Power-Bi

We normally run our Power BI Core Skills class as the 2nd day of the week in our 5 day BI Core Skills. We’ve had extra demand for the Power BI day so we’ve added an extra one in Melbourne on May 10th. Details are here: http://www.sqldownunder.com/Training/Courses/20 Early bird pricing ends April 26th.

2016-03-05

Hi Folks, We’ve taken a fairly long break but now back into the swing for SQL Server 2016 and Power BI. The first of the new series of shows is a show on the current state of Power BI with Jen Underwood. You’ll find it here: http://www.sqldownunder.com/Podcasts or subscribe download like any other podcast. Feed link is: http://www.sqldownunder.com/SQLDownUnderMP3Feed.xml. Enjoy! Regards, Greg

2015-12-27

We recently started working with the new Personal Data Management Gateway for Power BI. Overall, we really like it but the error messages in most of Power BI have left much to be desired. One error that we were encountering made us feel like the service was flaky as it seemed to happen randomly. When we tried to refresh a dataset, we got this error: The Power BI team came to the rescue and worked out what was happening.

2015-07-14

The Power BI team have released details of their March update to the standalone Power BI designer. You’ll find details of the update here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/03/26/7-new-updates-to-the-power-bi-designer-preview-march-2015.aspx The first thing I noticed is just how much faster the tool operates. The blog post mentioned performance enhancements but I really, really noticed them. One particular enhancement that I wanted to call out was the additional of a connector for Google Analytics. I’ve been trying that this morning and have found it really easy to use.

2015-03-27

Two of the parameters in SQL Server connections are the Application Name and the Host Name. You can see these in SQL Server if you execute the following command: I’ve always been a fan of having applications identify themselves in their connection strings. It makes tasks like tracing much easier. The tools supplied with SQL Server do a reasonable job of that as you can see above. But many other tools don’t do such a good job.

2015-03-19

Over the last year, I’ve delivered a number of partner enablement events for Microsoft. These events are low cost training sessions that run for three days. Days 1 and 2 cover SQL Server 2014 content, mostly regarding in-memory OLTP, clustered columnstore indexes, and Azure integration with hybrid systems. Day 3 covers the full Power BI stack. We’re pleased to be running another set of these around the country: Melbourne: November 5th to 7th

2014-10-30

It seems like anyone that’s talked to me this year has heard me going on and on about how Power Query is just the nicest new bit of tech that’s come from Microsoft lately. We cover it as part of our one-day Power BI Core Skills training class and as part of day 2 in our BI Core Skills classes that we recently updated for SQL Server 2014. Out of all the technologies that people see during that week, Power Query is the one that seems to promote the biggest discussions.

2014-06-28

I promised there would be a bunch of shows this year. The second one is now published. In this show, SQL Server MVP Grant Paisley describes PowerPivot, Power View, Analysis Services Tabular vs Multidimensional and shares the lessons he’s learned when working with these tools. The show is here: http://www.sqldownunder.com/Resources/Podcast.aspx Enjoy!

2013-01-22

When Power View appeared, one of the big outcries was “but what about connecting to existing cubes!”. Great to see that the SQL Server team have addressed that. A CTP that allows connecting Power View to SSAS Multidimensional cubes is now available: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/analysisservices/archive/2012/11/29/power-view-for-multidimensional-models-preview.aspx Help the team get this out the door by trying it and providing feedback.

2012-11-30

I’ve been doing some work with PowerPivot and SharePoint/Excel Services this week. I wanted the user interface to have slicers for: Year Month Day But I wanted the slicer to be preselected for the current month. There is no property on the slicers to set a default value. I read a number of websites and the suggestion was to use VBA code to set the value. This works but if you want to have the VBA code run at workbook open, you have to create a macro-enabled workbook, and these are not supported by Excel Services.

2011-08-11