The Journey From Power BI to well… More Power BI

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 05:13:29 -0800

There is a natural progression in Power BI adoption that I see time and again within enterprise customers of all sizes. A small team starts to build a core dataset in a Power BI desktop file (.pbix) with reports that transform their ability to manage their area of business, along with enormous time savings, increased trust in the numbers and a growing sense of calm that at least some things are now under control.

Word gets out and more aspects of the business are added to the dataset, along with more really valuable report pages. Before long, the number of tab in this master Power BI file has grown to 20 tabs (report pages) covering a range of topics, and there are loads of tables and oddly named measures scattered throughout the dataset.

It gets difficult to maintain. If we change this measure, which report pages will be affected?

I want to clean up these measures, have they been used?

People are asking for self-service access to the dataset. How will they know which of these measures is the right one to use?

People are asking for the report pages to be split out into separate 'Apps' according to subject matter content (e.g. HR, Sales, Procurement). Do we duplicate business logic across multiple pbix files, how do we manage keeping these in sync?

Some will claim a-ha! That's why you shouldn't let the business use Power BI themselves. It's true, this is a problem of Power BI's own making. The business gets hooked on the rapid pace of improvement. There needs to be a grow-up story where we can take the enthusiasm and early buy-in and transfer the momentum towards a more governed set of processes that can scale as the business becomes more reliant on key datasets.

At this point I highly recommend you explore Matthew Roche's world of funny, poignant, insightful and practical posts about the culture your organisation needs in order to support...Read More

Create a Power BI Demo - Part 1: The Data Source

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 04:30:33 -0800

Welcome to my first blog post!

I've promised to give back to the SQL and Power BI community for almost six years now and have never been quite ready. The community has done so much for me, heroes like the people at London Power BI User Group - James Dale (my first dashboard in a day!) & Prathy, Mark Wilcox (London Business Analysis Group), Rishi Sapra (Power Platform for Finance), Samit Sani (Heathrow legend), the crew over at Redgate, Adam and Patrick from Guy-in-a-cube, the Italians Marco and Alberto (SQL BI), Alex (both of them), the incredible Leila and Raza over at Radacad, Matt Allington (Excelerator) , Imke Feldmann (Power Query extraordinaire at Biccountant), Chris Webb (Cross Join), Melissa Coates (SQL Chick), the team at Bluegranite, David Eldersveld (Dataveld)…. and the Power BI team themselves, especially Christian Wade, Will Thompson and Lukasz Pawlowski. So many people have been so generous with their time.

I'm really looking forward to contributing to this awesome community. It might take me a while to find my voice and get the hang of this - so please bear with me. I am no data warehousing or enterprise BI expert. I am an experienced Power BI practitioner aiming to get the job done for the business whilst trying to continually develop best practise - on a platform that changes and grows on a weekly basis!!

I'm also going to try to document some of the mistakes and wrong pathways along the way in the hope that it'll save you time here and there.

So here goes... 🤞

TL:DR You'll find the AdventureWorks2014 .bacpac file here, just import it to Azure SQL and you're good to go 😊

Having signed up to present at the awesome New Stars of...Read More

Action BI

The Journey From Power BI to well… More Power BI

Create a Power BI Demo - Part 1: The Data Source