Business-Intelligence

One of my favourite conferences each year is SQL Day. It’s run by an enthusiastic group from Poland, and when I’ve attended in person, I loved it. This year it’s virtual, and the upside of that, is you can attend from anywhere.

As part of the conference, I’m running a pre-con workshop. It’s a low cost one day course on How I Implement Power BI in Enterprises. You’ll find info on it here. The course is running on Poland time, but it looks to me like the times will suit a pretty wide variety of people, including from here in Australia.

2021-04-16

I’m a big fan of Azure Data Factory (ADF), but one of the things you need to get used to with tools like this, is that the UI keeps changing over time. That makes it hard for several reasons:

• It’s hard to train people. Any recorded demo you have will show them things that no longer exist, within a fairly short period of time.
• Every time a cosmetic change occurs, it immediately devalues blog posts, tutorials, etc. that are out on the Internet.

I think Microsoft don’t quite get how much blog posts, etc. supplement their own documentation.

2021-03-09

I’ve seen many challenges with analytics over the years. One that’s painful is an inability to explain where analytic data came from. Someone looks at a report, sees a value, and says I don’t believe that number. Don’t put yourself in that position !

Lineage

I load analytics from data warehouses. Most of my data warehouses are SQL Server databases of some type. Currently, they’re almost always Azure SQL Databases. I like to include information in the database, about how the data got there i.e. the lineage of the data.

2021-01-13

I love the way that tools like Power BI have made creating analytics approachable for a much wider range of users. The skills acquired when doing this are a great start for using analytics in enterprises, but an area that I still see missing is data modelling.

What I see users doing is this:

• Decide what the output reports, etc. should look like
• Design tables that match the reports.

And this is where things go wrong.

2021-01-07

I was really excited today to see details of the upcoming #dataweek. Anything with a name like that already has my interest.

In this case though, there’s a #CreateData event that’s happening as part of #dataweek. And the focus of that looks to be on Azure Synapse Analytics.

Azure Synapse Analytics

I know that many of my readers won’t have spent much time with Azure Synapse Analytics. The product has grown out of Azure SQL Data Warehouse (note not Azure SQL Database) but it’s now much more than just an upgraded Azure SQL DW.

2020-11-25

I work with a lot of technology on a daily basis, much of it amazing. But I still get excited when relatively small enhancements are made, and they make my life or development much better.

Timezone support in schedule triggers in Azure Data Factory is one of those changes.

Schedule Triggers

In Data Factory, the most common type of trigger that we use is a schedule trigger. It’s used to run a pipeline at a specific time or series of times. But one of the most painful aspects of these triggers is that they didn’t have time zone support.

2020-11-04

Power BI is amazing. And it’s starting to appear all over the place. Many enterprises don’t know what to make of it though. Some are scared that it’ll be the “next Access” where stores of uncontrolled data end up all over the organization. Power BI’s mantra of “5 minutes to Wow” is spot on. It’s easy to be impressed. But enterprises are often struggling with “what comes next after that 5 minutes?”

2020-08-07

I was editing using the Power Query editor in an Analysis Services project, hosted in Visual Studio 2019. When I tried to use “Add column by example”, I received the error shown above:

Unexpected Error

Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.DataIntegration.TransformDataByExample, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad34e35’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

The problem is that the assembly had not been deployed with the Analysis Services Designer.

2020-07-16

I was working with Azure Analysis Services the other day, and was having an issue with the processing of a tabular data model. When I first tried to process, I was receiving an error that told me pretty clearly that the AS server couldn’t connect to the SQL Database. Fair enough. Wasn’t sure what had nuked those credentials but reset them.

Next, I started to get this error: Failed to save modifications to the server. Error returned: ‘The key didn’t match any rows in the table

2020-03-10

If you have worked with larger tables in either Power BI or Analysis Services, you’ll know that developing against them is painful. Any time the data needs to be refreshed (which happens often), you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for it to happen.

Now our buddy Chris Webb proposed a way of getting sampled data during development. That’s pretty good. And fellow MVP Marc Lelijveld also uses a similar method.

2020-02-28