When you start a new Power BI report, you may run into some options that might confuse you. Maybe you already know what they are, but you don't really know when to use what? This is the blog post for you 🙂 Import This option loads all the data into the Power BI report. This
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SQL Server
In Microsoft BI, a tabular model is often the way to go. OLAP gets more and more often replaced by Tabular cubes and Power BI models. However, it's really hard to create a model that covers the whole enterprise. In this post I propose a solution for doing just that in a simple way. In
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Recently I have seen implementations of Analysis Services that go directly to the Data Lake. In order to speed things up and to remove redundancy, there is no relational data storage even if the data is relational in nature. Data is persisted raw in the lake and goes directly to a user friendly data model
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Tonight I presented a 1-hour session about applying Continuous Integration at the Microsoft Advanced Analytics User Group Belgium. The session was an "espresso version" from the 2-day course, skipping things like Git, setting up VSTS build environments etc. Great fun to be here, thanks for the invite! The slides can be found have disappeared at
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If you want to set up Continuous Integration using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) in order to build your BI projects, you'll run into the fact that some project types can be built and released out-of-the-box by MSBuild, while others need specific logic to create or deploy artifacts. In this post, I share my current
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Storing and processing personal data In case your data warehouse processes and stores sensitive data such as social security or credit card numbers you could implement a mechanism to secure this data. In case you store the data on a MS SQL Server database, one way to do this is by using Always Encrypted. If
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With Continuous Integration working for my Data Warehousing solution (SQL Server, SSAS Tabular, SSIS), it's time to step forward. Before moving to Continuous Deployment, I want to have a rigorous and automated testing on my EDW. But how to get there?
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As you might know, I'm keeping an eye on how I can automate my Data Warehousing testing. In "Automated Testing for the Data Warehouse" my observation was In essence, testing a Data Warehouse isn't that complex It turns out I'm not the only one thinking about this (really? 😉 ). Some time ago I listened to
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Wait, didn't I post this already several weeks ago? Well, almost. A few weeks ago, I showed how to set up a build agent using devenv.com. Unfortunately, I ran into some problems like failing builds not reporting failure and SSAS Tabular projects not building correctly. However, it turns out to be pretty easy to build
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In my earlier post "Automated Deployments using Visual Studio" I metioned that the method described was a workaround because I hadn't figured out how to do a continuous build in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) yet. With hindsight, that workaround was not really needed: VSTS build turns out to be só easy, that it's ridiculous
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