Power BI users are not all in the same category. If you treat everyone equally, you wouldn’t have a successful Power BI adoption. You would likely spend too much on the training and gain much less adoption. In this article, I’ll explain what the different types of users are and are proper actions for each Read more about The importance of knowing different types of Power BI users; a governance approach[…]
We are pleased to let you know that our DAX and Calculations in Power BI video course is now available. This course, like many other video courses we offer, is part of the Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star training. This is a course to consider if you need to create calculations for adding Read more about New Video Course: DAX and Calculations in Power BI[…]
You want to see which Power BI training option is good for you. You want to see should you start from the beginning or focus on a specific component of Power BI? This is the question that I often get asked when people come to me and asking about bespoke training for their teams. Here Read more about Power BI Training Self Assessment: What Training Path Should I Take?[…]
This is the first part which published at the last! I previously published 7 posts for the series of “I’m New to BI, Where to Start?”. However I got some feedback from audience that are not coming from the world of Database, and they are not familiar with relational database structure, primary keys, foreign keys, constraints, indexes, T-SQL…. So I felt the requirement for a preliminary post that links to some references to have better understanding of prerequisites to starting BI. Business Intelligence is the art of fetching information to support decisions based on the story behind the data. With this definition the first and foremost prerequisite is to understand data and how to work with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi folks, I want to give you a heads up about my new course which will be presented at 15-16 of November in Auckland. Title of Course is : Microsoft SQL Server 2012 for the Oracle DBA. Registration are open now under this website: http://www.auldhouse.co.nz/courses-schedules/vendors/microsoft-technical/sql-server/microsoft-sql-server-2012-for-the-oracle-dba This is a 2 day course, and I and Dave Read more about I am Trainer of SQL Server for the Oracle DBA Course[…]