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Day: June 13, 2022

Editing a Legend in Excel

Published 2022-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Cisneros provides tips on how to edit chart legends in Excel:

One essential element of our charts and graphs rarely gets the attention it deserves: the legend. 

Without a clear and thoughtfully-incorporated legend, viewers of our data communications will struggle to understand exactly what we’re presenting to them. Any additional effort an audience needs to devote to solving the mystery of “which data series is green?” or “what’s the difference between square data markers and circles?” is energy they won’t have to put towards grasping your visual’s important insights. A well-designed legend will remove that cognitive burden. 

Click through for eight such tips.

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Building a Q&A Engine in R with httr and Shiny

Published 2022-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Benjamin Smith builds an oracle but with R, not Delphi:

Knowing how to write API requests and handle their responses is a valuable skill that a developer, data
engineer or data analyst/scientist needs to know. In this short blog I share how its possible leverage DuckDuckGo’s instant answer API to create a oracle which can answer (some) of your questions using the httr package and Shiny.

Click through for a simple app which does the job.

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Using SELECTEDVALUE with Field Parameters

Published 2022-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo diagnoses an error:

If you try to use SELECTEDVALUE on the visible column of the table generated by the Fields Parameters feature in Power BI, you get the following error:

Calculation error in measure ‘Sales'[Selection]: Column [Parameter] is part of composite key, but not all columns of the composite key are included in the expression or its dependent expression.

Read on to understand what causes this error and what you can do to resolve it.

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Guidance on When to Use Azure Data Explorer

Published 2022-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Tzvia Gitlin Troyna has a flow chart for us:

Azure Data Explorer is a big data interactive analytics platform that empowers people to make data driven decisions in a highly agile environment. The factors listed below can help assess if Azure Data Explorer is a good fit for the workload at hand. These are the key questions to ask yourself.

The following flowchart table summarize the key questions to ask when you’re considering using Azure Data Explorer.

In addition to the flow chart, there is a table of three common patterns of interaction which ADE can do well.

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Seven Principles for BI Skill Development

Published 2022-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brett Powell thinks about first principles:

Data and analytics languages should be prioritized far beyond graphical interface tools/software/services and should form a solid foundation of a skillset. Unlike software applications and various user interface controls which change frequently, the essential concepts and semantics of data languages such as SQL and DAX don’t change nearly as frequently and thus languages offer a much greater return on the time invested to learn them. For example, the fundamental PowerShell scripting knowledge I built up years ago using the Windows PowerShell ISE can still be applied today in many different tools, apps, and services that weren’t around back then such as Azure Function Apps and Visual Studio Code.

In almost every BI project I can remember, even projects that were explicitly intended to use low-code or no-code tools, it was the combination of different languages such as SQL, DAX, Kusto (KQL), Power Fx, and others that delivered the most value or which made the difference between project success and failure. Similarly, even in projects in which my role was intended to exclusively focus on the data model layer with DAX, I’ve almost always found myself also writing SQL, Power Query (M) and using other languages and code either in the data warehouse or on the reporting layer.

Brett has put a lot of thought into this and I think many of the principles apply outside of business intelligence work as well.

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Using S3 Object Storage in MinIO with SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino takes us through an example of integrating with MinIO via its S3 integration:

In this post, I will walk you through how to set up MinIO, so you can use it to work with SQL Server 2022’s s3 object integrations. Working with s3 and SQL Server requires a valid and trusted TLS certificate. This can be a pain for some users and environments. So I’m writing this post so you can get off the ground running with this new feature set in SQL Server 2022. The certificate we’re working with here is self-signed. You could get a real certificate for your environment, and that’s encouraged. But this walk-through intends to get you up and running fast so that you can test out SQL Server’s s3 object integrations. We’re using MinIO’s free GNU AGPL v3 edition and running it in a docker container for our s3 compatible object storage and SQL Server 2022 CTP 2.0, which is also running in a container.

Click through for the demo, in which Anthony sets everything up and then backs up a database in SQL Server 2022 to MinIO.

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