User stories are development tasks often expressed as follows: persona + need + purpose A key component of agile software development is putting people first. User stories put actual business users at the front-and-centre of the conversation. In this post, we will cover the following topics: What makes a good user story? Story template Definition… Continue reading User Stories for Agile Business Intelligence
The Microsoft Power BI team have released a preview Data Lineage feature and I couldn't be happier! The Power BI lineage view displays the lineage relationships between all the artifacts in a workspace, and all its external dependencies. Businesses need a clear line of sight on data asset ownership and stewardship. This has traditionally been in the hands of the IT department, but unfortunately the projects can become deprioritized as IT fight other battles elsewhere. IT can do so much, but the business do need to bring things to the table. Hence, we now see accessible tools appearing in technology such as Power BI.
I'm pleased to announce that the University of Washington are running a Foundations of Data Analysis course, starting in January 2020. In this 10-week course, you'll learn how to understand and analyze data. We’ll start with fundamental data-related concepts, terminology and ethical considerations. You’ll learn how to articulate business problems and identify required data. Using Microsoft Excel and SQL, you’ll practice gathering, cleaning and organizing data. Finally you’ll use Tableau to effectively describe, analyze and visualize data.
From the business intelligence perspective, it is incredibly useful to compare AWS RDS and Microsoft Azure SQL Database. As a freelance industry analyst who has worked with GigaOm, I'm pleased to see the GigaOM Transactional Field Test derived from the industry-standard TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E) report which compares Amazon Web Services Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.
I'm excited to be attending ASG Technology's Evolve19 event in Dallas, Texas on October 21 - 23. I'm particularly interested in learning more about metadata management. As I've written previously, I believe that metadata management is often overlooked in data science. It's an important part of obtaining full value from data, and it should be… Continue reading Keynote and Session highlights at ASG Evolve19
At some point, however, we need to pay back data debt if we are to succeed in making better decisions.
Credit to stux-12364 for the jigsaw image. When you install SSDT, you can find that the SSIS Toolbox components are all missing. I am writing this blog for myself BECAUSE I ALWAYS FORGET WHERE IT IS and I am SO ANGRY with myself right now. Here is what to do: Click on Control Flow Go… Continue reading SSIS Toolbox components are all missing?! Here’s the fix!
Customers want their data good, fast, cheap and easy. A tall order, right? One of the biggest challenges that I see with data warehousing in the cloud is that customers are concerned with cost. I was interested to see the Gigaom report on the topic of Data Warehousing in the cloud, which contained a number… Continue reading Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence in the Cloud with #Azure: How do we get good, fast, cheap and easy?
I'm excited about Power BI dataflows, since I believe it's a great way forward for companies to sort out the issue that nobody likes to talk about: cleaning data. I'm passionate about this topic since I believe in inheriting technical debt as much as I can, so I leave the organization's technical debt in a… Continue reading Power BI Dataflows and fixing ‘Your Azure storage account must be in the same Azure Active Directory tenant as your Power BI tenant.’
I am writing some SQL to form the basis of views to pull data from a Microsoft SQL Server source into Azure SQL Database, and then the data would go to Power BI. The data was all presented in string format initially (not my data, not my monkeys, not my circus), and I wanted to… Continue reading Error converting data type varchar to numeric where ISNUMERIC finds only numbers
how to find the tenant in Power BI.
December is a great time for setting personal and business goals for next year. I'd hoped for some downtime at this time of year, but I've picked up a crucial data science project which needs to be delivered over Christmas so there isn't much downtime. I'm also starting to write another book, which will be… Continue reading Business Goals for 2019: Looking back over 2018 and forward
