I find it interesting that after it's been out for a long while, and after some great attempts by non-Microsoft sources to provide an adequate definition, I am still struggling with being able to provide a succinct explanation of what Power BI is to my customers. My best attempt thus far has boiled down to … Continue reading What is Power BI?
I just finished watching the hosted customer even in San Francisco where the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, COO Kevin Turner, CVP of Data Platform Group Quentin Clark and the SQL Server Product Marketing GM Eron Kelly officially introduced the new release of the SQL Server 2014. In this post I am not going to give … Continue reading Few thoughts on the SQL Server 2014 launch event in San Francisco
I have been getting some questions about it recently so I decided to write a few lines in addition to what's now available on the Power BI site. Here is a list of some key points about the tool: No middle-ware components are necessary to provide the connectivity between Excel and the Business Objects server. … Continue reading What is the Microsoft Power BI connector for SAP?
I don't expect that anyone will be blown away, at least initially, with the new demo gallery now available on the Microsoft Power BI site because to a business user, the content of those demos will look a little difficult to relate to if not a little nonsensical. Zany layouts aside, there is, however, a … Continue reading HTML5 and Anonymous access in Power BI… or check out the new Demo Gallery
After I wrote the step by step guide on integrating on premise data with Power BI models I realized that I actually dispensed some bad advice. The basic premise of the post was to demonstrate how one may use Power Query to source data into a Power Pivot model in a very elegant way (at … Continue reading What is Power BI Gateway?
I may be using the term Data Catalog somewhat liberally here, but since we don't have the official definition of this term yet, I hope I don't get myself in too much trouble here. As I have been experimenting with various features of Power BI, I have been creating and sharing queries in the Data Catalog; … Continue reading How to access Data Catalog in Power BI
It appears that Satya Nadella has added an additional layer of context to the already ambitious Microsoft strategy of transforming itself into a "devices and services" company by declaring that "Going forward, it's a mobile-first, cloud-first world". I believe that it is safe to assume that in the near future, the roadmap of every Microsoft … Continue reading Microsoft self-service BI on premise vs cloud
I have not been posting much on the site in the last few months. This lack of activity was attributed to predominantly two things: A) My summer got really busy with my primary revenue generating activities and B) There was really not whole lot going on in the MS BI space that I felt I … Continue reading Getting back in the game…
There are now scores of blogs and web articles available that do a great job of introducing Power BI (a good example can be found here) so there is little value in re-hashing it in this post. I do, however, want to reflect and pontificate a bit on this announcement. The most important piece of … Continue reading A quick rant on Power BI, #confused….
Microsoft has just announced that Windows Azure SQL Reporting is Generally Available. A quick glance on the Guidelines and Limitations reveals that the released functionality is mainly based on the SQL Server 2008 R2 stack, which means that PowerView is not available in the cloud yet.
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