So much data, so little budget! Caching data in Power BI gives you the best report performance, but budget constraints usually put downward pressure to stay within lower Power BI Premium premium plans. So, what to do? Split large models. Remember that Power BI Premium Gen2 grants each dataset a 25 GB memory quota. I'm actually a big proponent for consolidated organizational semantic models, but…
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Please join us online for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, January 3rd, at 6:30 PM ET. Paul Turley will show us how to integrate Power BI with paginated (SSRS) reports. And your humble correspondent will update you on the Power BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. Presentation: Power BI Paginated Reports: The…
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Happy Holidays! More and more organizations consider data virtualization to abstract the underlying storage and integrate siloed sources. In this letter, I'll discuss a real-life project that used PolyBase to expose third-party ERP data as SQL tables. Before I get to the subject of this newsletter, I'm excited to announce the seventh edition of my "Applied Microsoft Power BI" book. It should be available on…
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A while back a client wanted to avoid importing a large snapshot fact table with loan balances because its memory footprint would require them to upgrade to a higher Power BI premium plan. This of course required leaving the table in DirectQuery mode at the expense of query performance. Luckily, most users would be interested in the latest six months of data. To speed up…
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As a report author, you are constantly pressed to fit more visuals into a single page. The November release of Power BI Desktop introduced the Power BI Bookmark Navigator, which simplifies the process of creating a tabbed interface, such as this one. Since Power BI doesn't support visual containers or a "menu" visual, you must resort to the awful hack of hiding and showing UX…
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I'm helping a client convert a few SSRS reports from SharePoint to Power BI Premium Per User (PPU). SSRS is of course near and dear to my heart because of all the work I've done around it circa 2004-2010 (yep, it's been that long), books, MVP awards, etc. Since its humble beginnings, SSRS have had a solid architecture that excelled in extensibility. You'd be hardly…
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LabCorp operates one of the largest clinical laboratory networks in the world. It also has an Interactive Response Technology system that healthcare vendors can use to conduct case studies. Thanks to the cloud data analytics solution implemented by Prologika, LabCorp and its vendors can now analyze data across case studies. Read this newsletter to learn more about the solution architecture and business value. Business…
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A long-standing limitation of Power BI has been that Excel pivot reports connected to external Analysis Services models can't be interacted with when uploaded to Power BI Service. You get the cached pivot report but any attempt to interact with the report online (that is in Excel Online), such as to change a slicer or filter, would result in an error complaining that the connection…
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Business Performance Management (BPM) is a methodology to help the company predict its performance. An integral part of a BPM strategy is creating and monitoring a scorecard with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In this newsletter, I’ll discuss how the newly released Power BI Goals can help you augmenet your BPM strategy. But before that, I’d like to share my excitement that Microsoft have recently awarded…
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You should definitely switch your Power BI Premium capacities to Gen2 although you might wait until it goes GA because Gen2 is currently in preview if you're risk-averse. I switched an enterprise client P2 node to Gen 2 a few months ago and here are the top benefits we observed: Lower CPU utilization The Gen1 P2 node was under CPU pressure so the client was…
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