In recent months, I’ve been brushing up my R skills. I’ve had a few areas of interest in this:
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
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: SQL Down Under Podcast
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. Turns out that you cannot currently refresh more than once every 5 minutes. That also includes within 5 minutes of your initial upload. Unfortunately, this is the error returned when you attempt it.
2015-07-14
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: https://podcast.sqldownunder.com
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 tool that allows connecting Power View to SSAS Multidimensional cubes is now available.
(NOTE: CTP no longer available)
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:
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
I’m loving my Kindle. I seem to be getting through books so much faster. One book that I recently read was Book Review: Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning by Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari.
I really liked this book. It provided quite good coverage of PowerPivot use in Excel 2010 and also spent some time mapping the use of PowerPivot to organizational requirements. Marco and Alberto provided more coverage of DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) than I have seen anywhere else, particularly in relation to the CALCULATE verb.
2011-06-01
