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Mike Diehl

Using Microsoft Power BI in data engineering

By Business Intelligence, DevOps, Power BI & SQL, Power Platform

Using Microsoft Power BI in data engineering We have a lot of discussions with clients about a desire to do “better reporting”. They have been using Power BI but feel they now need a data warehouse to create reports that will give them all the info they need. Fundamentally, organizations often have an analytics problem, one for which a data warehouse forms part of the solution, however, the complexities lie in the data. Often organizations…

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The Power of DevOps in Business Intelligence

By All Posts

The Power of DevOps in Business Intelligence Common pain points experienced when building Business Intelligence (BI) data assets, and how Imaginet uses DevOps to mitigate them If you’re a Business Intelligence developer, have you experienced some of these challenges? One team member overwrites the changes of another team member accidentally, such as when someone uses an outdated Power BI Desktop file and publishes to a workspace Someone didn’t deploy or publish all the necessary changes…

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What is Data Engineering?

By All Posts, Azure, Business Intelligence, Power BI & SQL, SQL Server
When you look at a dashboard or report in Power BI, you are seeing the tip of the iceberg; the data you see has likely taken many steps from its source on its way to Power BI. Data engineering is the work that brings data from one or more sources and shapes it, validates it, cleans it, correlates it, and (often) stores it, and it’s a lot of what we do at Imaginet. Power BI...
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Getting Ready for Your First Power BI Project

By All Posts, Business Intelligence, Power BI & SQL

One of the best parts of my job as a Business Intelligence (BI) consultant is what happens when Imaginet engages with a new BI customer. In many cases, our first engagement with a customer who is challenged by their BI and/or reporting capabilities is our Imaginet Power BI Quick Start. This is typically a one or two week intensive engagement where an Imaginet Business Intelligence consultant (like me) embeds themselves into a team within an…

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Power Query Function for Dense Ranking

By All Posts, Power BI & SQL, Tutorials No Comments

Power Query Function for Dense Ranking Recently I was having issues writing a measure in DAX to rank items properly (not an issue with the DAX, but in my understanding of the DAX). I did some searching and came across Chris Webb’s article that had a nice implementation of ranking using Power Query. The technique he proposed uses Power Query to: sort a table by the column you want to rank by, add an index column…

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Power Query for Azure tables and Updating Column Names

By All Posts, Azure, Power BI & SQL, Tutorials No Comments

Power Query for Azure Tables and Updating Column Names I recently did some PowerBI work using Azure Table Storage. In the query editor, it seemed that each table I pulled in from Azure Tables had a very similar process.: Get the list of tables available for the storage account. Select a table Select the Content of the table (excluding the RowKey, PartitionKey, and timestamp columns) Expand the columns in the Content Rename the columns Azure…

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Scaling Azure SQL Databases Up and Down

By All Posts, Azure, Power BI & SQL, SQL Server, Tutorials No Comments
Scaling Azure SQL databases up and down   I've recently been working on a project where we push data from an on-premise database to a set of Azure SQL databases daily, and use that Azure SQL database as the source for a Power BI dataset. The dataset gets refreshed once a day. Our Azure SQL data marts are pretty small - all but one of them are under 2 GB, and the largest one is...
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Cash In on the Data Dividend with Imaginet and Microsoft Power BI

By All Posts, Business Intelligence, Productivity, Tutorials, Videos, Webinars No Comments

In this demo-packed presentation on Business Intelligence, Imaginet will show you Microsoft Power BI and how it can quickly provide insights into your data so that you can realize the ‘Data Dividend’ in your organization. Find out how Imaginet can help you cash in on the untapped value of the data you already have using Microsoft Power BI. — Imaginet is your trusted technology partner who turns your business innovation ideas into reality. 18+ years…

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