Month: April 2015

Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 7: Azure

Posted on by Reza Rad

Many organizations nowadays are in transition from on-premises to cloud, and many of them use hybrid solutions where part of the computing will be done in cloud and the rest on-premises. The trend nowadays is to use cloud to have better maintenance, lower costs, more reliable solutions, lower administrative efforts, and powerful shared resources. In BI world there is a high demand for solutions to be on cloud, some computing services such as data transfer and ETL to be done on cloud, some data analysis and mining solutions happens on cloud, and even data to be stored on cloud data warehouse at some stage. There are many BI vendors in the market, but there are few who provide BI on the cloud.

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Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 6: Data Mining

Posted on by Reza Rad

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Data Scientist is a hot job nowadays in the market and there are lots of demand for it. Data Science origins from the BI field and sits under umbrella of Business Intelligence, because the data science and data mining helps decision makers in their decision making process. To have an idea about how data mining can solve real world issues, think about loyalty program of the super market that you usually use close to  your home. Loyalty program simply analyze your purchase history and based on that it comes up with some suggestion and prediction about your next purchases and will promote that through your cell phone text messages or email or even flyers directly addressed to your home address.

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Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 5: Power BI

Posted on by Reza Rad

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Power BI is not a strange word these days, there are many blog posts, videos, news, and speakings about it. Power BI is Microsoft Cloud BI services that released recently. Power BI is not only Cloud BI but also it offers good self-service BI stack as well. Power BI has five main components which are:

  • Power Query: For data extraction, transformation, and load into model.
  • Power Pivot: Data Modelling tool.
  • Power View: Data Visualization tool
  • Power Map: 3D Geo-spatial data visualization tool.
  • Power Q&A: Engine for natural language questions and answering

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Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 4: Data Visualization

Posted on by Reza Rad

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Data Visualization is the front end of your BI system. It will be seen from the user’s point of view as the whole BI system! The reason for that is users only will see this part of the BI system, they won’t see Data Warehouse, ETL,  andData Governance… What they see is only dashboards and charts explaining data values. So it is essential to do the data visualization right and effective. A good data visualization should be able to tell story behind the data. A bad data visualization won’t help users even if you have a good data warehouse or ETL design. So you should spent time to analyze ever dashboard, chart, and table and make that a good story teller to the user.

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Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 3 : Data Governance

Posted on by Reza Rad

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Data Governance is one of the most important aspects of BI systems, that unfortunately seen less important in many organizations. All usefulness and gratefulness of BI system will only be seen if there is a good data governance in place. If you build superb dashboards and data visualizations it won’t help until the quality of data is high. your ETL scenario won’t be so much great when there are more than one source for the same data but with different versions of it.

Data Governance and Enterprise Information Management (EIM) are concepts that needs to be covered in every organization working with the data, despite the fact that they use BI system or not. So in nutshell EIM and Data Governance are not components of BI system, they are separate systems, that can be used side by side of a BI system. However because of their very close relationship with BI system (especially because BI system is based on the data and information) we would cover them here. I would like to comment here that there won’t be a good BI system without good EIM or data governance in place.

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Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 2: Modelling with BISM

Posted on by Reza Rad

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You’ve learned about first steps for getting into BI field in previous post. In this post I’ll continue with explaining some other components of Microsoft BI and resources to learn it. Previous post was about the overall picture of BI, Data Warehouse Design, Dimensional Modelling, ETL and SSIS. In this post I’ll explore components such as SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) Tabular and Multi-Dimensional.

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Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 1

Posted on by Reza Rad

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Business Intelligence is hot topics still after years of first appearance of the world in the job market. Term changed many times; Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, Data Analysis, and Cloud BI…. BI related jobs are still high paid jobs in the market. Demand for BI is pretty high, and number of BI professionals is not that high. So it creates a niche market section for high demand jobs with high salaries. On the other hand BI is not something out of the blue for DBAs, Database Developers, Software Developers, and many IT professionals. Most of software developers build reports and analysis elements on their everyday activities. However that experience in report writing and analysis isn’t that much helpful for them if they want to step into BI jobs. For getting into BI market, you don’t only need experience in report writing, but you also need conceptual and architectural points of BI and DW systems, understanding components of BI, and learning tools of it.

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FIFA 2014 World Cup Data Analysis with Power BI

Posted on by Reza Rad

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Fifa 2014 is not a hot topic these days, but it was the headline news June 2014. With new capabilities in Power BI Designer I tempted to use FIFA 2014 Worldcup data as a demo of it, and play with the tool to see how it works. Fortunately I was able to build some interesting dashboards with it. The demo work was interesting enough to say that I probably would write detailed information about how to build such demo, and would use it in some of my conference speakings.

I’ve used data from official Fifa.com website for most parts of this demo. you can reach FIFA.com official site for 2014 Brazil from here:

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Azure Data Factory – Updates: March 2015

Posted on by Reza Rad

Previously in another post I’ve mentioned what Azure Data Factory is and a sample scenario of data transfer with it.

Microsoft recently published a new version of it, which has really interesting features. In a nutshell features are:

  • New Version of Data Management Gateway
  • On Premises File System Linked Services
  • On Premises Oracle Linked Services
  • Encoding options for text files on Azure Blog storage
  • Invoking Stored Procedures with additional parameters.

Have a read in details about these new features below;

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