Tuesday, May 29, 2018

My Data & BI Summit Recap

I finally came around to writing a wrap-up for the Data & BI Summit in Dublin last month.
No fancy pictures or colors, just a to-the-point summary.

New features

  • Incremental refresh – Premium (included in May update as preview feature)
  • Drillthrough with current filters and parameters (included in May update)
  • Common Data Service For Analytics (preview live)
  • Theme file additions coming soon:
    • Theme export
    • Background added to themes
    • Table/matrix headers
  • Persistent filters (per user) in the service
  • Buttons to trigger action (included in May update)
  • Q&A and linguistics
  • App workspaces without Office365 group

Modelling

  • Optimize your model (size)
  • Make use of Query folding in Power Query
    • Applies to Import mode only
    • Filter first, Transform later
    • Use supported transformations first, non-folding steps at the end
    • Writing a SQL query in Get Data prevents folding
  • Create a blank query with #shared to show a document library of all M functions (Blog)

Visualization

Governance

  • Use App Workspaces for DTAP
    • DEV_Finance
    • UAT_Finance
    • Finance
  • Use Onedrive for Business for versioning your pbix-files, with the same folders as the App Workspace
  • Use the API’s with PowerShell to copy resources between workspaces
    • Chriss Webb (@cwebb_bi) wrote a successful script in response to a video from Adam Saxton (@GuyInACube)

Best practices and notes

Visualization | Model

  • Driving table for measures
  • Hide unused columns
  • Totals in matrix and tables insensitive to row filters
  • Uniform naming of measures and calculations
  • Sync slicers
  • Add descriptions where possible
  • Make sure filters are not hardcoded

Governance

  • Add an about page with last refresh date time and description of Model
  • Version the Model
  • Schedule datasets using Admin account for one place to monitor failure notification emails
  • Use one drive as source control
  • Golden dataset

Further reading


@NickyvV

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Nicky

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