Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog

Is there any good news in the COVID-19 Coronavirus data? Everyone is familiar with the tragic growing number cases and fatalities globally and in most countries that have high populations. However, several countries have increasing recovery rates. You can click here to view the new report shown in the image below.

The experts keep taking about looking for “the peak”, when the number of people recovering from infection increases faster than new cases. We’re not there yet but where is the recovery rate increasing? The “Recovery Rate (3 Day Change)” measure is the Recovery Rate (e.g. The number of confirmed cases divided by the number of recovered cases) from three days prior to the most recent report date. This report ranks countries by this measure.

For a new series of posts to include tutorials and “how to” demonstrations for Power BI, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and Paginated Reports, I need your help to know what questions are most compelling and top of mind.

Please scroll to the Comments section at the bottom of this post and help me create a list with your questions and suggested topics.

There are now three different ways to access the COVID-19 Daily Updates Power BI dataset & report:

• Use this link to view the report published using Power BI “publish to web”
• Add the complete COVID-19 app to your Power BI tenant from Microsoft AppSource (see instructions below)
• Download the .PBIX file from this GitHub repository and make your own enhancements

This is a Power BI report that I have developed and published with public access to the web to be shared with anyone who needs access to this information. It contains daily updates from the Center for Disease Control using data curated by the John Hopkins University Center for Systems Science & Engineering. To the best of our collective ability, the data is accurate but I cannot make any guarantees. Please validate with other sources before making any decisions with this information.

I’m very hopeful that the this report will be a valuable resource. It’s been a labor of love and as usual, considerably more work that I envisioned. But, I will continue to work on enhancements and corrections as I am able based on feedback. Please post comments here or contact me through Twitter, if you have feedback, comments and questions.

At the time of this post, the world is dealing with a serious health and economic crisis. The COVID-19 Corona Virus is impacting the lives of people around the world and in turn, it is affecting world markets and industries and many different ways. This demonstration shows you how to create a multi-layer map to correlate current outbreak case locations with your own data, using Power BI and the ESRI map visual.

This post and the video walk-through demonstrates how the order of steps added to a query can make a big performance difference and drastically effect the number of steps generated by the designer.

Activity monitoring and troubleshooting with the new logging API is focused entirely on Power BI tenant events like dashboard, interactive and paginated reports views, deployments, errors and data refresh events. This should be easier than before, enabling admins to be more proactive by track usage patterns. In a short series of blog posts, I’ll demonstrate how to build a complete activity logging and reporting solution for your entire Power BI tenant.

As I read the many posts from those in the community who I follow, I am reminded that the community…

As I continue to explore and develop best practices for managing serious business-scale Power BI solutions, I’m having conversations with recognized community leaders. Last month I chatted with Ásgeir Gunnarsson on the SQL Train ride from Portland to PASS Summit in Seattle. Ásgeir is a data platform MVP and seasoned Business Intelligence expert from Reykjavik, Iceland who works as Chief Consultant for Datheos, a Microsoft-focused BI and Analytics consultancy in Copenhagen. He leads the Icelandic Power BI User Group and PASS Chapter.

Team file sharing and version control may be managed through Power BI workspace integration with OneDrive and SharePoint team sites. In this post, I will show you how to get started and setup a new project.

This is a series of posts and exercises from a recent full-day workshop called Next Level Power BI. Check back for additional lessons and freely post your questions and feedback in the comments section after this post.

Power Query is a modern data acquisition and transformation technology and it is the “Get Data” component of Power BI and many other Microsoft tools. The query script language of Power Query is known as “M” or the Microsoft Data Mashup language. The menu options and selections in the Power Query Editor interface build this “M” script for you but to use Power Query at an expert level, you must understand fundamental concepts of the language. The post will step you through some essential mechanics of the language to build the necessary fundamental skills.

Enabling the modern data analyst by becoming shopkeepers rather than gatekeepers of information

I really appreciated the opportunity to sit down and talk with one of my heros in the industry. Donald Farmer has been recognized leader in the Business Intelligence and Analytics industry for the past two decades and his thought leadership is even more relevant today. He played a key role in shaping the Microsoft BI toolset as a Principal Program Manager from 2001 when the products we use today were in their infancy.

Power BI table and matrix visuals can render SVG object elements in a column or measure to display in-line web content. You can build dynamic content like KPI indicators, databars and sparklines by altering SVG element content using DAX expressions. In this post, I will show you how to create databars that show negative and positive values with different color fills based on category values. Of course, Power BI has built-in databars in the conditional formatting options for numeric columns but you cannot alter the color and other attributes dynamically – at least not yet. For the time being, this technique provides more flexibility than the built-in databar feature.

In this first post in a series called “Next Level Power BI”, I demonstrate how to create dynamic databars using a Scalable Vector Graphic. A dynamic SVG databar, icon, sparkline or practically any imaginable graphic can be produced with calculated column or measure.

Is the 2010, first edition of my SQL Server Reporting Services Recipe Book so snooze-worthy that it is now being…