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Setting up a GitHub Repo and Power BI Project – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Both Azure DevOps and GitHub are supported Git repos for Power BI and Fabric workspace integration. Getting started with GitHub is quite easy, and anyone can have a free GitHub account. Simply navigate to http://GitHub.com and sign-up for an account. You may create a personal or organizational account, and your personal account can be associated…
Continuous Delivery & Version Control for Power BI – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
For the business intelligence professional, DevOps can be a confusing topic because it intersects with many disciplines and philosophies. I'm hopeful that a bit of reflection on my own experience over the years provides some valuable insight. I have seen DevOps and version control implemented on dozens and perhaps hundreds of projects, with different degrees…
Delivering Enterprise and Self-service Power BI with Microsoft Fabric – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
The term "architecture" is more commonly used in the realm of data engineering and data warehouse project work, but the concept applies to BI and analytic reporting projects of all sizes. Like the architecture of a building, a complete Business Intelligence architecture contains the foundation and structure of your solution. Using the building analogy, a…
Efficient Query Design in Power BI: Importing CSV files, lakehouse & database tables – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
I wanted to share the results of a few experiments I recent conducted with one of my favorite sets of sample data. This will take at least two blog posts to cover, but I will summarize them here: Compare data load & transformations with CSV files vs a Fabric lakehouse using the SQL Server connector:…
Direct Lake memory: hotness, popularity & column eviction – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
I just read that the Miss Universe contestant from Panama was evicted from the Miss Universe pageant. I don't know what she did, but it was apparently bad enough to get kicked out. She was hot and she was popular, but she's been evicted. On that note, let's talk about memory management for Microsoft Fabric…
Doing Power BI the Right Way in 2025 – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
I work with hundreds of consulting clients who go through the same cycles, having the same experiences, facing the same challenges, many making the same mistakes, and many learning some of the same lessons. The purpose of this series is to share those lessons with you. Universal Best Practices If we sum up Power BI…
Microsoft Fabric Project Advice: Getting into the Thick of It – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Advice and lessons learned from working with consulting clients for nearly one year since Fabric was released. How to approach architecting solutions, choosing from among Fabric assets and tools, and getting your organization ready for Fabric adoption, developing, managing and deploying successful Fabric solutions.
Microsoft Fabric Roadmap & Feature Status Report – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
I created this report to summarize the release status for all Fabric features that are documented in the Microsoft Fabric Roadmap. The information on this report is collected and updated frequently from the Fabric Roadmap hosted by Microsoft, and displays status information in a convenient, single-page Power BI report. Each feature area on the report…
Power BI Direct Lake and DirectQuery in the Age of Fabric – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
I just returned from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas. Over 4,000 attendees saw a lot of demos showing how to effortlessly build a modern data platform with petabytes of data in One Lake, and then ask CoPilot to generate beautiful Power BI reports from semantic models that magically appear from data in…
Moving from Power BI to Microsoft Fabric – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Fabric is here but what does that mean if you are using Power BI? What do you need to know and what, if anything will you need to change if you are a Power BI report designer, developer or BI solution architect? What parts of Fabric should you use now and how do you plan…
CI/CD & DevOps for Power BI… Are We There Yet? – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
In my view, projects and teams of different sizes have different needs. I described DevOps maturity as a pyramid, where most projects don't require a sophisticated DevOps implementation, and the most complex solutions do. The DevOps maturity is a progression, but only for projects of a certain scale. One of the following options might simply…
Conference Sessions and Presentations in 2023 & early 2024 – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Events I am presenting Check back for event links and updates August 15, 2023Using Power BI with a Lot of Data - Best Practice DesignBay Area Power BI Platform MeetupOctoberUsing Power BI with a Lot of Data - Best Practice DesignPortland Fabric & Power BI user groupOctober 20Preconference: Power BI Enterprise WorkshopSilicon Valley SQL Saturday,…
Introducing the New Power BI Project, and why it is important – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
The enterprise Business Intelligence and IT community have been anxiously awaiting this capability for many years and it has finally arrived - at least in Preview form for testing and prototyping real Power BI CI/CD DevOps solutions.
How Does Microsoft Fabric Change the Enterprise BI Game? – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Microsoft Fabric (#MicrosoftFabric), the new Unified Analytics platform, was announced this morning, literally moments before the Build Conference. Satya made the official announcement in the keynote address. Why is this big news and why is it important? In a few words, this is the most significant expansion to the Power BI and the analytics platform…
How Lakehouse Architecture is Revolutionalizing Business Intelligence – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Data storage fads have come and gone over the past decade as the industry shifted from on-premises data storage to the cloud. Remember how "Big Data" was going to change everything? Then came the Data Lake, which had great promise, but still left many questions unanswered. Governance and data quality controls needed to provide dimensional constraints…
DevOps & CI/CD for Power BI – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Paul Turley's Power BI and SQL Server BI Blog: Sharing my experiences with the Microsoft data platform, SQL Server BI, Data Modeling, SSAS Design, Power Pivot, Power BI, SSRS Advanced Design, Power BI, Dashboards & Visualization since 2009
Creating and Displaying a Last Refresh Date Measure – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
usiness users often need to know how fresh the data is that they see on a Power BI report. This requirement can be interpreted to mean either "when was the last date & time that the source data was updated?" or "when was the last date & time that the data model was refreshed?" I've…
Power BI and the Dimensional Dilemma – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
There is no secret about this. If you do any legitimate research about Power BI (reading blogs, books or training from reliable sources), you will quickly learn that a lot of basic functionality requires a dimensional model, aka "Star Schema". This is a hard fact that every expert promotes, and self-taught data analysts either have…
DevOps & CI/CD for Power BI – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
DevOps isn't difficult to implement for small and medium-scale projects, and simple things like managing version control in a code repository can save hours of lost time. Organization who are accustomed to managing large application development initiatives might expect to have a fully automated build and deployment process in concert with an Agile delivery process,…
Full-day Power BI for Enterprise Solutions Workshop in Chicago, Sept 12 – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
If you are in the Chicago area and haven't already registered for the Data Insights Summit, please join me. I will be teaching a full-day workshop specifically focused on Power BI enterprise-scale solution best practice design. With in-person events resuming, I'm excited to get back into the classroom and teach what I love so much.…
Developing Large Power BI Datasets – Part 3 – Detail Tables – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Power BI is architected to consume data in a dimensional model, with narrow fact tables and related dimensions. Introducing a big, wide table in a tabular model is extremely inefficient. It takes up space and memory resources, impacts performance, and complicates measure coding. Flattening records into a flat table is one of the worst things…
Developing Large Power BI Datasets – Part 1 – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
When planning a Power BI solution, how can we plan for scale and growth? Like any technology, Power BI has limits but Power BI can manage a surprising large value of analytic data. We also have tools and companion technologies capable of handling workloads of data that alongside Power BI. The Right Tool for the…
Developing Large Power BI Datasets – Part 2 – Partitioning – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Table partitioning has long been an important task in semantic model design using SQL Server Analysis Services. Since SSAS Tabular and Power BI models are built on top of the SSAS architecture, the pattern of partitioning remains the same as it has been for twenty years. However, the specific methods for implementation have been fine-tuned…
Are We There Yet? …Composite Models Using DirectQuery Over Power BI Datasets – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
The new composite model feature in Power BI that enables datasets to be chained together using a featured called "DirectQuery for PBI Datasets and AS". Creating a data model that virtually layers existing models without duplicating effort is exciting...
Learn Databricks, ADF & Paginated Reports at the PASS Community Summit – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Seven days and counting... For the past eighteen years, thousands of data tech professionals would travel to the PASS Summit conference held somewhere in the US, paying for airfare, hotel and conference admission. This year, the PASS organization (Professional Association for SQL Server) is rebooted as the PASS Data Community, led by Red-Gate Software, and…
Power BI Object Names – Why Standards Are Important – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Colleagues: if I have sent you to this post, it is because I respect you and want to make sure we use common language communicating about our Power BI project. This post is written with an audience in-mind who may be less familiar with Power BI than those of us immersed in the product all…
Guy In A Cube Power BI Livestream – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
I just wanted to give a big big Thank You to Adam Saxton and Patrick Leblanc at GuyInACube.com for inviting me to participate in the Power BI Livestream yesterday. It was a blast and an honor to be hang with you the Saxton clan (even the sheep and the great dane!)
Doing Power BI The Right Way – for Enterprise Reporting – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
I started a series of blog posts back in 2020 about best-practice guidelines for planning and designing enterprise reporting solutions with Power BI. To make the topics covered in this series of posts easier to find and follow, they are listed on this page: Doing Power BI The Right Way – for Enterprise Reporting |…
When to Use Paginated Reports vs Interactive Power BI reports – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
When should we use Power BI vs Paginated Reports for our reporting needs? You can use either tool to create different styles of reports for different purposes, but should you? Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD. Can we use Power BI to create operational or transactional style reports?Can we create scorecards and dashboard-style…
Use Paginated Reports to Create a Gantt Chart – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
A Gantt chart is an excellent example of where Paginated Report & SSRS were an ideal choice for the purpose. It is a running list of activities with the duration for each displayed as a horizontal bar depicting the beginning and ending day along a horizontal scale. The challenge is that this is not a…
Getting Data Into Shape for Reporting with Power BI – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Even for small, informal BI projects, shaping the data into a dimensional model alleviates complexity, speeds up slow calculations and reduces the data model storage size. I conclude this post by reviewing seven data architectures and the data shaping methods with different degrees of scale.
Doing Power BI the Right Way: 8. Delivery options – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
Part of the the series: Doing Power BI the Right Way When you sign-up for the Power BI service at PowerBI.com (this address redirects to App.PowerBI.com), use establish a tenant for your organization, hosted in the Azure cloud. Even if you setup a 90-day trial account, you have a tenant that you can upgrade later on.…
Microsoft Data Community Interviews and Advice about Working Remotely – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
You may not know that I have been travelling the country interviewing community leaders from the Microsoft data platform, on a new video blog: Data On The Road (dataontheroad.blog). Earlier this year, we travelled across the US in our motorhome, "The Data Bus" and stopped in several cities to chat with friends and colleagues who…
Hybrid Tables, Incremental Refresh and Table Partitioning in Power BI – Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
The December 2021 Power BI Desktop update introduced a long-awaited upgrade to the partitioning and Incremental Refresh feature set. The update introduces Hybrid Tables, a new Premium feature that combines the advantages of in-memory Import Mode storage with real-time DirectQuery data access; this is a big step forward for large model management and real-time analytic…