Category: Microsoft BI Platform

Microsoft Fabric (#MicrosoftFabric), the new Unified Analytics platform, was announced this morning, literally moments before the Build Conference. Satya made the official announcement in the keynote address. Why is this big news and why is it important? In a few words, this is the most significant expansion to the Power BI and the analytics platform since the product was introduced. Satya said that Fabric is the most significant data platform innovation since SQL Server.

Business users often need to know how fresh the data is that they see on a Power BI report. This requirement can be interpreted to mean either “when was the last date & time that the source data was updated?” or “when was the last date & time that the data model was refreshed?”
I’ve used a few different approaches to record the actual date and time, but all generally using the same technique.

There is no secret about this. If you do any legitimate research about Power BI (reading blogs, books or training from reliable sources), you will quickly learn that a lot of basic functionality requires a dimensional model, aka “Star Schema”. This is a hard fact that every expert promotes, and self-taught data analysts either have learned or will learn through experience. So, if everyone agrees on this point, why do so many resist this advice?

Perspective is everything. I didn’t understand why getting to the star schema was so out of reach so often until I was able to see it from another perspective. There are a few common scenarios that draw source data into different directions than an ideal dimensional model.

Table partitioning has long been an important task in semantic model design using SQL Server Analysis Services. Since SSAS Tabular and Power BI models are built on top of the SSAS architecture, the pattern of partitioning remains the same as it has been for twenty years. However, the specific methods for implementation have been fine-tuned and improved. The reasons for partitioning large fact tables mainly include:

Improve refresh speed,
Prevent reloading historical records,
Capture updated history,
Reduce database resource load

You don’t have to have massive tables to benefit from partitioning. Even tables with a few hundred thousand records can benefit from partitioning, to improve data refresh performance and to detect source data changes. There is little maintenance overhead, so the benefits usually outweigh the cost, in terms of effort and management.

Colleagues: if I have sent you to this post, it is because I respect you and want to make sure…

If you are in the Chicago area and haven’t already registered for the Data Insights Summit, please join me. I…

A Gantt chart is an excellent example of where Paginated Report & SSRS were an ideal choice for the purpose. It is a running list of activities with the duration for each displayed as a horizontal bar depicting the beginning and ending day along a horizontal scale. The challenge is that this is not a standard chart type in either Power BI or SSRS/Paginated Reports. Furthermore, project planners may prefer to see activities as rows in the format of a printed page.

I started a series of blog posts back in 2020 about best-practice guidelines for planning and designing enterprise reporting solutions with Power BI. To make the topics covered in this series of posts easier to find and follow, they are listed on this page: Doing Power BI The Right Way – for Enterprise Reporting | Paul Turley’s SQL Server BI Blog which you can access from the main menu on the blog. We have a few more topics to go so check back and subscribe for notifications.

Part of the the series: Doing Power BI the Right Way When you sign-up for the Power BI service at PowerBI.com…