Power-Bi

I spend a lot of time doing consulting that involves Power BI. One of the core skills for working with Power BI is getting yourself comfortable with the M language that’s used in Power Query. I was asked the other day, how to create a function that determines if a date is a weekday or a weekend. That’s actually quite easy. The Date.DayOfWeek function can be adapted to do that.

2019-06-28

One of my Kiwi buddies who specializes in Power BI is Reza Rad. I was pleased to see he had a set of eBooks now on Power BI but was especially happy to see he had a book called Pro Power BI Architecture. There are lots of books around to discuss how to use Power BI but there’s been a real lack of books on architecting solutions using Power BI. So if you want to learn to develop dashboards or reports, this isn’t the book for you.

2019-05-10

In our free SDU Tools for Developers and DBAs was an AddWeekdays function. Now that was for T-SQL. Recently though, I needed to do that for Power Query. While the M language has a wonderful set of date-related functions, it didn’t have this one. That made it time to write one. Here’s the code that’s required: So how does it work? Forgive the formatting to fit this window, but let’s take a quick look through it:

2019-04-09

A current trend that I can’t say that I love is constant churn within software applications. I have no interest to go back to the days where we got a new version of SQL Server or Power BI, etc. every few years. It’s also not a case of who moved my cheese? In fact, I thrive on change. However, I’ve now become really concerned about how anyone: Learns to use a complex application Remembers how to use a complex application when they don’t use it daily I first really struck this issue with Azure.

2018-02-20

Digital Transformation and Cloud Transformation are phrases that I hear bandied around at nearly every large organization that I currently doing consulting work for. Yet, in so many cases, I can’t see the organization achieving the changes required. This is for two core reasons: The first is that the culture within the organizations is a major hurdle. There just isn’t enough flexibility to think outside the box about alternative ways to work.

2018-02-06

I had the great pleasure to record another SQL Down Under podcast last week with the Power BI general manager Kamal Hathi. In the show, Kamal and I discuss the current state and potential futures for Power BI, its relationship to SQL Server Reporting Services, and its development and extensibility models. You’ll find the show here: http://www.sqldownunder.com/Podcasts I hope you enjoy it. Note: We had a few unexpected audio issues with the recording.

2017-11-24

Hi Folks, That Power Query webinar that I’m doing for the global Power BI team is on this week. Love to see you attend. Registration is here: https://info.microsoft.com/CO-PowerBI-WBNR-FY17-08Aug-25-PowerQuery-PowerBI-Registration.html

2016-08-24

Hi Folks, Want to get your head around Power Query in both Excel and Power BI Desktop? I’ve got a webinar happening for the Power BI team later this month: https://info.microsoft.com/CO-PowerBI-WBNR-FY17-08Aug-25-PowerQuery-PowerBI-Registration.html

2016-08-05

It’s hard to believe that it’s only a year, given how far Power BI has come. Many of us in the community got together under the lead of Paul Turley and Adam Saxton and created a short video for Power BI’s birthday. Looks good: https://youtu.be/An_8wf4RwBw So to James Phillips, and all the Power BI team, happy birthday from Down Under, Power BI ! (Good to see some locals in there too )

2016-07-25

In recent months, I’ve been brushing up my R skills. I’ve had a few areas of interest in this: * R in Azure Machine Learning * R in relation to Power BI and general analytics * R embedded (somewhat) in SQL Server 2016 As a client tool, I’ve been using RStudio. It’s been good and very simple but it’s a completely separate environment. So I was excited when I saw there was to be a preview of new R tooling for Visual Studio.

2016-03-10