Voice of the DBA

Tag: Power BI

  • Learning some DAX

    I’ve not done much BI work in my career, other than simple aggregates in reports. I’ve wanted to tackle projects, but I’ve rarely had a chance to spend time in this area at work.

    Recently I had a bit of time and decided to look at some Power BI courses.  At Pluralsight, when searching Power BI, I got a learning path that showed a number of courses from different authors. In the intermediate track, the first course was from Eugene Meidinger.

    2019-12-09 13_40_32-Microsoft Power BI for Analysts Path _ Pluralsight

    I met Eugene last year at SQL Saturday Pittsburgh and decided to give his course on Getting Started with DAX Formulas in Power BI, Power Pivot, and SSAS. Not quite what I wanted, but since I was curious about DAX, I decided to give it a try.

    Understanding DAX

    The intro is interesting. Eugene makes a good case for why DAX is important in the Microsoft stack. I tend to agree as I see this being incorporated into many products, including Excel. I’ve felt somewhat out of touch in that I haven’t known much about it and how it works. Even when I flip through our Stairway series, I’m somewhat skimming and haven’t really understood what it means.

    I think Eugene does a good job of trying to explain DAX as different than, but similar to Excel. Thinking of this as an expression language, rather than a query language, isn’t something I’ve considered. Maybe I’ve heard this, but it didn’t stick.

    He also lets me know this isn’t easy, which is what I’ve thought. I’ve seen Bill Pearson and Reza Rad talk some DAX, and it wasn’t quite clear to me. It felt clear when they were speaking, but not later. I’m hoping Gene teaches me a bit more in my office rather than in a 1 hour session.

    Going Through the Overview

    I went through the first few modules, which give you an overview and basic understanding. Eugene tries to explain the differences between DAX and SQL, which is a good way to approach the problem. Many of us are familiar with SQL, so this is helpful.

    The third module starts to get into data governance and where you use DAX with your data. This is interesting, and it’s a good look at what type of organization you deal with for data. How is your data managed, which is something that most companies don’t really have a good, or consistent, data governance strategy.

    One good thing is that Eugene explains  the different places where DAX is supported for queries. That’s good since I’ve been thinking of DAX as the Power BI language, but it’s not. It can be used in Excel with PowerPivot.

    The fourth module is the one where we start to understand column storage and the value this gives us. Still no DAX, but it’s a good module for analysts and relation people.

    In getting through 4 modules, no real technical stuff that’s helped me, but it’s given me a little better baseline.

  • Data Science, BI, and Reports

    Data science, along with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) fields, is often seen as the new direction in which we ought to move our analysis of all the bits and bytes that we collect and store in our databases. There is so much hype now about those technologies, and managers are buying in.

    I’m not sure I agree. I do think that AI and ML will increasingly be used, but they’re just a part of what you use to analyze data. Buck Woody has a good post about the way in which we might examine our technology stacks used for BI work.

    We have a lot of reporting technologies to enable us to make better decisions, and there is a space for all of them. Many people like Excel, some use tools like Power BI and Tableau, still others prefer to get insight boiled down to a single number that influences them to move one way or the other.

    There is a lot being written about AI and ML technologies and certainly many organizations experimenting with them. Data Ccience covers these areas and more, asking our data not just what it says, but potentially what this might mean in the future.

    However, this doesn’t replace traditional BI and reporting. As Buck notes, these are tools and you should use the ones that work for your organization. Learn about them, experiment, understand the impact they have on your audience, and choose the best tools for the job.

    I’m sure this area will continue to evolve, and we’ll get new tools and techniques to help organizations make better decisions. Whether this will actually improve forecasting is likely up to the skills of both the technical and business people.

    Steve Jones

  • Microsoft, Think DevOps First

    This post from Melissa Coates is a good example of not thinking through your product architecture early on. The short version of the post is that Power Bi Desktop is a better place, perhaps really the only place, to author your Power BI Reports. Melissa covers a few potential issues while using the Power BI online editor, but the big item is that you cannot easily prevent conflicts and track versions there.

    Power BI started as the online service, with the Power BI Desktop tool seeming like a bit of an afterthought. At least from the marketing perspective as all of the early demos and media from Microsoft was about the online report service. Since then it’s evolved to become the primary way we will build reports in SQL Server moving forward, which I think is a good move.

    While I can understand the developers at Microsoft not really thinking that the service would on-premises and maybe not considering the need to provide some text format for the reports, I can’t understand why they didn’t learn from the Integration Services team and realize that binary versions of programmable items don’t make sense. We need a format that can be easily versioned, and maybe more importantly, stored in a VCS and diff’d in a way humans can understand.

    When building a format for storing code, please consider the need to work in a team and version the changes made. This means any format should not be a) binary and b) difficult to decode. Separate visual elements from logical elements and ensure a text version of this can be examined by developers. You can use XML, JSON, YAML, or any other text based format, but choose something that makes sense. Even if you add your own extension, ensure that standard tools that work with code can use this.

    I do know the PBIX format is a ZIP file, but zip files don’t easily integrate with a VCS. We could use hooks to extract/rebuild out files on commit/checkout, but that’s cumbersome and silly. I’d rather that the PBIX were a folder with the files inside. Users, including my Mom, can zip a folder and email that if needed. To me, that would have been a better structure from the beginning.

    Microsoft is supposed to be a company providing platforms that we build upon and use in our work. The decisions for the Power BI service seem to be poorly thought through with that in mind. I’d urge them to create a baseline set of rules for future products that consider DevOps, teams, and the need to track code.

    Steve Jones

  • Power BI Desktop on the Mac

    Power Bi is one of the neatest tools that Microsoft has built for data professionals. It allows anyone to build fantastic interactive visualizations that can help tell a story and help someone make decisions. There have been some amazing demo visualizations from Microsoft customers. I’ve seen a predictive maintenance visualization for airplanes, one for diabetes trends and a fun basketball visual. There are also a fantastic set of custom visual controls, quite a few of which are described in Devin Knights blog series.

    If you don’t know anything about Power BI, there are lots of resources, including some amazing tips from the Guy in a Cube. Adam Saxton has an amazing channel and puts together some impressive videos with Patrick LeBlanc. They might be one of the best sources for learning to work with the tools. You might want to spend some time playing with Power BI as I can almost guarantee that you’ll build better reports with this tool than you would otherwise. You’ll impress your customers, clients, and boss with your design work.

    Plenty of people have Mac laptops, especially business people, and for quite some time they’ve had to deal with a lack of native tooling. Certainly there are lots of software ports, and no shortage of web software, but there are always places where a lack of a native solution is problematic. I don’t know that we’ll get lots of software ported to a new OS, but there is a better solution. Containerization can help smooth the way.

    A few years back I met the Kenji Obata, founder of Turbo.net. He was doing some interesting work with containers, and I was fascinated by their work. Since then, they’ve grown and refined their technology, and now they have Power BI for Mac available. As soon as I saw their walk-through video, I wanted to share the experience. It’s pretty amazing, and if I were still running OSX, I’d be looking to use some of the Microsoft tools I want on the native desktop.

    This isn’t really native, but the experience feels native. The use of containerization technology might be debatable for databases, but for client applications, it’s amazing. The way that Turbo.net packages up applications is incredible. I like Turbo, and if you need to use Microsoft client applications on a Mac, you might give them a try. It’s not free, but it’s way better than virtualization and has some really cool features as well. I’m sure lots of non-technical people, especially management, that might build reports would love the experience of running Power Bi Desktop on their Mac.

    They even have SSMS available as a turbo container for the Mac, if you’re interested.

    Steve Jones

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