The Microsoft Power Platform consists of three products: Power BI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow (now called Power Automate). I find customers are confused on the use cases of these products and how they compare to other products (Azure Functions, Logic … Continue reading →
As a follow-up to my blogs What product to use to transform my data? and Should I load structured data into my data lake?, I wanted to talk about where you should you clean your data when building a modern data warehouse … Continue reading →
If you are building a big data solution in the cloud, you will likely be landing most of the source data into a data lake. And much of this data will need to be transformed (i.e. cleaned and joined together … Continue reading →
Dataflows, previously called Common Data Service for Analytics as well as Datapools, will be in preview soon and I wanted to explain in this blog what it is and how it can help you get value out of your data … Continue reading →
There are two really great features just added to Power BI that I wanted to blog about: Composite models and Dual storage mode. This is part of the July release for Power BI Desktop and it is in preview (see … Continue reading →
As I mentioned in my recent blog Use cases of various products for a big data cloud solution, with so many products it can be difficult to know the best products to use when building a solution. When it comes to … Continue reading →
Announced today are some really cool new Power BI features: Power BI Premium Previously available were two tiers, Power BI Free and Power BI Pro ($10/user/month). The problem with Power BI Pro is that for large organizations, this can add … Continue reading →
Below I have attempted to list the various options for reporting off of Hadoop (HDInsight, HDP, Cloudera) using Power BI Desktop and Excel. Some of the data sources prompt you to choose the Data Connectivity mode of either Import or … Continue reading →
Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception. I’m writing a set of blogs covering the major announcements. Next up is the technical Preview for Power BI reports on-prem in SSRS. The … Continue reading →
One thing I try to do in my role with Microsoft is to get clients to think of possible use cases for building solutions in the Azure cloud. To set off light bulbs in their heads. Sometimes this is accomplished … Continue reading →
In an effort to understand Power BI and all the products it encompasses, I have made this slide deck to hopefully make things easy for you: Power BI Made Simple. It is a presentation that covers all the products under the Power … Continue reading →
Long has the question been asked “Which Microsoft tool do I use for dashboards?”. SSRS, Excel, PowerView, Report Builder and PerformancePoint are all candidates. But that has all changed, and the future of dashboarding is here: Power BI Designer [since renamed … Continue reading →
The following blog describes how to use certain cloud-based Power BI for Office 365 products (Power View and Q&A) on a Power BI Site that will reference data on-premises. To do this you will use certain on-premise Power BI products … Continue reading →
Microsoft has announced today the general availability of Power BI for Office 365! Microsoft describes it as: Power BI for Office 365 is a complete self-service Business Intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365 providing you with data discovery, analysis, and … Continue reading →
Pricing for Power BI for Office 365 has been announced (see pricing). It’s all very confusing to me but Melissa Coates does a great job explaining it (see Initial Pricing for Power BI Has Been Announced). More info: Microsoft pins a price … Continue reading →
As I mentioned in Power BI first impressions, Power BI Q&A is an instantaneous search experience that uses a natural language query. The user enters a question and it interprets it and serves up the correct interactive chart or graph. It only … Continue reading →
One point of confusion I see with Power Query is some people believe Power Query adheres to the Excel limit of a max of 1,048,576 rows that can be imported. However, there is a way around this limit. When using … Continue reading →
Microsoft keep turning out updates to Power Query. For December, some of the new features (download): Connection to three more data sources: Sybase IQ, Exchange, and Dynamics CRM Online When using the Navigator pane in the Power Query search, it … Continue reading →
As I have been giving demos on Power BI for Office 365, I have received a tremendous amount of positive feedback, with many clients really loving it. There are common questions that I hear, and I thought I would list them … Continue reading →
As I mentioned in my previous post (see Power BI first impressions), Power Query is a great new tool and Microsoft has been updating it frequently. The latest update has many new features, among them: Connectivity to Windows Azure Table Storage … Continue reading →