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2025-07-09
Unlock your potential with Analysis Services !
We’re pleased to announce that this course is now available. We had so many requests for this course. You can find details of it here:
Analysis Services for Data Professionals
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Our comprehensive course is your gateway to becoming proficient at working with both SQL Server Analysis Services, and with Azure Analysis Services.
Ask Yourself:
2025-07-06
In a previous post, I described the issues with measuring quantities in warehousing systems. I showed how you could well need to measure more than just quantities purchased or sold. You often need to deal with the hierarchies of containers that goods are supplied in.
But while food wholesale systems will need to deal with quantities like I described in that post, they often have another layer of complexity. Items are often sold by:
2025-03-05
After one of my recent posts, I was asked what an outer quantity was. This term is common in warehousing and logistics. So many business applications assume that you sell things by quantity, and that you just count the number in vs the number out.
But that’s not how it works.
A system that’s useful for these tasks, understands way more than that. The terms unit, inner, outer, shipper, layer, and pallet refer to different levels or units of packaging and organization in the supply chain. Here’s a breakdown of each term:
2025-03-01
I work with a lot of clients that are creating analytic systems. They all collect large numbers of data points and analyze them. Most do a fairly good job with it.
One area that many also handle well is detecting anomalies i.e. data that is out of the ordinary.
But another area that I see very few handling well, is the data that is missing, rather than just the data that is present. There’s a huge difference between data that arrived, and is odd, and data that just didn’t arrive at all.
2024-11-18
Another book that my friends at PackT sent me for review recently was Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices by Thomas LeBlanc and Bhavik Merchant.
Over the years, I’ve come across Thomas many times but haven’t had the chance to spend time with him, unlike Bhavik who worked here in Australia quite a bit. They are a good combination to write this book.
I like the fact that samples of everything discussed in the book are available. I also like the idea that if you bought the printed book, that you can download a PDF as well.
2024-10-01
I had some clear time this morning so I read a recent book called Deciphering Data Architectures (Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh) by James Serra.
One comment I need to make is that for some reason, the O’Reilly titles seem to have become more expensive lately, and their freight options are expensive too. It was the same for this book. It was $112 AUD landed at my place. That’s so much more than any similar book that I’ve read lately, and this is not a large book.
2024-08-15
Another Fabric Down Under podcast is out the door. This time it was with a another fellow “Down Under” guest Heidi Hasting from Adelaide.
Heidi Hasting is a Business Intelligence professional and former software developer with over ten years experience in Microsoft products. She’s an MVP, MCT and holder of many certifications along with being an ALM/DLM enthusiast and Azure DevOps fan and co-founder and organiser of the Adelaide Power BI User Group.
2024-07-24
There was a question on the Q&A forums today, asking how to read data using SSIS, when it’s in this format:
|Col1| |Col2|Col3|Col|
|101| |A|21|DC|
One of the concerns was that there was a leading pipe. This is not a problem. When you have data like that, and you set | as the delimiter, because there are 6 delimiters, then there are 7 columns output. These are the values:
Column 1: blank string Column 2: 101 Column 3: blank string Column 4: A Column 5: 21 Column 6: DC Column 7: blank string
2024-07-19
A few weeks ago, I received another book from our friends at PackT. It was the second edition of Azure Data Factory Cookbook by Dmitry Foshin, Dmitry Anoshin, Tonya Chernyshova, and Xenia Ireton.
I liked the earlier version of this book, and I was pleased to see substantial work had gone into this second edition.
It’s interesting that the book doesn’t stick directly to Azure Data Factory (ADF) but also branches into topics on Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Fabric, and Databricks.
2024-06-14