A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
The Power BI team knows how to make me happy:
Today Microsoft announced Power BI Premium — a capacity-based licensing model that increases flexibility for how users access, share and distribute content in Power BI. The new offering also introduces the ability to manage Power BI Reports on-premises with the included Power BI Report Server.
Power BI Report Server will be generally available late in the second quarter of 2017.
I like this a lot for internal company dashboards.
Comments closedMindy Curnutt looks at a Power BI solution template for managing Twitter campaigns:
Now you can start poking around and seeing what’s in the Dashboard. Since I opted to not put any handles in for analysis of FROM and TO, the first two tabs in the workbook (Outbound Tweets and Inbound Tweets) will not have any information, this is normal.
But then we get to tab #3 – Author Hashtag Graph. The gray dots are hashtags and the green dots are accounts that have tweeted. You can see that I made a tweet that had 2 hashtags – #osmf2017 and #mvpbuzz. And boy was @TexasMusicDude busy tweeting up a storm – and using lots of other hashtags in conjunction with his tweets. Other hashtags that were popular appear to be #CampGround, #ShinyRibs, #TexasMusic, #DreamFolk and #Strings. Along the bottom you can see the day/timeline and the quantity of tweets at what time of day. If you click on any of the nodes, the information about what time the tweet(s) took place is highlighted in the timeline. It’s very interactive.
It does require an Azure subscription, but it looks very useful as a model for an advanced set of dashboards as well as a campaign management tool.
Comments closedDevin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:
In this module you will learn how to use the SandDance Power BI Custom Visual. The SandDance visual is an incredibly interactive visual that allows you to create insights to view your data in multiple ways and with animations.
This is a long video for a complicated visual.
Comments closedAdam Saxton has a video talking about Natural Language Search in Power BI:
In this video, I look at one of my favorite Power BI features that I’ve found a lot of people aren’t familiar with. In a few of my presentations, by a show of hands, the majority of folks (meaning most of the room) didn’t know what this was. I WAS SHOCKED!!! Can you guess what it is?
When this works, it’s really cool.
Comments closedDevin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:
In this module you will learn how to use the Time Brush Power BI Custom Visual. The Time Brush gives you the ability both filter your report and see a graphics representation of your data at the same time. The name Time Brush comes from the behavior used when you select the values you’d like to filter.
The use of color is an interesting take on combining continuous data points with categorical representations of those points.
Comments closedCallum Green notes the trade-offs between using a Header versus a Title in a Power BI slicer visual:
o Header can have an Outline, which includes the ability to underline text.
o Header is constrained to displaying the name of the attribute (“Product Category Name”), whereas a Title can be customised (“Select Category”). You can rename your source data attribute to get around this, however.
o Title enables you align the text, but this is not possible with a Header.
o Header contains the “Clear Selection” option.
It’s not usually great to have both, but there are definitely trade-offs.
Comments closedIn this video, Patrick answers your question about how to do this in Analysis Services Tabular and Multidimensional. Also, he adds a little bit of SQL to the mix.
Make sure to watch the previous dynamic filtering videos to understand the basics of how to do this.
To begin, you need to make sure to get the URL for your published report.
I completely agree with Patrick about doing as much as you can in the source, especially if there will be more than one potential consumer aside from Analysis Services.
Comments closedChris Webb shows that tools like Power BI ignore formatting in SCOPE statements:
What’s more (and this is a bit strange) if you look at the DAX queries that are generated by Power BI to get data from the cube, they now request a new column to get the format string for the measure even though that format string isn’t used. Since it increases the amount of data returned by the query much larger, this extra column can have a negative impact on query performance if you’re bringing back large amounts of data.
There is no way of avoiding this problem at the moment, unfortunately. If you need to display formatted values in Power BI you will have to create a calculated measure that returns the value of your original measure, set the format string property on that calculated measure appropriately, and use that calculated measure in your Power BI reports instead:
Click through for more details and a workaround.
Comments closedCedric Charlier points out a comaprisonCriteria on Table.Sort in Power Query:
Have you already tried to sort a table based on a text field? The result is usually a surprise for most people. M language has a specific implementation of the sort engine for text where upper case letters are always ordered before lower case letters. It means that Z is always before a. In the example (here under), Fishing Rod is sorted before Fishing net.
The classical trick to escape from this weird behavior is to create a new column containing the upper case version of the text that will be used to sort your table, then configure the sort operation on this newly created column. This is a two steps approach (Three steps, if you take into account the need to remove the new column). Nothing bad with this except that it obfuscates the code and I hate that.
Click through to learn a more elegant way of sorting.
Comments closedDevin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:
In this module you will learn how to use the Line Dot Chart Power BI Custom Visual. The Line Dot Chart gives you the ability to make a more engaging line chart that can actually be animated across time.
This seems more like a fun chart than a useful chart, but I could see it being visually engaging for demonstrating relatively low-frequency events.
Comments closed