I’ve recently spent a lot of time developing Fabric items (pipelines, notebooks, activators, lakehouses, semantic models, etc.). I’ve also spent a lot of time reading Microsoft’s marketing material and trying to parse out the hype from the useful. I decided it’s time to give my honest appraisal. I come from a background as a Power…

Have you ever had a Power BI report that was unnecessarily large and suffered from slow refreshes? Or maybe navigating the Power BI Desktop file was a nightmare because so much data was loaded into the model? Semantic models in Power BI can be like a tree: They need to be pruned at times to…

I’m about to make a claim that isn’t meant to be a blanket statement, just a general rule of thumb. Data careers tend to appeal to more technically minded people. And technically minded people tend to be more focused on tools than on people. I won’t try to back up that statement with anything but…

I’ve heard the phrase “data mesh” used for several years now, but I finally decided to do some research after encouragement from my manager.  As always, this post is meant to be anything but a comprehensive overview.  Selfishly, these musings always help crystallize my own thinking.  But I maintain the thought back-of-mind that they may…

I’ve been a bit off the grid.  This past January, I transitioned into a new job as a BI Developer at a large multinational manufacturing firm.  My previous four years largely centered around front-end BI development; building dashboards, reports, data models, and interfacing with business users.  My new role is giving me the opportunity to…

Late last week, Microsoft’s Christian Wade made the announcement that “Datasets” are being renamed to “Semantic models” in Microsoft Fabric. Many business users and developers (myself included) likely discovered this unexpected change last Friday. The name change helped clarify the purpose of what used to be known as the dataset, which is important for understanding…

What is requirement gathering in business intelligence? And how can it be done simply, effectively and efficiently? A Brief Definition I would posit the following definition: Requirement gathering, simply put, is the process of obtaining knowledge about the reporting needs in an organization. This can be done a variety of different ways, for a variety…

Since the introduction of Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Power BI in May 2023, Microsoft has been hard at work developing and releasing new features as part of the planned development roadmap. There are few times in the history of Power BI that have had as much anticipation of new features as 2023-2024. Today I’m…

If you’ve spent any time across the Microsoft suite of tools, you’ll know firsthand the frustration of finding “that setting” you need to enable to access to “that one thing” to perform “that one task”. I recently re-discovered this when working with a client to set up Power BI access as an external user.  Microsoft…