Almost two years ago I was a part of the BI team in an organization that decided to move to the Cloud. As a first step they followed the lift and shift approach, so they moved their Data Warehouse and all the existing processes into the Azure environment almost...
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...
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...
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...
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...
For the first time I am on the project that has big enough Data Warehouse tables that could be partitioned. While many data warehouses are big, in my previous projects a single table has rarely exceeded a few million rows, which means it is too early to think about...
Data Warehouse solutions often include several copies of the same structure, I mean Development, Production and often Test and Pre-Production environments. When the Data Warehousing team works on the new piece of requirements, they don't want to put fully functioning...