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Day: September 6, 2019

Progressive Disclosure

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld continues a series on storytelling with Power BI:

Progressive disclosure
It is all about giving that little bit more insights which can be done in many ways. For example, you want to show the sales by product category, which you’ve put in a bar chart. Looking at these bars, you might be interested in the number of manufactures involved in these sales amounts for product category. You can create a stacked barchart representing the different manufacturers in a legend. Or you can use another chart in your report to represent the top 5 products, which will interact with the sales over time chart. But both options will use additional space on your report canvas and look a bit messy, which can distract the users of where it is all about.

Marc is wrapping up the series and it’s worth the read.

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On-Prem Data, Azure Apps

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick helps us figure out how to keep our data local while using Azure services:

One of the challenges many organizations face when beginning to work with Azure applications (PowerBI, PowerApps, Flow, etc.) is that their data is on-premise and the applications are hosted in the cloud. Moving the data to the cloud is often cost-prohibitive and there can be operational requirements that prevent the data, or the systems hosting it, from being relocated to the cloud.

So, how can on-prem data be used with Azure apps?

Read on for more.

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Processing JSON in Biml

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Fellows takes us through a library which (seemingly by law) must be in every .NET project:

#sqlhelp #biml I would have the metadata in a Json structure. How would you parse the json in the C# BIML Script? I was thinking use Newtonsoft.Json but I don’t know how to add the reference to it

Adding external assemblies is a snap but here I’ll show how to use the NewtonSoft Json library to parse a Json based metadata structure and then use that in our Biml.

Click through to learn how.

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Using Azure Storage Explorer

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal takes us through Azure Storage Explorer:

I only ever use the storage explorer when managing my blobs, files, queues within storage accounts. It is your single view access point for all your storage needs and I totally recommend downloading it and using it (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/features/storage-explorer/).

Why do I like using it? I am sure there are more reasons, but these are personal to me.

Click through for Arun’s reasons as well as installation basics.

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Dealing with Thousands of Databases

Published 2019-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy has some Q&A about dealing with large numbers of databases on a single server. Part one:

What was the most difficult challenge faced initially with a large environment and how does that challenge relate to now?

For me personally, it was just getting a handle on how to deal with this many databases because I didn’t “grow up” with the system. I walked into an environment with a lot of established tools and procedures for performing tasks and had to learn how those all fit together while also not breaking anything. You don’t want to be the person who walks in the door, says “why are you doing things like this, you should be doing it this other way” and then falls victim to hubris. If something seems unusual, there’s probably a reason for that and you need to understand the “why” before trying to change anything.

Part 2 is also up:

How large is the team that manages the databases? Is the knowledge shared and everyone can work on everything or do these people fill niches?

There are two of us. We each have a few specialties but we aren’t “territorial” and we try to share as much as possible. If we aren’t both directly involved in a given project, we keep each other in the loop as it progresses.

Stay tuned for part 3.

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