Business-Intelligence

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

I’ve been working a lot with ADF (Azure Data Factory) again lately. If you’ve started to work with ADF and aren’t using Git in conjunction with it, you need to change that now.

ADF objects are also represented as JSON objects and lend themselves nicely to being stored in Git.

Another key advantage is that if you don’t have Git connected, when you’re working with ADF, you don’t have a Save button. If you’re part way through making changes, you can either Publish them or Discard All. When you have Git in place, you get an option to Save.

2020-02-21

I was working with a client the other day and we had what we thought was a simple situation:

• A table in an SSAS tabular model project
• The table had two partitions
• We needed to remove 6 columns from the table

So, we’d already removed the 6 columns from the SQL Server view that the tables were being loaded from. We just needed to update the tabular model.

Now for an unpartitioned table, that’s easy. You open the table properties, click Design, wait for a moment, click below the query, then on the Query menu, click the option to Refresh. When you then click Import, you can then save the changes. We do that all the time.

2020-02-14

I’ll start this post by mentioning that there’s a general consensus that you should avoid columns in tabular data models that have both dates and times. That’s largely because they don’t compress well. However, sometimes you really do need to have both a date and a time in a single column.

For example, if you want to sort one column by the date and time, we have no option to sort one column by two other columns. And if you’re going to create a composite column to get around that, you’re really back in the same problem as storing a datetime anyway.

2020-01-31

I have a client who’s publishing their tabular data models to Azure Analysis Services (AAS). They want to publish a table that’s visible, but only has a single column that’s hidden.

You might wonder why he wanted to do that.

He’s trying to have a table with no existing columns that’s an anchor point for report designers to attach their report-specific measures.  There are measures and computed columns in the tabular data model in AAS. But he wants to have a known location for measures that are only related to the specific report.

2020-01-24