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Category: Tools

Capabilities (and Limitations) of Power BI Migration Tools

Published 2023-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb talks tools:

I have so many customers wanting to migrate from legacy BI tools to Power BI. They are concerned that their current BI tool has an uncertain future. Licence renewals are looming and in the current economic climate organisations are looking to save money. Power BI is not only a lot cheaper than other BI tools, it’s a better tool overall and since Microsoft continues to make big investments in it then migration is clearly a no-brainer.

As a Power BI consultancy owner I have a problem though: I don’t have enough skilled people working for me to keep up with all this demand. What’s the answer? I know! Let’s build a tool that can help migrate all these legacy reports to Power BI!

The result is that, so far this year, I’ve seen or heard of five or six different Power BI migration tools built by various consultancies. That’s great and here at Microsoft we’re naturally supportive of our partners and want as many people to use Power BI as possible. I have reservations about some of these tools though, and these reservations fall into two categories.

Read on for Chris’s take on the topic.

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Diagnosing VSCode + R Integration Problems

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

John MacKintosh troubleshoots an issue:

I recently updated my R installation, and then realised that I’d broken my VSCode/ R set up in the process – I could not launch an R terminal either directly or via radian.

I have a repo where I’ve collated various blog posts relating to setting up VSCode for R, but that didn’t solve all my problems.

I did get it resolved eventually, and here’s how.

Read on for that resolution. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Plan Explorer Integration in SSMS 19

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun does us a solid:

If you’re like me, Plan Explorer has always been a must-have tool in your performance tuning arsenal. And one of the things that made it so useful was a simple little SSMS Integration that would allow you to right click on an Execution Plan and see “View with […] Plan Explorer.” 

Unfortunately, I started hearing reports of that no longer being available in SSMS v19. But I know a thing or two, so was willing to bet 30 minutes of time that I could get it back.

Andy won that bet, so shower him with accolades.

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Tools for the DBA Jumpbox

Published 2023-01-25 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano has a script:

I wrote a blog post a few months ago about the tools I use on my jumpbox you can read here.  Since then, I have automated most of the install with Chocately and so I’ll have the script later I’m going to blog it here.  First, we need to install Chocately on the jumpbox by opening PowerShell as the adminstrator.

Read on to see how to do that, the installation of a slew of tools via Chocolatey, and then several Powershell modules.

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Time Intelligence Templates in Bravo for Power BI

Published 2022-12-21 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari try out some templates:

Thanks to Bravo for Power BI, creating a Date table and applying time intelligence calculations to existing model measures has never been easier. With a few clicks, the Power BI model gets the required updates, and you can further modify the code generated.

Bravo provides several ready-to-use templates based on the Time Intelligence patterns published on the DAX Patterns website. However, the pattern may not provide all the features required. There could be columns and measures you want to remove, or you might need additional columns or time intelligence calculations that are not part of the template.

Read on to see two ways you could resolve this.

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An Overview of Quarto for R Users

Published 2022-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Nicola Rennie and Colin Gillespie provide an overview of Quarto:

Earlier this year, Posit (formerly RStudio) released Quarto. Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that allows you to weave together narrative text and code to produce high-quality outputs including reports, presentations, websites, and more.

One of the main features of Quarto is that it isn’t just built for R. It’s language-agnostic. It can render documents that contain code written in R, Python, Julia, or Observable. That makes it incredibly useful if you work in multilingual teams, or collaborate with people who write in a different programming language from you. But what if you don’t use any other programming languages? What benefits does Quarto bring to people who only use R?

Read on to learn why you might want to use it over R Markdown.

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The Basics of dbt in Spark

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ust Oldfield provides an introduction to dbt:

dbt is an abbreviation for data build tools. It is primarily a SQL based transformation workflow, supported by yaml, to allow teams to collaborate on analytics code whilst implementing software engineering best practices like modularity, portability, CI/CD, testing, and documentation.

dbt is available using a CLI in the form of dbt core, or as a paid-for SaaS product in the form of dbt cloud.

Click through to see how the product works, including an example.

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Installing the SSIS 2022 Preview for Visual Studio

Published 2022-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck does a bit of installation:

For those of you that have been working on an older version of SSIS/SQL Server (2014-2016, something like that), the BI components (SSIS/SSAS/SSRS) are now extensions in Visual Studio. SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is no longer available as a separate download.

So you’ll need a full-blown version of Visual Studio (make sure you only install the workflows you actually need). The good news is that you can use the community edition of VS if you’re just using it for BI development. Anyway, install VS 2022 on your machine and download the SSIS extension here.

Read on for the full installation process and a couple of warnings.

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MLflow 2.0 Now Available

Published 2022-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Cornell announces MLflow 2.0:

Today, we are thrilled to announce the availability of MLflow 2.0. Building upon MLflow’s strong platform foundation, MLflow 2.0 incorporates extensive user feedback to simplify data science workflows and deliver innovative, first-class tools for MLOps. Features and improvements include extensions to MLflow Recipes (formerly MLflow Pipelines) such as AutoML, hyperparameter tuning, and classification support, as well modernized integrations with the ML ecosystem, a streamlined MLflow Tracking UI, a refresh of core APIs across MLflow’s platform components, and much more.

I like a lot of what MLflow does; it’ll be interesting to see how quickly different products adopt 2.0.

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