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
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?
In this post I will walk you through all the steps necessary to expose your on premise enterprise data to your Power BI users of Power Query in Excel and also will demonstrate how to source that data into a Power Pivot workbook. I am not going to give you too much theory, rather, I … Continue reading How to configure on premise access in Power BI and use Power Query to load on premise data into Power Pivot
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 been really impressed with Microsoft Data Explorer the minute I had a chance to play with it as I was able to turn formatted Excel reports into legitimate data sources available for analysis. Fairly recently, an update to the tool delivered an uber critical feature that makes a huge impact on the world … Continue reading Unpivot data using Microsoft Data Explorer
Well, a leader and not the leader, although Microsoft BI stack is definitely ranked very high by Forrester. Please follow this link to read the report. This is probably a little bit of old news, since the report was release in June and updated in the middle of July, but I figured it be a … Continue reading Forrester Releases “Self-Service Business Intelligence Platforms” report, Microsoft identified as leader
Microsoft is expected to make a number of very important announcements at the upcoming SQL Pass conference in Seattle… If you are on the fence about attending it this year, I would definitely recommend attending this event.
Well, the more time passes, the more I like it... Somehow I have figured out, subconsciously, how not to make it crash quite as often and also how to work around things that don't work very well. So, in no particular order, here are few more observations... Map - like it a lot. There is … Continue reading PowerView in Excel 2013 – Business Intelligence – Second Impression
Microsoft isn't great at prognosticating.. here is an interesting tidbit on when we might see the next release of PowerView. 2014??? I sure hope not....as much as I love this technology, there are several glaring holes in it that have to be addressed ASAP if Microsoft were to lead the Business Intelligence quadrant again like … Continue reading Next release of PowerView
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