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