In this article, we will explore the functionality to secure reporting Services with Group Managed Service accounts ( GMSA)
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Power BI desktop Mekko Charts
November 6, 2018In my last articles on Power BI Desktop (see the index at the bottom of the article), we have explored that Power BI has a rich set of visualizations. We can present data using various custom visuals available from Microsoft AppSource. These visuals are available free to download and use it as per our requirements.
Read more »How to use JSON data in SSRS
November 6, 2018In this article, we will explore the concept of using JSON data in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). This usage concept will include a different approach than the usual methodologies because we will take advantage of SQL Server R service support.
What is JSON?
JSON is an abbreviation for JavaScriptObjectNotation. The main purpose of JSON data was to provide data transfer between server and web applications for JavaScript but today’s JSON is the most popular data interchange format. JSON offers two advantages to us. These are; light-weight text based format easily readable by humans. Currently, JSON is not only used in JavaScript applications, it is also used in all popular software programing languages like JavaScript, C++, C#, Perl, Java, Python, Php etc.
Read more »Replicating Excel’s XY Scatter Report Chart with Quadrants in SSRS
October 25, 2018In this article, I’ll share some of the tricks and tips that I had to employ in order to successfully replicate Excel’ XY Scatter Report Chart.
Read more »How to add parameters to SSRS mobile reports
October 12, 2018This article will explain detailed usage of parameters in mobile reports in SSRS. Parameterized reports are important because report readers want to filter and customize their report data with parameters and this option helps report readers to focus on particular data. A parameterized SSRS report uses parameters as an input value and filters the report data according to these parameters. In this article we will focus, in particular, on how to use parameters and data sources together and how can we manage the parameters in mobile SSRS reports.
Read more »How to create a Word Cloud generator in Power BI Desktop
October 11, 2018In this article, we’ll look at how to create a Word cloud generator in Power BI Desktop, including importing data, customization and more.
In my last article, Power BI Desktop Interactive chord diagrams, we learned about customized visualizations in Power BI Desktop. These visualizations are free to install and we can use them with our data set and customize charts as per our requirements.
Read more »Power BI Desktop Pulse Charts
October 9, 2018In my last article, Power BI Desktop Interactive chord diagrams, we underscored that Microsoft Power BI desktop has a rich set of customized visualization features. These visualizations can help to produce convert data to information in an efficient manner to an easy to understand format. We can freely download them from Microsoft AppSource
Read more »Power BI Desktop Interactive chord diagrams
September 28, 2018Power BI desktop helps to create interactive reports and dashboards from a high and complex volume of the data. The Power BI desktop is an integrated tool where we can get the data from different sources.
Read more »Load testing for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
September 25, 2018Performance monitoring is a very significant and essential topic for database or system administrators. This is no different with SSRS load testing. In some cases, performance problems can lead to significant system downtime. Most of the time in the background of the problem is having insufficient resources or improper settings. Therefore, before experiencing performance issues, we have to take some time to review preventive measures related to current system configurations or new installations. The load test (or stress test) is the most commonly used approach to tune systems before real-life staging conditions. Now we will discuss the details of load test, and in particular SSRS load testing.
Read more »How to embed a Power BI Report Server report into an ASP.Net web application
September 20, 2018Every once in a while, teams from different functional areas of the business (i.e. business intelligence, software development, web development etc.) would join forces to form a cross-functional development team with a common goal of integrating a business intelligence artefact such as a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report into a front-end web application. There are many reasons for forming such a partnership including a lack of report-development skill by web developers, BI team owns a better reporting tool for data visualization, or maybe to prevent the software team from “reinventing the wheel” by developing a report that has already been produced elsewhere.
Read more »Text Analytics with Microsoft Flow
September 19, 2018Twitter is a very popular social media platform which generates millions of tweets a day. These tweets include very valuable data for marketers or social media analyzers because they can analyze these tweets with specific algorithms and find out the sense of social media users.
Read more »Available options for generating heatmaps in an SSRS report
September 17, 2018As developers of business intelligence solutions, we tend to service different types of business users. Whilst a call center supervisor is more likely to consume reports that offer detailed breakdown of day-to-day performance of her call center agents, senior managers on the other hand often prefer big-picture analytical reports that represent data in a form of colorful graphs and charts. Not surprisingly, such reports often make use of heatmap controls to provide visually effective comparative view of business metrics against set targets.
Read more »SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Shared Dataset
September 14, 2018In the SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS) report development process; we can use a beneficial feature which is called the “shared dataset”. The purpose of SSRS embedded datasets are to retrieve data from target data sources for only one report but a shared dataset can be used by multiple reports to retrieve data.
Read more »How to create a Mobile Dashboard with SQL Server Microsoft Mobile Publisher?
September 10, 2018Over the past three years, I read some interesting news about Microsoft which was “Microsoft acquires mobile business intelligence leader Datazen”. This news made me excited because showing Reporting Service reports in mobile devices can be painful and often not effective for end users. After this acquisition, Microsoft developers worked quickly to adapt the Datazen application to SQL Server Reporting Services and this effort culminated in Microsoft SQL Server Mobile Report Publisher.
Read more »How to integrate Power BI data alerts into Slack
August 31, 2018There is a growing trend among professionals and entire companies to move away from email as a primary means of communication and are even adopting alternative technologies. One of the most popular of these is Slack. Slack is a new kind of messaging and communication platform between colleagues, team or community members that allows them to integrate a lot of services including Visual Studio Team Service, Jira and GitHub.
Read more »Creating Bollinger Bands with SQL Server Reporting Service reports
August 27, 2018One of the most powerful reporting tools is Microsoft is SQL Server Reporting Service, also known as SSRS. SSRS offers various, impressive features including reports subscriptions, custom code, paginated reports etc. In this article, we are going to review some key features in SSRS, with a highlight on Bollinger Bands
Read more »How to handle SSRS multi-value parameter filtering in SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse
August 23, 2018Experienced business intelligence (BI) developers would tell you that as you move from one project to another, some requirements start becoming repetitive like you have dealt with them before. One such repetitive requirement occurs during SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) development wherein a client would request that a report parameter be configured to allow multiple values from a dataset that is populated by stored procedure, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Read more »Dynamic Partitioning in Azure Analysis Services (tabular)
August 6, 2018Objective
The real-life requirement
Disclaimer: I assume dear Reader, that you are more than familiar with the general concept of partitioning and star schema modeling. The intended audience is people who used to be called BI developers in the past (with a good amount of experience), but they have all sorts of different titles nowadays that I can’t keep up with… I won’t provide a full Visual Studio solution that you can download and just run without any changes or configuration, but I will give you code can be used after parameterizing according to your own environment.
Read more »SQL Server – development practices with referenced views
July 24, 2018We’ve recently had production failures because our developers changed an important reference. In this case, we had a view which several procedures and views referenced. A developer made a change to the referenced view by removing columns, which caused several procedures and a view that referenced it to fail. We’re considering whether we should stop this practice, or if there are other ways we can prevent changes to an object that’s being referenced by other objects (in our case, a view).
Read more »Create a Soccer Heat map with Power BI
July 20, 2018When I watched the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia match, at the end of the match I saw a very interesting and stunning soccer field heat map analysis. After this, I decided to create a soccer field heat map in Power BI. So I wrote this article!
Read more »SQL Server Reporting Service Configuration Manager
June 27, 2018After the native installation of the SQL Server Reporting Service, we may need to customize some settings of Report Server. SQL Server Reporting Service provides a tool that is named as such; Report Server Configuration Manager. This tool helps us to customize SQL Server Reporting Service parameters and configurations. With the Report Server Configuration Manager, we can change and customize various parameters of the SQL Server Reporting Service. We can find the below settings in Report Server Configuration Manager:
Read more »Top 4 options for fixing Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClientUI.dll assembly error in SQL Server 2016
June 26, 2018I’ve always been in favor of an orthodox strategy when it comes to applying SQL Server updates which often goes like:
- Instead of installing SQL Server Cumulative Updates, wait for release of service packs
- When a service pack is released, install it in phases starting from the non-production environment (i.e. DEV, UAT) to eventually roll it out on production
How to automatically create KPIs in SQL Server Reporting Services
June 18, 2018Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
A Key Performance Indicator aka KPI is a metric which objectively measures the numeric equivalent of goals or targets of a company, team or an organization. Any individual or a community which has a numerical target can measure success of their goal with key performance indicators.
In all business roles and levels, if you manage a team you most likely have to set at least one key performance indicator and try influence this metric to show a positive result or trend. KPIs should be both logical and achievable. If not, team motivation and morale may decrease as a result of loss of self-confidence. For this reason, we have to be careful and logical when we set key performance indicators. At the same time, we have to check KPIs at regular intervals to determine if they remain valid. We can illustrate a typical KPI life cycle below.
Read more »Real-time streaming in Power BI
May 29, 2018The concept of the IOT (Internet of Things) is that every object that you might think of is somehow accessed and connected to other devices on the internet. Nowadays every electronic device is now becoming smart and these devices are now able to communicate with each other. Many ideas and technology on IOT are being developed and are even being used today.
Read more »How to integrate Power BI to the Facebook Graph API
May 4, 2018The challenge
With the popularity of social networking and sharing sites and their widespread availability, internet marketing techniques have also been rapidly influenced. Sharing sites with high visitor traffic offers great potential for advertisers, so much so that it is almost unheard of now that brands or products do not have a profile or group on a social networking site. Markets have the opportunity to communicate directly with consumers by creating profiles or groups in sharing sites. Thanks to the comments and forums on the pages, they are able to follow both positive and negative attitudes of the target groups about themselves and thus have more precise ideas about what to do next.
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