SQL Saturday #442 in Orlando, FL has come and gone but what a turn out! The event was excellent, we had a great turnout for our session and had a blast! And as a bonus, the BBQ lunch, baked beans, coleslaw, mac n cheese and dessert were amazing. Seriously one of the best lunches I’ve had a SQL Saturday event! Plus, the Lego name tags were epic! 100% without a doubt the coolest name tag ever.
Continue reading Thank You for Attending my #SQLSatOrlando Session! Slides, Resources, Recording
October 4th of this month was my seven year anniversary as an employee of Pragmatic Works. Things have changed a lot over the past seven years. Working with the wonderful people at Pragmatic Works has been quite an amazing journey and incredible opportunity. With that in mind I thought that I should share my story of how I ended up working in the business intelligence field with the great team at Pragmatic Works. Continue reading How I Got my Start at Pragmatic Works
SQL Saturday #442 is upon us and yours truly will be presenting in Orlando, Florida on October 10th alongside Mitchell Pearson (b|t). The session is scheduled at 10:35 AM and will last until 11:35 AM. I’m very excited to be presenting at SQL Saturday Orlando this year as it’ll be my first presenting this session in person and my first time speaking at SQL Saturday Orlando! If you haven’t registered yet for this event, you need to do that. This event will be top notch! Continue reading Data Warehouse from the Ground Up at SQL Saturday Orlando, FL on Oct. 10th
This week I’m teaching the Pragmatic Works Intro to MDX virtual training class. A student in the class asked how they could find the current day sales amount using MDX (no SSAS functionality) and I thought this was a worthy blog topic. This solution assumes that the cube is processed at least once a day as the query you’re about to see returns the last day in the cube that we data for.
View previous posts in the #MDXMonday series
The first part is where the most work takes place. I created a named set to identify
One of the current issues in Power BI is the inability to specify a Date table. The Date table is what enables us to create some of the powerful DAX time calculations like Year To Date, Month To Date and more when the Date key is not a Date data type. Ginger Grant has blogged about this issue with a proposed work around, which you can read about here. Even though we can’t exactly specify which table is our Date table in Power BI, that doesn’t mean we can’t create some nifty time calculations with Continue reading Creating Time Calculations in Power BI
Thank you to everyone that attended my webinar titled Power Pivot 101: An Introduction! Also, thank you to Thomas Leblanc (blog|twitter) for making it possible. I had a great time presenting to the PASS Excel BI Virtual Chapter and I’d love to be able to do it again any time.
If you weren’t able to make the webinar, you can easily view the entire recording right here!
If you’d like to play along with the webinar and follow through with my examples, you can download the data sources here.
If you want to download the Power Pivot model I created during the webinar and play around with it, that can be download here, as well.
Read about options for upgrading a Power Pivot model.
Here is part 1 of 10 DAX calculations for your Power Pivot model.
We had a lot of questions at the end of the webinar and I didn’t have time to answer all the questions. If you had a question that I didn’t get to, please just leave a comment down below with your question.
If you had any other feedback, you can leave that comment down below, as well. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the webinar.
In the upcoming release of SQL Server Analysis Services 2016, one of the new features you’ll see is the ability to perform a database consistency check against your SSAS cubes and Tabular models. Just like in the database engine side of things, DBCC for SSAS checks for corruption across the entire database or individual objects within the database.
Check out what’s new in SSAS 2016
The DBCC command is shaped likes the XMLA Process command so there’s not a lot of complexity to it. Below here, you can see the basic syntax for the SSAS DBCC command. Its worthing noting that the syntax of the command will look the same whether you’re running it against an SSAS multidimensional database or Tabular model. Continue reading Executing DBCC for SQL Server Analysis Services 2016
If you’ve read my blog for a while you may have seen the following posts:
Ten MDX Calculations For Your Cube (part 1)
Ten MDX Calculations For Your Cube (part 2)
Well the time has come for me to put together a compilation of ten useful DAX calculations for your Tabular or Power Pivot model (in no particular order so don’t infer any level of ranking or importance from the order they’re posted). Continue reading 10 DAX Calculations for your Tabular or Power Pivot Model (Part 1)
I’m excited to be able to say that coming up next week on Thursday September 10, I’ll be presenting my session Power Pivot 101: An Introduction to the PASS Excel BI Virtual Chapter! For a lot of users, Power Pivot is like the Ferrari you had in your garage but weren’t aware and that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to be able to present on this topic. This session is completely free and available to all who would like to attend. It doesn’t get much better than that!
Register for free Power Pivot training
Power Pivot is a powerful yet flexible analytics tool built into a familiar environment yet many users remain unsure of how to take advantage of this dynamic tool. In this session, we’ll discuss the purpose of Power Pivot, where Power Pivot fits within your organization and the basics of designing a Power Pivot model that integrates disparate data sources with the goal of gaining previously unrecognized insight into key business metrics.
This free online training event is scheduled for Thursday September 10th at 12 pm CST/1 pm EST. If you’re interested in attending, all you need to do is RSVP here to let the organizers know you’re coming. It’s going to be a great event, a lot of fun and maybe even educational! 😉
After a couple months of fun with Power BI, I’ve picked up a few little tricks along the way that have helped me to be able to create some pretty cool data visualizations and dashboard reports. Here are five Power BI tips and tricks that you may find useful as you begin creating dashboards for your organization.
New to Power BI? Start here to get acquainted!
One of the ways we can create a KPI visualization is to use a pie or donut chart visualization, which you can see here.
In the chart above, I create a KPI to quickly display which tight ends score more than, less than or equal to the average number of touchdowns all tight ends scored last year allowing me to quickly identify tight ends that score more TDs than average.
Here is my calculated column to create the KPI value for you to have as an example:
TD KPI = if(int('TE Stats'[TD])>INT('TE Stats'[Avg TE TDs]),"1",IF(int('TE Stats'[TD])<int('TE Stats'[Avg TE TDs]),"-1","0"))
Then configure a pie chart as follows.
First, I place my KPI calculated column as the Legend and as the Values.
Then I hid all the labels and configured the colors to display red (-1), yellow(0) or green(1) depending on the value of the KPI.
Now when I use a slicer to select a player, my pie chart acts as a stoplight KPI. Cool!
I’ve previously blogged this tip before, but this one is too nifty to not share again, in my humble opinion. One of the advantages to using a visualization like a funnel chart as a slicer is you gain the ability to single-select a filter, which is something the current slicer lacks. Check out this post to learn more about leveraging Power BI’s natural cross filtering to create some pretty cool slicers.
A nice way to create a small trend line, also called a spark line, is to use a line chart visualization which you can see below.
This trick is pretty easy. Just create a normal line chart visualization, hide all the labels and shrink the chart down to the desired size.
Last week you may have seen my blog post on how to use a scatter graph to create a calendar chart. One of the ways you can improve the calendar scatter graph is to create the visualization along side a matrix visualization, as seen below.
You can use the matrix to display the names of the week below each day in the calendar and then also optionally display the totals by day.
The bar chart is a great visualization type to use in your Power BI dashboard because its so easy to differentiate the differences between the categories. But one of the problems with the visualization in Power BI is that sometimes its hard to see the categories on the y-axis if the chart is too small. See the image below to see an example the issue I’m talking about.
One way you can work around this is to right-align the y-axis. This will cause the full value of the y-axis categories to always be displayed in all their glory albeit on the right side.
You just have to live with the category labels on the right side of the bar chart.
Need more Power BI tips? Check out these tips:
Here’s three Power BI best practices to follow.
