Publish to the Web, Partner Showcase & Best Power BI Report Contest
It was a big day for Power BI! The Power BI Partner Showcase is online as of today. Please check-out…
Power BI Workshops, Spring 2016
These Power BI Workshop sessions are coming up pretty soon and if you’re in the area of these events, please…
Webcast: Upgrading and Migrating SQL Server 2005 BI Features to SQL Server 2014 and 2016
Please join me on February 3rd at 10 Pacific Time for this presentation brought to you by Microsoft and SolidQ…
BI Industry, BI Projects, Business Analytics, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Self-service BI, SQL Syndication, SQLServerPedia, SSAS Design, Tabular Models
Tabular Models, Multiple Data Sources and Unknown Members
Self-service data modeling tools like Power BI Desktop, Power Pivot and SSAS Tabular promote the advantage of using data from…
Hey, Cortana; Show me Power BI
The proliferation of Power BI across the Microsoft ecosystem is astounding and Power BI keeps popping up in the most…
Animated Visual: A Day in the Life of Americans
One of the more effective data visualizations I’ve seen in a while, this animated visual is a time-varying Markov chain…
Power BI Hands-on Workshops
Chicago – full-day: March 4, 2016 San Jose, CA – 2 hour session at the PASS BAC, May 3-4, 2016…
BI Projects, DAX, Power BI, PowerPivot, SQL Syndication, SQLServerPedia, SSAS Design, Tabular Models
Complete DAX Function Reference
The DAX function documentation in MSDN can be found on separate pages, organized by function categories and then details for…
SQL Server 2005 End of Support and Business Intelligence
How does the official end of support for SQL Server 2005 affect companies using Reporting Services, Analysis Services and other…
BI Industry, BI Projects, Business Analytics, Power BI, Self-service BI, SQL Server, SQL Syndication, SQLServerPedia, SSRS Design
The Resurrection of Reporting Services & The Maturing of Power BI
Spending the past two weeks at the annual PASS Global Summit and the Microsoft MVP Summit, I’ve consumed a literal…
SQL Server Pro Magazine: Datazen Mobile Dashboards with Analysis Services and Drill-through
This post is a teaser for an article I just published to SQL Server Pro Magazine. This is the third…
BI Industry, Business Analytics, Power BI, SolidQ, SQL Saturday, SQL Server, SQL Syndication, SQLServerPedia
Oregon SQL Saturday 2015 Keynote
This year we are honored to have a particularly special guest kicking off our SQL Saturday event on October 24th. …
Business Analytics, Data Visualization, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, SQL Syndication, SQLServerPedia
Power BI Custom Visuals Contest Round-up
It’s really exciting to see the first round of entries into the Power BI Best Visuals Contest, which has been running for about two weeks and wraps up on October 1. The first people’s choice award winner is Daniele Perilli from Rome who submitted a nice horizontal bullet chart. The contest is a catalyst to get the community developing custom visuals for Power BI using Java Script libraries and an open development environment. What a great way to get the community involved and to fast track onward development of this great product! See the complete list of entries and more contest information here. Check back to this post for contest updates.
Is Power BI Ready For Enterprise Solutions?
I’m working on several projects right now that incorporate Power BI and learning some valuable lessons along the way, so I thought I’d share some thoughts and experience. I love Power BI and I think it can perform some very cool and valuable business functions. Being challenged with solving real business problems with real data for real consulting clients; it’s natural to both find the tool’s limitations and to discover functional design patterns to solve those problems.
In the last year or so, Power BI has surfaced as a truly impressive tool for self-service projects. A data analyst can import data from just about anywhere, transform and clean it up, model the data, create some calculations, reports, graphic visuals and dashboards. The analyst can publish the whole thing to the Power BI cloud service and share it with others who have the same email domain. In this scenario, everything works great. I make a point of using the Analyst as an example because this is the sweet spot for this product, more so than for the Developer or Solution Architect wanting to integrate dashboards into a larger solution. I’m very encouraged with the capabilities to extend Power BI dashboards with programmatic data sources and real-time data from Stream Analytics and other Azure services. I’m hopeful that we will soon have more capabilities to incorporate this product into IT solutions by embedding visuals into a frame or control, passing parameters, navigating to an from a report using actions, links or expressions.
Tell The Joke Again – Blogging On Blogging
I just returned from a meeting with some of my peers at SolidQ and we were talking about the value of blogging and publishing articles. A few days ago, another one of my peers asked me to review his first-ever blog post before it was published. Douglas McDowell, CEO of SolidQ North America, shared a blog post he wrote earlier this year about his perspective on this, which I found quite insightful. It’s about sharing information that someone has shared with you. I now share this with you:
Tell the joke again
by Douglas McDowell
Have you ever retold a joke? Of course you have, we love to hear jokes and retell them. But no one ever tells the joke the same way they heard it, they change it to reflect their personality, make it funnier or fit a situation or audience better. A part of them comes through in how they retell the joke. And retelling the joke is usually as (or more) entertaining to the person retelling the joke as it is to the people hearing it.