Are you new to Power BI? If the answer is yes, where do you start to learn how to use it? There is a lot of useful information on the Internet, but how do you know if it is any good? Look no further, I have compiled a list of useful resources that I have used over the...
When is paranoia a good thing?When it comes to downloading files for sure. Using a cryptographic hash function to test the authenticity of a file is a good practice. Such a good practice, that I wanted to make it as easy as possible to perform.I've written two scripts...
I am currently working on a project that has chosen to use Varigence BimlFlex as the preferred tool to create and manage the data warehouse. BimlFlex is a data warehouse framework that allows you to model and build an end to end data warehouse solution using a...
After having an opportunity to use Power BI at a client site, I thought it would be interesting to have a go at trying to create a Power BI report using Jira data. To access this data dynamically I chose to use the Jira REST Application Programme Interface (API)...
We have recently completed a move from Dropbox to SharePoint and given it was such a interesting process I'd thought I'd share some lessons learned. We had been using Dropbox for several years but decided to move onto SharePoint. What we started with was approximately...
It's typical in Business Intelligence that users are not getting data from the Data Warehouse database directly. Although the table structure should speak to them, one should be careful when querying Slowly changing dimension type 2 tables to get only point in time...
Hello and happy how-is-it-December-already?! What a year 2018 has been. We hope yours has been exciting, full of opportunity and you're looking forward to a well deserved break very soon. This newsletter is the last for the year, so taking the opportunity to share...
It is not uncommon for data warehousing to get the data from any possible source the organisation has. ETL developers like myself are enabling data collection from different database types, files and APIs. Recently I had to deal with something I haven't came across...
When you work with databases all day every day it's easy to forget that many people new to the technology development space will not have used a relational database. Once I get over the moment of surprise, I think about the question if I wanted to learn now, where...
Microsoft has introduced a new feature of graph database in SQL Server 2017. This is not a new idea, graph platforms were on the market for a while now. I have decided to dive in to understand why graph databases are special and how they could be used in Business...