Data & Analysis

Power BI, Caching, Parallelism And Power Query Refresh Performance

Some time ago a customer of mine (thank you, Robert Lochner) showed me a very interesting scenario where a set of Power Query queries in Power BI Desktop refreshed a lot faster with the “Enable Parallel Loading Of Tables” option turned off. Source : Chris Webb's…

3 April 2019

Data & Analysis

Find and Delete Duplicate Photos with Power Query

I was trying to clean up my hard disk drive on my PC the other day. I use a program called WinDirStat to show me graphically what is taking space (as an aside, this is great software and you can download it here). After running the…

22 March 2019

Data & Analysis

Attaching Manually-Created Common Data Model Folders In Power BI Dataflows

Most of the focus on Power BI dataflows so far has been on the use of Power Query Online to load data from external data sources. However, when you create a dataflow you also have the option to attach an existing Common Data Model (CDM) folder…

21 March 2019

Data & Analysis

SQLBits Power BI And Analysis Services Videos Now Free To View Online

SQLBits is one of the best Microsoft data platform conferences around, and last week’s event in Manchester was particularly good. As usual, videos of almost all of the sessions are available for everyone to view for free online (no registration required) here: Source : Chris Webb's…

12 March 2019

Data & Analysis

Query by Example to Extract YYYY-MM from a Date Column

I was answering a question for a student in one of my online training courses this week. The question was, “Do you know of a way in power query to efficiently extract YYYY-MM from a Date column?” This can be done ‘manually’ with multiple steps including:…

7 March 2019

Data & Analysis

Extract Numerical Data Points from an Image

Today Gartner released the 2019 magic quadrant for Business Intelligence. As expected (by me at least), Microsoft is continuing its trail blazing and now has a clear lead over Tableau in both ability to execute and completeness of vision. I thought it would be interesting to…

1 March 2019