Tag: BI

Power BI – New Features and Need for Big Data Functionality

With January’s Power BI update, two items that I was looking forward to have been released. The first one was the public preview of email

February 8, 2017

Power BI Visuals in SSRS 2016 Web Site

Yesterday, January 17, 2017, Microsoft released the Power BI reports in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) technical preview. I downloaded the technical preview and installed it

January 18, 2017

KTL Solutions Launches New Website and New Direction

FREDERICK, MD – August 29, 2016 – This week KTL Solutions launched their new website and direction. Focusing more on the use of business solutions

September 7, 2016

Get Your Self-Service On!

Do you need to make an immediate or occasional one-time backup of your Dynamics GP databases, or maybe run a SQL job that populates your BI360 Data Warehouse? Occasionally, you may be performing some month-end closing procedures, post a large, significant batch, or perhaps you are about to integrate a large amount of your Dynamics GP data into your BI360 Data Warehouse. It’s critical that you make a good set of database backups to use in recovery in case of a failure, in order to refresh your Dynamics GP data into your Data Warehouse without IT involvement. There are several ways you can create a one-time backup or run other SQL jobs, like refreshing your Data Warehouse for month-end reporting. Here are some easiest ways, with some of the tools most people are familiar with:

May 11, 2016

The Two Power Players – Power BI and CRM

At the 11th Annual KTL User Conference, I will be presenting a session on Power BI and Dynamics CRM data. The main goal is to give users an easy way to present information in a timely and simple-to-understand format. In the session, using Power BI, we will cover the process of building and accessing refreshable dashboards with information from Dynamics CRM and Dynamics GP. In the session we will discuss/demo the following:

April 27, 2016

Design Best Practices to Build Killer Dashboards

When buying real estate its all about location, location, location. Like real estate, dashboards or data visualizations are all about one thing – data, data, data. With that in mind, here are some of my data visualization best practice design tips. Make your data visualization:

March 2, 2016

What’s New with Microsoft’s BI Stack

Microsoft has made a large investment in BI in 2015, both on-premises and in the cloud. BI offerings across Datazen, R, Excel, Power BI and coming to SQL Server 2016 are huge. Microsoft released a public BI roadmap on where they are headed with their BI stack. Microsoft’s simple goal is to put the power of data in the hands of every business user. This simple goal is inline with the #1 top ranked IT priority according to Gartner.

January 27, 2016

Real Time Data Warehouse ETL

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.

January 4, 2016

Real Time Data Warehouse ETL (Part 1)

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.

November 5, 2015

WOW! A Dynamics GP multi-company Financial Dashboard

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.

October 21, 2015