At some point this weekend, the Microsoft Power BI folks turned on the drill-through feature in the Power BI service. Then the following week, the September release of Power BI Desktop included the new drill-through action feature. This is the same drill-through feature that demonstrated during day 1 of the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, which you can read about here. So I thought it’d be good to quickly walk through how you can set up the drill through action. Continue reading Setting Up a Drillthrough Action in your Power BI Report
Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000 lives!
So I’ve been working on a fun little project over the past couple weeks. A lot of my customers have questions related to Power BI and I spend a lot of my time answering those questions. So I said to myself, “Self, why don’t you build a chat bot that can help field some of those basic questions?” Thus was gloriously born the Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000!
The Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000 uses Azure Bot Service leveraging a knowledge base created using QnA Maker. Later I’m going to do a write-up on how exactly I created the Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000 (it only took me about 10 minutes), but for now I just want to share the bot with you. Start with “Hello” and then try Continue reading Power BI FAQ Chat Bot 9000 lives!
Building Your Brand and Becoming a Thought Leader Session Materials
Thank you to everyone that attending my session today at SQL Saturday #649 in Jacksonville, Florida! It was a packed room with over 70 people attending my session and the audience was lively! We had lots of great questions and tons of awesome interaction! If you want to download my slide deck from today’s presentation you can do that right below. Continue reading Building Your Brand and Becoming a Thought Leader Session Materials
What-If Analysis in Power BI Desktop
One of the most talked about features previewed during the Microsoft Data Insights Summit in the previous June was the What-If Analysis capabilities. Today, this capability was finally released as part of the August update to Power BI Desktop.
New to Power BI? Start here!
The What If Parameter feature allows you to dynamically perform what-if type analysis by using a slider bar to visualize changes to a calculation. This becomes a very flexible way to perform all kinds of different “what if” type scenarios.
In this blog post, I’m going to walk through setting up a simple What-If type scenario to dynamically change a Revenue Target calculation. Continue reading What-If Analysis in Power BI Desktop
Power BI NFL Football Stats Comparisons and Analysis Report is now available!
Important Update: View the latest version of my NFL stats analysis Power BI Report here
For the past few years I’ve combined my love of professional football and analytics by releasing a series of Power BI reports featuring player statistics. This year is no different. This year I’m finally able to release my NFL Football Stats, Comparisons, and Analysis reports featuring the stats for players at the quarterback, runningback, wide receiver, tightend, and kicker positions. Unlike previous years, this years reports are based on data from NFL.com. My goal for producing this report is, as nerdy as this is, to give me a leg up on my fantasy football drafts. If you’ve ever played fantasy football, you know the key to winning is having the deepest roster and I hope that these reports will allow me to identify middle and late round talent using the collected data in a readable and navigable format.
I think this is probably my best version of the NFL stats report that I’ve released yet, and there’s a few reasons why I think so. First, I included Continue reading Power BI NFL Football Stats Comparisons and Analysis Report is now available!
How to Automate Processing of Azure Analysis Services Models
I’ve been working on a proof of concept for a customer that involved using Azure Analysis Services as a cache for some data in an Azure Data Warehouse instance. One of the things I’ve been working on is scheduling the automatic processing of the Azure AS database. I did find the following documentation on the process, but the screenshots of the Azure portal are out of date and I did find some errors in the instructions. I also found this very extensive project for partition management in Azure AS, but this was a little overkill for my purposes and I was just interested in the very basics.
Read my recap for MS Data Summit here
These previously mentioned resources led me to write this blog post. In this post I’m going to leverage the previously mentioned article and walk through creating an Azure Function App to automatically refresh my Azure Analysis Services model, while correcting a few errors and updating the screenshots.
If you’re new to Azure Analysis Services, take a look at this documentation. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you have a basic understanding of Analysis Services.
Continue reading How to Automate Processing of Azure Analysis Services Models
Microsoft Data Insights Summit Day 2 Recap: Timeline Storyteller, Future of Power BI Desktop, and Freakonomics
The theme of day 2 of the Microsoft Data Insights Summit was sessions, sessions, sessions! There were a ton of different sessions for attendees and for us to watch! In total, there are 75 different videos between the keynotes and the individual sessions posted on the Microsoft Power BI YouTube channel that you can go back and watch anytime, which is pretty amazing!
Read my Microsoft Data Insights Summit Day 1 Recap here!
Obviously I haven’t watched all 75 different videos, but I did watch a few so I’ve included some of the things I learned, announcements on new features, links to some of the especially interesting sessions, and my notes from a couple of those sessions below. Continue reading Microsoft Data Insights Summit Day 2 Recap: Timeline Storyteller, Future of Power BI Desktop, and Freakonomics
Microsoft Data Insights Summit Day 1 Recap: Power BI Visio & PowerApps Integration, Custom Drill Through Actions, Book Marks, What If Analysis, & Data Insights
If you were at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit or were watching the live stream of the keynote, then you know that yesterday was a great day for Power BI! There were numerous announcements regarding new features, capabilities, and integrations coming to Power BI (If you missed it, you can watch the recording here!). Amir Netz, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, said that all the features demonstrated are features that will be available in Power BI within the next three months. These aren’t pie in the sky features or capabilities that will never see the light of day. These are all features that will be here by the end of next quarter!
New to Power BI Desktop? Start here!
Yesterday I watched Amir’s presentations and took notes on all the neat stuff coming down the pipe but I know everyone couldn’t attend the event or watch the live stream. So I thought I’d take a few moments to Continue reading Microsoft Data Insights Summit Day 1 Recap: Power BI Visio & PowerApps Integration, Custom Drill Through Actions, Book Marks, What If Analysis, & Data Insights
Deploying to Power BI Premium
Obviously the big news of the day is the announcement for general availability of Power BI Premium! And if you were at or you watched the Microsoft Data Insights Summit you saw that announcement. But early last month on May 3rd, Microsoft announced Power BI Premium, which allows you purchase dedicated capacity for your Power BI assets, thus allowing you to share content with Free users within your organization.
What is Power BI Premium?
Microsoft stated that Power BI Premium would be GA late Q2 of 2017, which could mean nothing else aside from June. Well, today is the day that Power BI Premium, along with Power BI Report Server, are generally available.
Setting up Cross Database Queries in Azure SQL Database
A question that I answer what seems like all the time is how to run cross-database queries against Azure SQL Database. So rather than answering those questions repeatedly I figured I should blog my response up so from here on out I can just forward the link to this blog on to my customers and others interested.
Most people I talk to still think that cross-database queries in Azure SQL DB aren’t possible. But thanks to a new feature called “Elastic Query”, we can issue cross database queries. There’s actually a few different types of cross database queries that Continue reading Setting up Cross Database Queries in Azure SQL Database