How Lakehouse Architecture is Revolutionizing Business Intelligence

The Lakehouse is the evolution of the earlier cloud data platform in many pieces that came with “some assembly required”. All of the components are modern, mature and capable but complicated and require specialized skills. Imagine that the new version is easier to assemble with instructions that are only a few pages with stick figures, and it comes with an Allen wrench.

We’re seeing consulting customers putting Lakehouse and BI solutions on-line in just a few weeks. Then they iterate to scale-up their modern data warehouse/BI platform as they train their Center of Excellence champions and Data Governance organizations as they progress.

DevOps & CI/CD for Power BI: Real-World Example

In a recent blog post, Paul discussed that DevOps, and specifically CI/CD, principles are essential for modern software development, and Power BI is no exception. Power BI CI/CD for enterprise class projects can be achieved using Azure DevOps, with steps including source control, automated testing, and build and release pipelines.  

Getting Data Into Shape for Reporting with Power BI

Even for small, informal BI projects, shaping the data into a dimensional model alleviates complexity, speeds up slow calculations and reduces the data model storage size. I conclude this post by reviewing seven data architectures and the data shaping methods with different degrees of scale.

Doing Power BI the Right Way: 9. Choosing the right report type: analytic or paginated

Writing this blog series while juggling other commitments has brought me to two realizations: 1. Posting articles in the series will be sporadic, and 2. The topics will be in fairly random order based on the projects I’m working on and the topics that are most top-of-mind at the time.

This brings me to the subject of this post: Paginated and Analytic reports.

Mastering Power Query in a Day – Full-day training in Seattle

Following the Power BI World Tour, Seattle event on Oct 30, please join me for a full-day of deep learning. …

How to Configure the Power BI Gateway to use Dataset Connection Parameters

A service provider or vendor might want to publish multiple copies of a report that should connect to different database…

SQL, M or Dax? – part 2

This is a post about a post about a post. Thanks to those of you who are entering comments in the original May 12 post titled SQL, M or DAX? This is a popular topic. And thanks to Adam Saxton for mentioning this post in his Guy in A Cube Weekly Roundup.

How to add KPI indicators to a Table in Power BI

Yesterday a friend asked for a little help getting started with Power BI.  He’s a DBA and system administrator and wanted to cut his teeth on Power BI with a really simple dashboard-style scorecard report.  Using a list of database servers with license expiration dates, he thought it would be a simple matter to calculate and show the expiration status for each server using a simple traffic light indicator.  The envisioned server list might look something like this:

Makes perfect sense, right?  This is a basic use case and a good application for simple KPIs; with the one minor caveat that POWER BI DOESN’T SUPPORT THIS!

This topic has become a bit of a soapbox topic for me

Keeping Up with Power BI – A Never Ending Story

This first week of the new year has been a lot of housecleaning for me (literally and figuratively…  my office…

Spontaneous Interviews at PASS Summit 2017

Conversations with Julie Koesmarno, Olivier Matrat, Aaron Nelson, Seth Bauer and Robert Bruckner captured in video interviews below… Continuing my…

Implementing Row-Level Security in Power BI

The best method to implement row-level security in a published Power BI model or SSAS Tabular model consumed from the Power BI service will depend to some degree on your data structure and requirements.  The method I demonstrate here is one of the most flexible approaches and one that I commonly use in my projects.

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