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Author: Kevin Feasel

Power BI Themes Gallery

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Seth Bauer shares a tip:

Welcome to today’s tutorial where we’ll explore the Power BI Tips+ Theme Generator and its incredible features designed to streamline your Power BI report building experience. In this walkthrough, we’ll guide you through the process of getting started with the Power BI Tips+ Gallery, focusing on the Sunset theme. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to effortlessly integrate our pre-configured Gallery Projects into your Power BI reports. It doesn’t get easier than this!

Click through for the process, including a video on how to do it.

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A Review of Data Platform Trends

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney checks the lists:

Each January I take a little time to look back on the Database market over the previous calendar year. This year I’ll have a look at 2023 (obviously!) and how things have changed and evolved.

In my post from last year (click here) I mentioned the behaviour of some vendors and how they like to be-little other vendors. That kind of behaviour is not really acceptable, but they kept on doing it during 2023 up to a point. That point occurred during the Autumn of 2023. It was during this period there was some degree of consolidation in the IT industry with staff reductions through redundancies, contracts not being renewed, and so on. These changes seemed to have an impact on the messages these companies were putting out and everything seemed to calm down. These staff reductions have continued into 2024.

Click through for Brendan’s thoughts on the new SQL:2023 standard and common estimations of data platform product utilization. I’ve historically focused on DB-Engines rather than TOPDB, but they’re both pointing in similar directions at the top.

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Microsoft Fabric Free Trial Capacities

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi digs into the fine print:

If you are evaluating Microsoft Fabric and do not currently own a Premium Capacity, chances are you’re using Microsoft Fabric Trial Capacities. All Power BI users within an organisation or specific security groups given the rights can opt into Fabric Trial Capacities. Therefore, you may already have several Trial Fabric Capacities in your tenant. Your Fabric Administrators can specifically control who can opt into the Fabric Trial capacities within the Fabric Admin Portal, on the Help and support settings section, and enabling the Users can try Microsoft Fabric paid features setting as shown in the following image:

Read on for a lot more detail, including several common issues you might find along the way.

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Stack Overflows in Power Query

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb hits an error:

If you’re writing your own M code in Power Query in Power BI or Excel you may run into the following error:

Expression.Error: Evaluation resulted in a stack overflow and cannot continue.

If you’re a programmer you probably know what a stack overflow is; if you’re not you might search for the term, find this Wikipedia article and still have no clue what has happened. Either way it may still be difficult to understand why you’re running into it in Power Query. To explain let’s see some examples.

Read on to learn what a stack overflow is, how you can create one, and circumstances in which one might arise in Power Query and M. Now Chris has me thinking about tail call recursion this early in the morning.

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Data Vault 2.0 Models in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Olschimke and Dmytro Polishchuk continue a series:

The last article in this blog series discussed the basic entity types in Data Vault 2.0: hubs, links and satellites. While it would be theoretically possible to limit a model to just these three basic entity types, the resulting Data Vault model would be inefficient: it would most likely consume too much storage, be less efficient due to the many joins, and require a number of grain shifts during information delivery. This is due to certain characteristics in the data that require special treatment.

For these characteristics, Data Vault 2.0 provides special entity types that deal with the specialities. This article focuses on two of them: the non-historized link, which is used to capture transactions and events, and the multi-active satellite, which is used to model multiple active descriptions for the same parent hub or link in the same load.

Read on for an example of how to implement this in a Microsoft Fabric warehouse.

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Being Smart about Missing Index Requests

Published 2024-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling doesn’t trust the system:

SQL Server’s missing index requests (and, by extension, automatic index management) are about 70/30 when it comes to being useful, and useful is the low number.

The number of times I’ve seen missing indexes implemented to little or no effect, or worse, disastrous effect… is about 70% of all the missing index requests I’ve seen implemented.

This has been pretty close to my experience as well. Click through for a much better approach to the task.

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Using the Spark Connect GRPC API

Published 2024-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott digs into API details:

In the first two posts, we looked at how to run some Spark code, firstly against a local Spark Connect server and then against a Databricks cluster. In this post, we will look more at the actual gRPC API itself, namely ExecutePlan, Config, and AddArtifacts/ArtifactsStatus.

Click through to see how it all works, with plenty of C# code to guide you along the way.

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Loading Data from Statistics Denmark into Power BI

Published 2024-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Svensen goes over an oldie:

It turns out that the blogpost I wrote 10 years ago about getting data from Statistics Denmark into Power BI with Power Query still is being used – link.

But as the API has changed a bit since then I was asked to do an update of the blogpost – so here is how you can get the population of Denmark imported into Power BI with Power Query.

Read on to see the right way to do it today.

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Embracing the Boring Part of Data Governance

Published 2024-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Nikki Kelly shares some thoughts on data governance:

Data Governance – you have heard the term a million times and not once has it driven excitement in to your heart. I’d like to spend the next few minutes changing that.

Data Governance is formally defined as “… a system of decision rights and accountabilities for information-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods.”

Boring.

Nikki makes a great point that the process may feel boring but the net results are critical.

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