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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Lo and behold, Azure Data Factory now supports deactivating activities as a preview feature. It took only seven years… You can deactivate/activate activity by right-clicking it in the canvas or from its General settings. You can also configure how the subsequent activities should treat a deactivated activity, with Succeeded being the most common outcome.
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Someone asked the other day for my opinion about the open-source dbt tool for ETL. I hadn't heard about it. Next thing I've noticed was that Fabric Warehouse added support for it, so I got inspired to take a first look. Seems like an ELT-oriented tool. Good, I'm a big fan of the ELT pattern whose virtues I extolled many times here. But a Python-based…
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Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, October 2nd, at 6:30 PM ET. Michael Hewitt will share 30 tips to make you more productive with everything Power BI. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE A CHANGE TO OUR MEETING POLICY. WE HAVE…
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One of trails my wife and I hiked today in the Acadia National Park was the Precipice Trail. This trail is considered one of the hardest trails in the United States. In fact, "hiking" is a misnomer as most of the ascent involves vertical rock climbing and pulling yourself up on iron rangs. Slipping and falling can surely result in a serious injury or death…
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I've been an independent consultant for almost 20 years and through most of this time, my company (Prologika) has been a Microsoft consultancy partner with Gold Data Analytics and Gold Data Platform competencies. Speaking of which, I'd like to thank all the wonderful people who have helped Prologika attain and maintain these competencies over the years by taking rigorous certification exams. I couldn't have done…
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For years users have been asking for Excel tables (not pivots) connected to SSAS so they can simply browse the data in a tabular format not subjected to the shortcomings of pivots. And for years Excel has been supporting just pivots that natively understand only SSAS OLAP cubes. Is Power BI changing things? Somewhat. Enter refined Excel connected tables. They look great on the surface.…
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I ranted many times about SaaS vendors preventing direct access to data in its native storage, which is typically a relational database. It's sort of like going to a bank, handing them over your money, and they telling you that you can only get your money back in cash, in Bitcoin, in ₿100 bills but no more than ₿1,000 per withdrawal, or whatever madness suits…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, September 11th, at 6:30 PM ET. Shabnam Waston (BI Consultant and Microsoft MVP) will introduce us to the Lakehouse engine in Microsoft Fabric. Shabnam will also sponsor the meeting. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE…
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Currency conversion is a common requirement, such as when implementing analytics on top of ERP sales data recorded in multiple currencies. The most flexible approach is to allow the user to select a currency and perform the conversion at runtime, ideally by centralizing the conversion code in Power BI calculation groups. However, this approach has several shortcomings: Based on my experience, the most common requirement…
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Poor data quality is one of the most challenging hurdles for successful data analytics. The story typically goes like this. The client has a flexible line of business system that people tend to use and abuse, such as entering garbage in free-form text fields that shouldn't be free-form to start with. There is no data stewardship or data entry oversight. I'm not blaming anyone because…
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