Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog

Facebook Live Pop-up Session Recording

Paul TurleyApril 24, 2018April 24, 2018

A big THANK YOU to everyone who attended the Facebook Live Pop-up session today. This was a fun event and…

PASS Facebook Live Pop-up Expert Series

Paul TurleyApril 15, 2018April 23, 2018

There are some great learning opportunities available from PASS and I am exciting to participate in two online events this…

Business Analytics, Power BI, Power Query, SSAS Design

How to add KPI indicators to a Table in Power BI

Paul TurleyMarch 28, 2018March 29, 2018

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

Microsoft BI Platform

Tour of the Power BI Solution Advisor

Paul TurleyMarch 18, 2018March 20, 2018

As a follow-up to my earlier post titled “Nine Realms of Power BI and the Power BI Solution Advisor“, I’ve…

Microsoft BI Platform

Using Power Query “M” To Encode Text As Numbers

Paul TurleyMarch 15, 2018March 15, 2018

I worked through a brain-teaser on a consulting project today that I thought I’d share in case it was useful for someone else in the community. We needed to convert application user names into an encoded format that would preserve case sensitive comparison. Here’s the story… A client of mine is using Power BI Desktop to munge data from several different source systems to create analytic reports.
Two-Phase BI Projects
I’m going to step out of the frame just a moment to make a soapbox speech: I’m a believer in two-phase Business Intelligence project design. What that means in a few words is that we rapidly work through a quick design, building a functional pilot or proof-of-concept to produce some reports that demonstrate the capability of the solution.

Microsoft BI Platform

Nine Realms of Power BI and the Power BI Solution Advisor

Paul TurleyFebruary 23, 2018February 14, 2019

The use cases for Power BI, along with its many companion technologies, are numerous. Many organizations are exploring the use of Power BI in enterprise-scale solutions and struggling with the myriad of options and choices. I’ve grouped these options into nine categories that I call the “Nine Realms of Power BI”. Along with my friends at CSG Pro, I have created a Power BI-based tool that you can use as a sort-of survey to assess your business and technical requirements and then recommend a reference solution architecture in one of these categories. The options, components and reference architectures, capabilities, limits and cost guidelines are detailed later in this presentation. I’ll also take you on a tour of the solution advisor tool, which I have published for public Internet users.
This is a presentation I prepared for the Redmond SQL Saturday that I will also use for some future presentations.