Call today 0845 643 6463

Business Intelligence

  • Power Bi – Visual to show filters that have been applied to a report

    March 13th, 2023 in Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI

      Most PowerBi reports will use slicers to allow the user to filter and interact with the visuals they have. But in practice, users may forget what slicers have been applied. It’s inconvenient to have to look through each slicer, potentially across multiple pages, to see what filters are being used on the report. Therefore, it is not user friendly. We need to show every filter that has been applied in one convenient place. Thankfully,…

    » Read more

  • Part 4: Natural Language Processing – Bringing it all together!

    January 23rd, 2023 in AI, Azure, Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI, Python

    Here’s the final post in this blog series on natural language processing where we are going to bring everything together and web scrape Trust Pilot for review data, which we will then perform Natural Language Processing on and then display in a Power Bi dashboard. I’ll be talking exclusively practically in this demo, so for a refresher on the theory please refer back to my earlier blogposts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). To re-iterate the goal…

    » Read more

  • Part 3: Natural Language Processing – Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

    November 24th, 2022 in AI, Azure, Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, Python, Synapse

    If you remember in part 2 we discussed what Key Word Analysis is and how this can be implemented to gain deeper insight from textual data. But we can go one step deeper and extract feelings and opinions from the same data. We can do this through Sentiment Analysis and Opinion mining! In this blog I will talk you through what they are and how we can implement them using Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. What is Sentiment Analysis? We should…

    » Read more

  • Previous Row Value DAX

    October 18th, 2022 in Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI

    In this quick blog post I’m going to show you how to use a hidden DAX function to get a previous row value with just a few lines of code. It’s that hidden that intellisense doesn’t even recognise it! I’ll use an example of some fictional race results from some well-known cartoon characters! Lets assume that in this scenario we wanted to analyse the time difference between 1st and 2nd place, 2nd and 3rd place etc in the race scenario…

    » Read more

  • How to Trigger a Power BI Dataset Refresh via Azure Synapse Analytics in 3 Simple Steps.

    June 27th, 2022 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Synapse

    In this blog post we’ll explore how to trigger a Power BI Dataset via Azure Synapse Analytics in 3 simple steps: Step 1: Create a new security group called “AzureSynapsePowerBIIntegration” in your Azure Active Directory. Next add the name of your Azure Synapse Workspace as a member of your new security group. This will be your service principal. Step 2: Login to powerbi.com and in the top right hand corner locate “Settings” and…

    » Read more

  • Combining Queries from Multiple Sources in Power BI using Merge and Append

    March 1st, 2022 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server, Uncategorized

    It is always good practice to do as much data preparation as close to the sources as you can before importing or connecting them to your Power BI reports, but what if there are circumstances where this isn’t possible? I had an issue recently where a third-party application had been updated and both the new and legacy versions were being used side-by-side. Logging data from both versions was being written to two separate Azure SQL databases.…

    » Read more

  • How to resolve SSIS “Row yielded no match during lookup” error.

    January 26th, 2022 in Blog, Business Intelligence, SSIS

    Have you ever been faced with the SSIS error “Row yielded no match during lookup”? If so, this blog is for you! A customer of ours recently faced the same issue in one of their SSIS packages and asked us to investigate this for them. Initial investigations on their side highlighted that when they replicated the lookup component using a standard join in T-SQL (similar to the image below) it returned the expected results. So why was SSIS…

    » Read more

  • Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part2)

    July 30th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Synapse

    So in part 1 we found out what Workload Management was and why we wanted to use it. (If you haven’t read that part, please click here and read that post before you carry on, as we’re jumping in at the deep end!) In this part we’ll be learning how to configure it. Continuing from the end of the previous post, you have two main options to configure this. First is to assign a user or role to one of the existing system defined…

    » Read more

  • Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part1)

    June 10th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Synapse

    So you’ve started using Synapse SQL Pools, you’ve scaled up to improve performance, but your queries aren’t going as fast as you’d hoped. You take a look at resource utilisation and you see that as you scale up, your total resource utilisation per query goes down. But didn’t we scale up to allow our query to use more resource and run quicker? What’s going on here? A little thing called Workload Management.…

    » Read more

  • Power BI – Enable Load

    April 16th, 2021 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Uncategorized

    In Power BI Power Query there is an option to enable or disable whether a table is loaded into the report. The option ‘Enable load’ can be found by right clicking on the table. Typically, by default, the load is already enabled. There is also an option ‘Include in report refresh’ which lets a user stop a table from refreshing when they refresh the entire report. This maybe useful for static tables or tables that are large which take a…

    » Read more