Business Intelligence

Esat Erkec

How to use JSON data in SSRS

November 6, 2018 by

In this article, we will explore the concept of using JSON data in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). This usage concept will include a different approach than the usual methodologies because we will take advantage of SQL Server R service support.

What is JSON?

JSON is an abbreviation for JavaScriptObjectNotation. The main purpose of JSON data was to provide data transfer between server and web applications for JavaScript but today’s JSON is the most popular data interchange format. JSON offers two advantages to us. These are; light-weight text based format easily readable by humans. Currently, JSON is not only used in JavaScript applications, it is also used in all popular software programing languages like JavaScript, C++, C#, Perl, Java, Python, Php etc.

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Esat Erkec

How to add parameters to SSRS mobile reports

October 12, 2018 by

This article will explain detailed usage of parameters in mobile reports in SSRS. Parameterized reports are important because report readers want to filter and customize their report data with parameters and this option helps report readers to focus on particular data. A parameterized SSRS report uses parameters as an input value and filters the report data according to these parameters. In this article we will focus, in particular, on how to use parameters and data sources together and how can we manage the parameters in mobile SSRS reports.

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Rajendra Gupta

How to create a Word Cloud generator in Power BI Desktop

October 11, 2018 by

In this article, we’ll look at how to create a Word cloud generator in Power BI Desktop, including importing data, customization and more.

In my last article, Power BI Desktop Interactive chord diagrams, we learned about customized visualizations in Power BI Desktop. These visualizations are free to install and we can use them with our data set and customize charts as per our requirements.

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Esat Erkec

Load testing for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

September 25, 2018 by

Performance monitoring is a very significant and essential topic for database or system administrators. This is no different with SSRS load testing. In some cases, performance problems can lead to significant system downtime. Most of the time in the background of the problem is having insufficient resources or improper settings. Therefore, before experiencing performance issues, we have to take some time to review preventive measures related to current system configurations or new installations. The load test (or stress test) is the most commonly used approach to tune systems before real-life staging conditions. Now we will discuss the details of load test, and in particular SSRS load testing.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

How to embed a Power BI Report Server report into an ASP.Net web application

September 20, 2018 by

Every once in a while, teams from different functional areas of the business (i.e. business intelligence, software development, web development etc.) would join forces to form a cross-functional development team with a common goal of integrating a business intelligence artefact such as a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report into a front-end web application. There are many reasons for forming such a partnership including a lack of report-development skill by web developers, BI team owns a better reporting tool for data visualization, or maybe to prevent the software team from “reinventing the wheel” by developing a report that has already been produced elsewhere.

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Esat Erkec

Text Analytics with Microsoft Flow

September 19, 2018 by

Twitter is a very popular social media platform which generates millions of tweets a day. These tweets include very valuable data for marketers or social media analyzers because they can analyze these tweets with specific algorithms and find out the sense of social media users.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Available options for generating heatmaps in an SSRS report

September 17, 2018 by

As developers of business intelligence solutions, we tend to service different types of business users. Whilst a call center supervisor is more likely to consume reports that offer detailed breakdown of day-to-day performance of her call center agents, senior managers on the other hand often prefer big-picture analytical reports that represent data in a form of colorful graphs and charts. Not surprisingly, such reports often make use of heatmap controls to provide visually effective comparative view of business metrics against set targets.

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Esat Erkec

How to create a Mobile Dashboard with SQL Server Microsoft Mobile Publisher?

September 10, 2018 by

Over the past three years, I read some interesting news about Microsoft which was “Microsoft acquires mobile business intelligence leader Datazen”. This news made me excited because showing Reporting Service reports in mobile devices can be painful and often not effective for end users. After this acquisition, Microsoft developers worked quickly to adapt the Datazen application to SQL Server Reporting Services and this effort culminated in Microsoft SQL Server Mobile Report Publisher.

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Esat Erkec

How to integrate Power BI data alerts into Slack

August 31, 2018 by

There is a growing trend among professionals and entire companies to move away from email as a primary means of communication and are even adopting alternative technologies. One of the most popular of these is Slack. Slack is a new kind of messaging and communication platform between colleagues, team or community members that allows them to integrate a lot of services including Visual Studio Team Service, Jira and GitHub.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

How to handle SSRS multi-value parameter filtering in SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse

August 23, 2018 by

Experienced business intelligence (BI) developers would tell you that as you move from one project to another, some requirements start becoming repetitive like you have dealt with them before. One such repetitive requirement occurs during SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) development wherein a client would request that a report parameter be configured to allow multiple values from a dataset that is populated by stored procedure, as illustrated in Figure 1.

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Istvan Martinka

Dynamic Partitioning in Azure Analysis Services (tabular)

August 6, 2018 by

Objective

The real-life requirement

Disclaimer: I assume dear Reader, that you are more than familiar with the general concept of partitioning and star schema modeling. The intended audience is people who used to be called BI developers in the past (with a good amount of experience), but they have all sorts of different titles nowadays that I can’t keep up with… I won’t provide a full Visual Studio solution that you can download and just run without any changes or configuration, but I will give you code can be used after parameterizing according to your own environment.

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Timothy Smith

SQL Server – development practices with referenced views

July 24, 2018 by

We’ve recently had production failures because our developers changed an important reference. In this case, we had a view which several procedures and views referenced. A developer made a change to the referenced view by removing columns, which caused several procedures and a view that referenced it to fail. We’re considering whether we should stop this practice, or if there are other ways we can prevent changes to an object that’s being referenced by other objects (in our case, a view).

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Esat Erkec

SQL Server Reporting Service Configuration Manager

June 27, 2018 by

After the native installation of the SQL Server Reporting Service, we may need to customize some settings of Report Server. SQL Server Reporting Service provides a tool that is named as such; Report Server Configuration Manager. This tool helps us to customize SQL Server Reporting Service parameters and configurations. With the Report Server Configuration Manager, we can change and customize various parameters of the SQL Server Reporting Service. We can find the below settings in Report Server Configuration Manager:

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Top 4 options for fixing Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClientUI.dll assembly error in SQL Server 2016

June 26, 2018 by

I’ve always been in favor of an orthodox strategy when it comes to applying SQL Server updates which often goes like:

  • Instead of installing SQL Server Cumulative Updates, wait for release of service packs
  • When a service pack is released, install it in phases starting from the non-production environment (i.e. DEV, UAT) to eventually roll it out on production
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Esat Erkec

How to automatically create KPIs in SQL Server Reporting Services

June 18, 2018 by

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

A Key Performance Indicator aka KPI is a metric which objectively measures the numeric equivalent of goals or targets of a company, team or an organization. Any individual or a community which has a numerical target can measure success of their goal with key performance indicators.

In all business roles and levels, if you manage a team you most likely have to set at least one key performance indicator and try influence this metric to show a positive result or trend. KPIs should be both logical and achievable. If not, team motivation and morale may decrease as a result of loss of self-confidence. For this reason, we have to be careful and logical when we set key performance indicators. At the same time, we have to check KPIs at regular intervals to determine if they remain valid. We can illustrate a typical KPI life cycle below.

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Esat Erkec

Real-time streaming in Power BI

May 29, 2018 by

The concept of the IOT (Internet of Things) is that every object that you might think of is somehow accessed and connected to other devices on the internet. Nowadays every electronic device is now becoming smart and these devices are now able to communicate with each other. Many ideas and technology on IOT are being developed and are even being used today.

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Esat Erkec

How to integrate Power BI to the Facebook Graph API

May 4, 2018 by

The challenge

With the popularity of social networking and sharing sites and their widespread availability, internet marketing techniques have also been rapidly influenced. Sharing sites with high visitor traffic offers great potential for advertisers, so much so that it is almost unheard of now that brands or products do not have a profile or group on a social networking site. Markets have the opportunity to communicate directly with consumers by creating profiles or groups in sharing sites. Thanks to the comments and forums on the pages, they are able to follow both positive and negative attitudes of the target groups about themselves and thus have more precise ideas about what to do next.

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