The Blog

Notes from the Microsoft data stack.

Field notes, deep dives, and licensing breakdowns from twenty years of building on Power BI, Fabric, and Azure analytics.

October 18, 2023

Blog

Article Series – Understanding Microsoft Fabric Licensing: A Simplified Guide

Microsoft Fabric is a complete data analytics SaaS solution that offers a wide range of analytics workloads, including Data Integration, Warehousing, Engineering, Business Intelligence, Data Science, and Real-time Analytics. Essentially, it provides all the tools and resources you need for comprehensive data analytics projects. As organizations consider implementing Microsoft Fabric, understanding its licensing and cost…
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December 29, 2022

Power BI

Best Practices to Handle Multiple Fact Tables in Power BI

Scenario 1: Multiple fact tables thar are not related to each other Solution: Relate every dimension with their respective fact tables. Identify the shared dimensions. Relate them with every fact. Sometimes this model is called constellation schema, where each fact table individually is a perfect star schema design because each one is related with a…
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September 30, 2022

Analysis Services, Metadata, Power BI, SSAS, Tabular Models

What are the DMVs and how you can use them?

The DMVs are queries that allow you to retrieve valuable metadata information about your data model, server operations, and server health. What are the DMVs The DMVs queries are an interface to schema rowsets based on SQL and use a SELECT statement and the $System schema with an XML/A schema rowset, however, they do not support the full syntax of…
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September 29, 2022

Incremental Refresh, Performance, Power BI

Step-by-step instructions to configure Incremental refresh

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In this article, I explain how to set up an incremental refresh in Power BI, the benefits of apply this policy in your data models what are the requirements for it and the important considerations you have to consider. Step-by-step instructions to configure Incremental refresh Incremental refresh policies are defined in Power BI Desktop to…
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September 29, 2022

ALM Toolkit, Metadata, Power BI

Metadata-only deployment using ALM Toolkit

ALM Toolkit is a free and open source tool that facilitates the deployment of Microsoft Power BI datasets, detects differences between source and target datasets, checking for changes to be deployed to help ensure the integrity of the target model. For datasets with incremental refresh policy applied, you must avoid publishing and replacing them with…
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September 29, 2022

Performance, Power BI

Essential checklist to keep your Power BI Solutions optimized. Part IV. Visualization Good Practices

This last article includes a list of best practices for data visualization. – Use filters in your visualizations to reduce the amount of data that display: The more data a visual must display, the slower it will load, so apply filters in the Filters pane, or use Top N, to reduce the number of items…
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September 29, 2022

Blog, Performance, Power BI

Tools to Analyze the Performance of your Power BI Solution

In this post I’ll show you several tools that can help you analyze the performance of your Power BI solutions at every step of the way, some of them are built-in features and others are free and open source. In this checklist you will find the tools you can use at every step of the…
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September 29, 2022

Performance, Power BI, Tabular Models

Essential checklist to keep your Power BI Solutions optimized. Part II. Data model good practices

This second article is focused on best practices for designing your data model, optimizing CPU, RAM, and workspace capacity consumption by minimizing memory usage. Benefits. Reduce space and processing time. Faster refresh times. Lower latency reports. Reduce the time development. More user-friendly data models because the user will not navigate through a bunch of useless…
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September 27, 2022

Blog, Performance, Power BI

Microsoft Power Platform Conference #MPCC2022 – Day 1 Recap

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1663800743577{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”] What a great first day of the Microsoft Power Platform Conference 2022. A wonderful day full of great speakers! Here’s a brief summary of some of the sessions I attended: What are Power BI Metrics? – By Treb Gatte In this session Treb talked about the Power BI metrics and how…
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September 21, 2022

Blog, Power BI

Microsoft Power Platform Conference #MPCC2022 – Day 2 and 3 Recap

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1664321719850{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]Last week was the first Microsoft Power Platform conference with over 150 interesting sessions and 18 workshops, I had the pleasure of meeting new people who share my passion for Power BI, and I met some of the heroes I’ve been following and learning a lot from like Patrick, Adam and Miri…
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September 19, 2022

Performance, Power BI

Essential checklist to keep your Power BI Solutions optimized. Part III. Optimizing DAX Formulas

This third article will cover how to optimize the DAX Formulas of your data model – Convert Multiple Measures to Variables: This will minimize the number of measures on your data model and improve their performance. – Use the DIVIDE function for division instead divide operator (/): This function is optimized to check division by…
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September 19, 2022

Performance, Power BI

Importance of Query folding and good practices

Query Folding is the capability of Power Query to delegate some of the transformations to the source to improve performance. In this post you will see its importance and good practices guide to achieve it. According to official documentation the following data sources support query folding: – Relational databases (SQL Server, Oracle, etc.). -OData sources (including…
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