Power QUery – Creating
Hi there, it has been quite a while since I have posted anything. After moving country and getting my first job. I have subsequently moved to my second job which is going really well. So I have started working on all the new BI Features that Microsoft has been offering and below is something that I needed to do, is…
Sharepoint 2013 – refreshing excel workbook with direct connection to sql server analysis services (SSAS) cube
I have not blogged in a while, due to moving countries and starting a new job. So i do hope that this blog will help someone or let them know how easy it is to use SharePoint 2013 to refresh data in an Excel spreadsheet. What I needed to do, was to use an existing Excel spreadsheet which connected directly…
Book review – Chris Webb – Power Query for Power BI and Excel
It has been a while since my last blog post due to relocating overseas. It has been quite busy and a lot of new things to learn but worth all the effort. When I saw the opportunity to review the book I jumped at it for multiple reasons. The first is that whilst I had dabbled with Power Query, I…
SSAS – KPI’s – Example of creating a KPI
Based on the previous BLOG post <font color="#ff000, we are going to explain how to create a KPI Example · Using our Internet Sales cube, we want to create a KPI in order to see if the guys are meeting their new target which is a 10% increase from their current sales. · So we will create a new…
SSAS – KPI’s – How Explanation of KPI Makeup
Below is an overall description of what is needed for the KPI’s when creating them in BIDS 1. After you click on New KPI you will have a window shown below and underneath the picture are the details required for each section: 2. a. Where it says Name: i. This will be the name for your…
SSIS – Error Handling and Error emailing for Packages
What the steps below do is to handle error handling for your SSIS packages. And then within the error handling enable it so that you can email the exact error to email addresses so that they are notified when there is an error and what the error was. Example: · In our example we are going to be using…
Relocating to Australia – BI Job opportunities in Queensland
I thought I would let you guys know that I am about to relocate to Australia from South Africa. I have had an amazing time in South Africa, and learnt a whole lot whilst working at my past employer. So this is a plug at anyone who has any lead or potential BI work in Queensland, Australia. I would really…
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) – Updating Project with Partition information
I am sure that this has happened to someone else before. You are making a change to your SSAS cube, within your SSAS cube you have created your initial partitions. But on your production server you have programmatically added additional partitions. Now by mistake or just not thinking you deploy your project, and when it prompts to overwrite your current…
SSIS – Using Date and Time Cache Lookups for faster inserts into Fact Tables
What happened is that I found that when doing inserts on larger data sets, it would take a long time to complete the date and time joins. If I excluded this the data would be returned a lot quicker. So my solution to the problem was to use the Cache Transform and then the Loopkup Transform in the SSIS…
SQL Server 2014 Observations
Today’s post is not going to be about explaining something but more along the lines of my experience on SQL Server 2014. When I heard about all the new features in SQL Server 2014, the In Memory Tables, new cardinality estimator, new changes to how TempDB works, SSIS and Delayed Durability, I was excited to see how I could use…