Category: Business Analytics

BI Projects, Business Analytics, Copilot, Data Agents, Dimensional Modeling, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Self-service BI, Semantic Models

Power BI Copilot, Data Agent Optimization & Performance

Paul Turley

Amid the AI frenzy, there is a lot of conversation about how business users will use agentic chat to answer business questions rather than interactive, dashboard-style reports. Is there truly a shift in the industry, and is agentic analytics going to change the way most business users consume data?

Just how viable is the whole “chat with your data” option, and is it really a replacement for conventional reporting? I recently heard a VP-level leader at a large consulting firm say something to the effect of “we need to stop investing in dashboard-building skills and focus on creating AI-driven data analysis solutions for our consulting customers.” I’m paraphrasing from memory, but that was the sentiment. Are all business leaders across the industry giving up their dashboards, interactive visual reports and scorecards in exchange for AI chat? No. Of course they aren’t — but conversational analysis is a new way to consume business data.

Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, BI Industry, BI Projects, Business Analytics, Microsoft BI Platform

How Lakehouse Architecture is Revolutionizing Business Intelligence

Paul Turley

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.

BI Industry, BI Projects, Business Analytics, DevOps & CI/CD, Microsoft BI Platform

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

Paul Turley

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.  

Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, BI Industry, Business Analytics, Dimensional Modeling, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Power Query, Self-service BI, SQL Server, Tabular Models

Getting Data Into Shape for Reporting with Power BI

Paul Turley

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.

Business Analytics, Data Visualization, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, SSRS Design

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

Paul Turley

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.

BI Industry, Business Analytics, Power BI, Power Query, Self-service BI, SolidQ

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

Paul Turley

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

BI Projects, Business Analytics, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server

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

Paul Turley

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

BI Industry, BI Projects, Business Analytics, DAX, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server, T-SQL

SQL, M or Dax? – part 2

Paul Turley

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.

Business Analytics, Power BI, Power Query, SSAS Design

How to add KPI indicators to a Table in Power BI

Paul Turley

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

BI Industry, BI Projects, Business Analytics, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Self-service BI, SQL Saturday

Keeping Up with Power BI – A Never Ending Story

Paul Turley

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

BI Industry, Business Analytics, Microsoft BI Platform, PASS, Power BI, PowerShell, Self-service BI

Spontaneous Interviews at PASS Summit 2017

Paul Turley

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

BI Projects, Business Analytics, DAX, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, SSAS Administration, SSAS Design

Implementing Row-Level Security in Power BI

Paul Turley

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.