DevOps & CI/CD for Power BI

DevOps isn’t difficult to implement for small and medium-scale projects, and simple things like managing version control in a code repository can save hours of lost time. Organization who are accustomed to managing large application development initiatives might expect to have a fully automated build and deployment process in concert with an Agile delivery process, managed with specialized tools like Jira, GitHub and Azure DevOps.

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.

Learn Databricks, ADF & Paginated Reports at the PASS Community Summit

Seven days and counting… For the past eighteen years, thousands of data tech professionals would travel to the PASS Summit…

A Developer’s Guide to Creating Bad Power BI Projects – Part 1

It occurred to me that we have put so much effort into promoting best practices and proper design that there is far less information about how to create bad reports and data models. In that light, the purpose of this article is to talk about what to do if you want things to go poorly and make sure your projects fail – if not immediately, then sometime in the future – and if not for you then for whoever inherits the work that you have done.

Drill-through from Power BI to Paginated Report – Report Recipe #4

Navigation between reports is the hallmark of an interactive reporting solution, enabling the ability to drill-through and see relevant details…

Power BI Expert Resources

Where to go for best practice advice for Power BI: The Data Gods One of the most common questions I…

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.

Drillthrough from Power BI to an SSRS Paginated Report

Navigating from a Power BI report to an SSRS Paginated report with filters and parameters.
This recipe primarily involves Power BI report design techniques. I’m not going to get into the details of Power BI report design but will cover the basics with a partially-completed report to get you started. If you are less-experienced with Power BI you can use this as an example for future report projects.

How to Assign Pro Licenses to a Power BI Tenant

This is a question that comes up all the time. Power BI licensing is not complicated but a common challenge is that the person who sets up a new Power BI subscription and tenant within an organization is often not the same person who manages Office 365 or Azure service licensing for the organization. I’ve consulted on projects for several organizations where folks just didn’t know who to talk to or how to proceed after testing the water with Power BI. After setting up a new subscription, IT professionals and business data analysist often don’t know how to license Power BI for company use and share reports and datasets with others in the organization.
This post will show you how licenses are assigned to users and, more importantly, what to request from your support desk or administrators who may be unfamiliar with Power BI and Office 365 user licensing. Keep reading for background information about why this is important and necessary.

Web API Data Sources with Power Query and Scheduling Data Refresh in the Power BI Service

Using a Web API is a convenient way to expose and consume data over an Internet connection.  Exercising some essential…

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…

Power BI for Grownups

The message from the Microsoft Business Applications Summit this week was very clear: Power BI is growing up. We have…

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

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