To implement my Service Broker ETL API, I started with the basic code/framework provided by Eitan Blumin in this blog post:http://www.madeiradata.com/service-broker-asynchronous-triggers/. He provides a good basic framework for the setup of Service Broker and an explanation of the installation scripts. To learn more on the basic framework and scripts to implement Service Broker please refer to his post.
Part 1 – Implementing Service Broker as a Real Time ETL Tool
The cheapest and easiest way to solve the real-time ETL problem is to not even attempt it in the first place, but we live in the real world and businesses are saying that:
· Viewing yesterday’s data is no longer sufficient.
· They need a faster reaction time to respond to threats and opportunities.
Dynamics GP can deploy some great Excel dashboard’s in GP2015 and Jared Hall created a awesome Financial Dashboard that you can download here. The problem with all of these solutions is that most Dynamics GP environments are multi-company setups making these dashboards not very functional without navigating and opening multiple Excel spreadsheets to view each company’s dashboard. So I took it upon myself to modify the one provided by Jared Hall to work in a multi-company Dynamics GP setup.
In July, Microsoft introduced six new chart types that will be available as part of Office 2016. Today, I’m will show you how to take advantage of the waterfall chart, one of the most popular visualization tools used in small and large businesses by modifying Dynamics GP’s Excel Financial Dashboard with Excel 2016 to add a Waterfall chart. A waterfall chart is a form of data visualization that helps in understanding the cumulative effect of sequentially introduced positive or negative values and is very useful in analyzing an income statement.
This year at KTL’s empower the User Conference one of the hottest topics was Microsoft’s Power BI. No surprise here after it was one of the most popular categories at Microsoft Dynamic’s Convergence back in March.
For those who haven’t heard of Power BI before here is a short synopsis. Power BI is an excel add-in tool made up of 4 components: Power Pivot, Power Query, Power View, and Power Map. Power Pivot and Query are used for data preparation while power view and map are used for data visualization. These tools can take large amounts of data from virtually any system and harness it for real-time, powerful analytics. One of the huge differentiators of Power BI from other analytics tools is that you can combine resources from multiple data centers. Typically, when people want to see the profitability of an organization they look at the financial data. However, this is not always the only factor, especially in today’s world that is driven by technology and social media.
In April, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the Datazen mobile BI platform and were adding it to their enterprise BI product suite. This is exciting news that rounds out the Microsoft BI stack and, better yet, it’s free for SQL Server Enterprise customers who have Software Assurance agreements.
What is Datazen and what are its capabilities?
In my last blog post we talked about Power BI Designer Preview and why I was lovin’ it. In this post I’m going to use Microsoft’s most recently Power BI tool to connect to my SQL server instance to analysis my Google Analytics data, Marketing data and CRM opportunities.
Connect to your SQL Data
Let’s get started by selecting the Get Data button in the top left corner and then select SQL Server
The Power BI preview released by Microsoft in Convergence provided a great tool to quickly make sense of large amounts of data. Power BI does all the heavy lifting and provides a quick and easy way to interact with the data. As promised by Microsoft with the release of Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1 CRM is now available within PowerBI alongside SalesForce & Google Analytics to gather data and provide data analysis. As of publishing this article the Power BI Dynamics CRM connector will only work with Dynamics CRM Online, it will not work with an on premise CRM installation, hopefully the on premise connectivity is not too far.
This year Convergence was held in Atlanta. While this conference is a huge Dynamics Users conference, they highlight applications that are not necessarily part of the Dynamic stack. One of the most captivating sessions I attended focused on Power BI, Microsoft’s excel based Business Intelligence tool.
Microsoft has a great new offering, Power BI Designer Preview, as part of the Power BI platform. It is a standalone Windows Desktop application that can be downloaded from the Power BI site. It is an optional Power BI content authoring option for users that are unable to upgrade to the latest version of Excel. The application combines Power Query, Power Pivot Data Model and Power View into a seamless experience that will allow users to build their Power BI dashboards and reports.
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