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Dynamic Cell Formatting in SSRS
Early in my Business Intelligence Designer days using other report designer tools, I was all about the data. Get the data onto the report, black and white, never mind fancy fonts or colors. After all,...
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Three Major Changes to Master Data Services in SQL 2012
Microsoft introduced Master Data Services as part of their SQL Server product starting with version 2008 R2. In SQL 2012, there were several enhancements that made the product a bit more usable. We’ll...
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Adding User Configurations to an Analysis Server Cube
Many times, clients ask me to hard-code various values into their cube logic, things like conversion rates or other common factors. This article series will cover several different methods for adding...
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Adding User Configurations to an Analysis Server Cube Part 2
Part 2: Dynamic User Configurations In Part 1 of this series, we hard-coded some MDX values into the cube. That approach works in that it produces the desired end result, but if the values need to...
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Adding User Configurations to an Analysis Server Cube
Part 3: One Row for Each Dimension Member In Part 2, we created a view that pivoted the Configurations table around a single [Dummy Key] value of -1 and joined that to a dimension. And the dimension we...
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Bringing Data to Life with Excel Power Map
If you have spent any time building, designing, viewing, or otherwise interacting with data visualizations, sooner or later you are going to come across Charles Joseph Minard’s iconic graph of...
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Adding User Configurations to an Analysis Server Cube
Part 4: Default Configurations with Overrides In the first parts of this article, we looked at a few methods of getting user controlled configuration values into a cube such that the value can be...
View ArticleFun with Machine Learning
All my blog articles over the years have been technical in nature. I decided to break out of that mold today. I almost titled this article “It’s not a train robbery, it’s a science experiment” (Doc...
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I Like Pie, But I Hate Pie Charts
Donuts too. I like donuts. But the same as pie, I don’t like them used as analytic visuals. I much prefer the Tree Map as a way to display category values as a percentage of the total. Let’s face it,...
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KPI’s in Power BI: Not as hard as you think
Power BI just keeps getting better. The addition of the KPI visual to the standard palette is just another example in a long line of improvements, and the subject of this quick article. Key Performance...
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How to Setup the Waterfall Chart in Power BI
In this article, I wanted to touch on a visualization that was part of the initial release of Power BI, but one I seldom see on Dashboards or requested by Business Users: The Waterfall Chart. What is...
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Electrify Your Business with Data
Data is a lot like electricity – a little bit at a time, not too much direct contact, and you’re fine. For example, a single nine-volt battery doesn’t provide enough power to light a single residential...
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How Much is Your Data Worth?
Data is the new currency in today’s modern businesses. From the largest international conglomerate down to the smallest neighborhood Mom-and-Pop shop, data is EVERYTHING! Without data, you don’t know...
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A Digital Transformation – From the Printing Press to Modern Data Reporting
Imagine producing, marketing and selling a product that has only a four-hour shelf life! After four hours, your product is no longer of much value or relevance to your primary consumer. After eight...
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Do Data Scientists Fear for their Jobs?
What happened in this last election, November 2016? Rather, what happened to the analysts in this last election? Just about every poll and news report prediction had Hillary Clinton leading by a...
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Row Level Security in Power BI – Part 1
The folks at Microsoft have been steadily adding features to both the Power BI service and the downloadable Power BI Desktop over the past eighteen months since it went General Availability in July of...
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Row Level Security in Power BI – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, we discussed Row Level Security in Power BI, that it is different from RLS in SQL Server 2016, and then went on to demonstrate two simple scenarios where RLS can be used to...
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T-SQL Inner Join Need Not Always Be an Equal Join
Have you ever had to write a T-SQL query that joined a table to itself? The classic example is an employee table that lists the ID of the person’s supervisor or boss, which refers to another row in the...
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Create a Pareto Chart in Power BI
“Baseball is 90% mental, and the other half is physical.” – Yogi Berra You just have to love Yogi Berra quotes like this. We all pretty much know what he’s talking about, even if his math is not spot...
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