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Day: February 9, 2023

How Power BI Chooses Colors for Legends

Published 2023-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Kennedy reveals a mystery of the universe:

I’ve just had a wonderful discovery about why Power BI sometimes seems to choose random colors in the legend. 

Typically, the first item in a series will match the first color of your Power BI theme, the second item in the series will match the second color of your Power BI theme, and so on. 

However, this isn’t always the case. I have noticed that sometimes when I have text category values for my legend that Power BI can assign random colors, seemingly not even part of my theme. Until recently, I just accepted this as a quirk of Power BI and carried on with my report development. 

Read on for the answer.

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Migrating SQL Server Databases to Aurora

Published 2023-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick wounds me:

Our decision to move some (not all) SQL databases to AWS Aurora was partially a cost decision, but also an effort to simplify operational management by diversifying our database platforms. Now that second reason might seem counter-intuitive, but here are some details about the situation and how we came to our decision:

Read on for Jamie’s thoughts and tips to make the migration process easier.

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Thoughts on the Data Lakehouse Concept

Published 2023-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some thoughts:

There has been a lot of noise surrounding a data lakehouse nowadays, so I felt the urge to chime in. In fact, the famous guy in cube, Patrick LeBlanc, gave a great presentation on this subject to our Atlanta Power BI Group and you can find the recording here (I have to admit we could have done better job with the recording quality, but we are still learning in the post-COVID era).

A lot of Teo’s thoughts relate to the data lake portion of the “lakehouse” metaphor and they’re worth reading. One small comment I’ll make is regarding the following statement:

And should you stage the data 1:1 from the source? In some cases, like the Get Data First aforementioned scenario, it might make sense. But in most cases, it would be much more efficient to stage the data in the shape you need it, which may necessitate joining multiple tables at the source (by the way, a relational server is the best place to handle joins).

The biggest benefit to getting data as “raw” as possible comes from the expectation that upstream data is ephemeral. What I mean is that, if you pull data on 2023-02-08, you’ll get some dataset. On 2023-04-08, you won’t be able to re-create that original dataset because your source will have changed, with inserts, updates, and deletes modifying the source.

Therefore, you want your copy of data into the Raw/Bronze layer to be as “opinion-free” as possible. This is because, if your data access code has a bug in it, you’ll never be able to re-create the old data. By contrast, if you have that raw data, you can start from there, re-apply your transformations, and replace your downstream results with corrected details. This is similar to the way a write-once service like Apache Kafka can benefit: you get history where there was none before.

So that’s the trade-off on the other side. Yeah, it’s typically more efficient to create queries and operate on the data before it goes into Raw, and you might need to do so for practical reasons, but there’s a risk of that code causing an irrevocable data problem and the risk goes up as you get more complicated operations.

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Last Refresh Date Measure in Power BI

Published 2023-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley keeps it fresh:

Business users often need to know how fresh the data is that they see on a Power BI report. This requirement can be interpreted to mean either “when was the last date & time that the source data was updated?” or “when was the last date & time that the data model was refreshed?”

Read on for Paul’s current solution to the problem of knowing the last time this data was refreshed.

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Azure Synapse Analytics January 2023 Updates

Published 2023-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Majidimehr shares an overview of what the Synapse team has been working on:

ADX contains native support for detecting anomalies over multiple time series by using the function series_decompose_anomalies(). This function can analyze thousands of time series in seconds, enabling near real time monitoring solutions and workflows based on ADX. Univariate analysis is simpler, faster, and easily scalable and is applicable to most real-life scenarios. However, there are some cases where it might miss anomalies that can only be detected by analyzing multiple metrics at the same time.

For some scenarios, there might be a need for a true multivariate model, jointly analyzing multiple metrics. This can be achieved now in ADX using the new Python-based multivariate anomaly detection functions.

The themes for this month are Spark, Data Exploration (via Kusto), and data integration.

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