Interviews from PASS Summit 2018: Matthew Roche, Matt Masson, Adam Saxton & Patrick LeBlanc
I had a chance to catch up with two of the three Matts from the Power BI product team at…
Data Model Options for Power BI Solutions
At the heart of every a Business Intelligence reporting solution is a data model, to optimize queries and enable ad hoc report interactions. Data modeling technology has evolved quite a lot over the past 20 years or so. You have several choices and options depending on the simplicity or formality of your project, and factors like data size and security. In the past, choices were simpler. Power BI was the choice for smallish, “good enough” projects and when data quality, high volume and exactness were the priority, SSAS was the better choice. Now, using Power BI for modelling larger data sets is even advantageous with new features like hybrid models, aggregations and incremental data refresh.
I’ve been a quest to find the best medium to break these choices down into simple terms but it truly is a journey and not a destination.
Interviews with Microsoft Data Community Speakers and Leaders
What is the key to advancing your career in the Microsoft data platform? Here is some advice from some of the most successful people in the industry…
Every year we have some big community events that bring together community leaders from all over. These are international user group and community leaders who write books and speak at conferences. we had our local Oregon SQL Saturday “SQL Train” which is a chartered train – some coaches that one of our speaker’s chartered to bring all of our speakers and attendees up to the PASS summit after Oregon SQL Saturday, and then the big PASS summit (the big conference up in Seattle). I had a chance to sit down with a number of our speakers, community leaders and attendees and just ask questions about what brought them there, and advice that they would give people in the industry about how to get the most value out of that experience …and this is what they said:
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…
Pareto, Burn-down & Accumulating Trend Charts in Power BI
I’m managing an Agile team project using Microsoft Teams – the new project management platform integrated with Office 365. Teams…
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 or M? – SSAS Partitions in Power Query/M
This is a continuation of this post In the data platform industry, we have been working with SQL for decades. …
SQL or M? – SSAS Partitions Using SQL Server Table-Valued Functions (UDFs)
[ Related posts in this series: SQL, M or DAX: When Does it Matter? SQL, M or Dax? – part…
Hands-on Workshops at the Pacific Northwest Power BI Symposium
Please join Power BI authors and community leaders for an afternoon and evening of deep learning. Featured presenters include “Guy…
SQL, M or DAX: When Does it Matter?
[ Related posts in this series: SQL, M or DAX: When Does it Matter? SQL, M or Dax? – part…
BI Industry, BI Projects, Business Analytics, DAX, Microsoft BI Platform, Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server, T-SQL
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.
SQL, M or DAX?
We live in a world of choices and we have many tools at our disposal. In Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions using tools like Power BI and SQL Server Analysis Services, you have at least three different ways to perform data collection, transformations and calculations. A question I get all the time is which database or BI tool should be used to perform routine tasks. Is it best to shape and transform data at the source, in Power Query using M script, or in the data model using DAX?
In this series, I’ll demonstrate options for creating utility and dimension tables, columns and calculations using each option and discuss the advantages, disadvantages and recommended practice for each.