In late January, Microsoft published the Power Platform: 2020 release wave 1 plan which lists all the new features that are targeting a release date before the end of 2020. The Power Platform ecosystem currently includes several different products that work reasonably well together and enable “users and organizations to analyze, act, and automate on […]
Quick note to the regular reader: don’t worry, still planning on finishing the series on Building a Scale-Out OLAP Farm in the Cloud with Azure VMs. But I’m afraid there’s not much time to work on that until we ship some important code (which I’ve been working around the clock on for 2 months). And so […]
In a presentation I’ve been delivering lately, Bus Matrix – the Foundation of your Dimensional Data Model, I briefly cover the hierarchy of an enterprise and how it can be conceptually broken down and mapped into a dimensional model. A single enterprise typically contains many business areas (e.g. Sales, Manufacturing, Finance) A single business area (e.g. […]
The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball has been read cover to cover by most Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence industry professionals. It is perhaps the most popular text on dimensional modeling known to mankind. However, it is not the best book on dimensional modeling. These may seem like pretty bold claims, yet I feel confident […]
On 1/14/2014, I presented Bus Matrix…the foundation of your Dimensional Data Model via the Free Training on the T’s offered by PragmaticWorks. If you weren’t able to attend the live session, you can watch the recording here. This presentation touched on a lot of complex concepts (dimensional modeling, conformed dimensions, star schemas) and it was […]
Two commonly misunderstood dimensional modeling techniques are Junk Dimensions and Degenerate Dimensions. This post is aimed at clearing up the confusion and providing some context and use-cases for each. Junk Dimensions There are certain scenarios where you will find that the source for a fact table contains a bunch of low-cardinality attributes that don’t really […]
In my last post (Go Work for a Consulting Firm), I discussed a difficult situation faced earlier in my career…back when I lacked the knowledge and expertise to solve the problems facing the team and ultimately steer the car back on the road. Towards the end of that post I mentioned how, after working for […]
Earlier this month, I spent an entire week evaluating WhereScape RED with a new client. If you’ve never heard of it, RED is a platform for rapid data warehouse development. Admittedly, I’ve always been skeptical of these types of tools…”build your entire data warehouse and ETL in a few hours“…but after a week of “kicking […]
User adoption is critical to the overall success of any IT project…but that goes double for self-service BI projects because at the end of the project the users will be expected to actually use the tools to generate their own BI (reports, dashboards, scorecards, analysis) and facilitate fact-based decision making in a rapidly evolving business […]
Yesterday morning, I passed the 70-463: Implementing Data Warehouses with Microsoft SQL Server 2012! This completes the second step on my SQL Server 2012 certification path. What follows is a quick outline of the materials I used while preparing for this exam along with some comments and afterthoughts. Data Warehouse Design Read The Data Warehouse […]
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