Crayon

MAY 9, 2023

This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, PSP Enterprises. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more!

Loss 617

Loss Win Analysis Learning 617

Chris Webb BI

JULY 2, 2023

For any Power BI person, Direct Lake mode is the killer feature of Fabric. Import mode report performance (or near enough) direct on data from the lake, with none of the waiting around for data to refresh! It seems too good to be true. How can it be possible? The full answer, going into detail about how data from Delta tables is transcoded to Power BI’s in-memory format, is too long for one blog post.

Sales 363

Sales IT 363

Smart Data Collective

APRIL 20, 2023

There are many ways businesses are using big data to make better decisions and operate more efficiently Organizations can use big data to optimize expenses and reduce costs. A modern data infrastructure can help get more value from data by accelerating decision making, simplifying operations, and powering analytics. One of the many ways big data is helping companies operate more cost-effectively is through the construction of smart buildings.

Business 363

Business Profiling Technology Technology 363

mention

JUNE 14, 2023

In 2023, almost 5 billion people will have used social media. With an increasing number of users and social media content, businesses are struggling to cut through the noise. A lot of them miss valuable conversations with customers actively looking to buy their products. Or worst, ignore negative comments about their products on social media. Remaining indifferent to social mentions about your brand, comment sentiment and missing on analyzing emerging trends related to your industry leads only o

Marketing 346

Marketing Marketing Competitor Analysis Due Diligence 346

Advertiser: ZoomInfo

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Sales

Crayon

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

While they might be a thorn in your side, your competitors aren’t special. They, like every other business on the planet, are coming into 2023 with all kinds of newfangled ideas. The optimists are plotting means by which AI can be leveraged to incite hypergrowth and the pessimists are streamlining and building efficiencies to help weather a potential recession.

Competitor Analysis 617

Competitor Analysis Analysis Competitive Landscape Competitive Intelligence 617

Chris Webb BI

JUNE 18, 2023

One of my most popular blog posts of the last few years is this one on the “Visual has exceeded available resources” error in the Power BI Service: [link] This error only used to appear in the Power BI Service, but the good news is – and trust me, this is good news – it may now appear in Power BI Desktop too following the May 2023 release.

Profiling 363

Profiling Learning IT 363

Chris Webb BI

MAY 7, 2023

Here’s a recording of a session I did for the Manchester (UK) Power BI user group recently on best practices for DirectQuery mode in Power BI: I’ve done it for a few other groups over the last six months but this is the latest and best version, I think. I’ve worked with several customers using DirectQuery mode since I joined the CAT team and learned a lot along the way.

Knowledge 363

Knowledge Learning Information IT 363

Chris Webb BI

APRIL 30, 2023

This post is a follow-up to my recent post on identifying CPU and memory-intensive Power Query queries in Power BI. In that post I pointed out that Profiler and Log Analytics now gives you information on the CPU and memory used by an individual Power Query query when importing data into Power BI. What I didn’t notice when I wrote that post is that there is also now information available in Profiler and Log Analytics that tells you about peak memory and CPU usage across all Power Query quer

Profiling 363

Profiling Analysis Information IT 363

Chris Webb BI

MAY 2, 2023

Another new metric has appeared in Profiler/Log Analytics recently, added to the end of the query text shown in the TextData column for the Query End event. It’s called WaitTime: What does WaitTime represent? Here’s the technical explanation: it’s the wait time on the query thread pool in the Analysis Services engine before the query starts to run.

Profiling 363

Profiling Analysis Management Information 363

Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali

As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.

Business Intelligence

Chris Webb BI

APRIL 23, 2023

If you’re about to put a big Power BI project into production, have you planned to do any load testing? If not, stop whatever you’re doing and read this! In my job on the Power BI CAT team at Microsoft it’s common for us to be called in to deal with poorly performing reports. Often, these performance problems only become apparent after the reports have gone live: performance was fine when it was just one developer testing it, but as soon as multiple end-users start running repo

Retail 363

Retail Profiling Analysis Information 363

Chris Webb BI

APRIL 16, 2023

When you add a field to the filter pane in a Power BI report and select the “Basic filtering” filter type, in most cases you’ll see some numbers next to the field values: These numbers are counts of the number of rows for each value in the table that the field is from. The query to get these counts is usually quite fast and inexpensive, but if you’re filtering on a field from a very large table (for example a fact table) and/or using DirectQuery mode that might not be tru

IT 363

IT 363

Chris Webb BI

MAY 14, 2023

One of the most confusing things about troubleshooting Power BI refresh problems is the way Power BI will sometimes try running a refresh again after it has failed. It means that refreshes seem to take a lot longer than you would expect and also that more queries are run against your data source than you would expect. I don’t have all the answers but I thought it would be useful to highlight a few scenarios where it does happen.

Profiling 363

Profiling Information Business IT 363

Chris Webb BI

APRIL 9, 2023

When interacting with a Power BI report you may occasionally get the following error: Couldn’t load the data for this visual We can’t display this visual because a measure is used in cross highlighting. Please remove the measure or cross highlight. What does this mean? The most important thing to explain is that you have not done anything wrong : you have, unfortunately, run into a limitation of Power BI where it can’t generate the query needed for a selection on a visual.

Matrix 363

Matrix Education Sales IT 363

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Competitive

Smart Data Collective

JUNE 21, 2023

Artificial intelligence has changed marketing in extraordinary ways, which is why the market for AI in the marketing profession is booming. Marketing companies spent over $35 billion on AI in marketing research alone last year, but they are likely to spend as much on AI-driven SEO. Search engine optimization (or SEO) is a broad and highly complicated area and if you are a new business owner discovering it for the first time, it can feel terribly overwhelming.

Briefing 362

Briefing Competitive Landscape Research Algorithm 362

Chris Webb BI

MARCH 19, 2023

Recently we announced an important new optimisation for DirectQuery datasets: the ability to run (some) of the queries generated by a single DAX query in parallel. You can read the blog post here: [link] A few of us on the Power BI CAT team have tested this out with customers and seen some great results, so I thought I’d write a post illustrating the effect this optimisation can have and explaining when it can and can’t help.

IT 363

IT 363

Smart Data Collective

MARCH 19, 2023

Many different industries are growing due to the proliferation of big data. The dropshipping industry is among them. Paul Glen of IBM’s Business Analytics wrote an article titled “ The Role of Predictive Analytics in the Dropshipping Industry.” Glen shares some very important insights on the benefits of utilizing predictive analytics to optimize a dropshipping commpany.

Predictive Analytics 363

Predictive Analytics Business Win Commerce 363

Chris Webb BI

MARCH 5, 2023

In the blog post for the October 2022 release of Power BI Desktop there’s a brief description of a new optimisation in Power BI for filters that perform searches in text columns. In this blog post I’m going to share more details about this optimisation and how you can make sure your reports can benefit from it. First of all, a brief description of the problem.

Briefing 363

Briefing Profiling Information IT 363

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IT

Chris Webb BI

FEBRUARY 19, 2023

Sometime last year, hundreds of people working at Microsoft BI consultancies around the world all had the same idea. Here’s what they were thinking: I have so many customers wanting to migrate from legacy BI tools to Power BI. They are concerned that their current BI tool has an uncertain future. Licence renewals are looming and in the current economic climate organisations are looking to save money.

IT 363

IT 363

Smart Data Collective

FEBRUARY 1, 2023

We have talked about ways that big data can help grow your business. But big data can also help demonstrate the importance of pursuing a degree in business as well. Data analytics technology is constantly shedding new insights into our lives. Many things are well observed through anecdotal experiences, but we have had a hard time proving them before data analytics technology became mainstream.

Technology 363

Technology Technology Hospitals Data Mining 363

Chris Webb BI

JANUARY 29, 2023

Dynamic M parameters are incredibly useful in Power BI when using DirectQuery mode because they allow you to pass values from your report direct to your data source query, bypassing Power BI’s own SQL (or whatever query language your source uses) generation layer. However it isn’t obvious how to pass any value you want: dynamic M parameters must be bound to slicers or filters, and they must be bound to tables in your dataset, which means that at first glance it seems like you can onl

Sales 363

Sales IT 363

Chris Webb BI

JANUARY 2, 2023

The new DAX window functions (announced here , more details on Jeffrey Wang’s blog here and here ) have generated a lot of excitement already – they are extremely powerful. However one important benefit of using them has not been mentioned so far: they can give you much better performance in DirectQuery mode because they make it more likely that aggregations are used.

Sales 363

Sales Intelligence Intelligence Management 363

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Competitive

Smart Data Collective

APRIL 17, 2023

In the past, large data sets about consumers were far more difficult to come by. For small businesses and agencies, this meant being at a significant disadvantage to larger businesses and corporations that could afford to conduct large-scale research. Today, however, this is far from the case and consumer data is more available than it ever has been before.

Marketing 361

Marketing Marketing Research Market Research 361

Chris Webb BI

JANUARY 24, 2023

SQLBits is happening again this March at the Celtic Manor resort in Wales. It’s the largest in-person Microsoft data technology conference in Europe and probably now the world; it’s also a lot of fun and something I would never miss. I imagine that a lot of you reading this post feel the same way that I do about SQLBits, but it occurred to me that if you’re relatively new in the world of Power BI you might not have heard of it and might not know why it’s such a great even

Entertainment 363

Entertainment Travel Technology Technology 363

Smart Data Collective

MAY 24, 2023

Great customer support plays a central role in a company’s success and profitability. Businesses with an excellent reputation for customer service tend to do better overall and stay in business longer. Companies that miss the mark often lose customers and generate negative reviews online. Unfortunately, bad reviews can deter new customers. What makes some businesses fail to provide outstanding customer support?

Gaming 360

Gaming Algorithm Technology Technology 360

Smart Data Collective

FEBRUARY 23, 2023

In the digital age, online brands constantly look for ways to improve their branding and stay ahead of the competition. Data mining technology is one of the most effective ways to do this. By analyzing data and extracting useful insights, brands can make informed decisions to optimize their branding strategies. This article will explore data mining and how it can help online brands with brand optimization.

Data Mining 362

Data Mining Technology Technology Profiling 362

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