Date post: | 25-Apr-2018 |
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Global Sponsor:
Excel 2013 PowerPivot in Action
Alberto Ferrari Senior Consultant SQLBI.COM
Let us see how Excel and Self-Service BI can boost your reports
Who’s Speaking? BI Expert and Consultant Founder of www.sqlbi.com Problem Solving Complex Project Assistance DataWarehouse Assesments and Development Courses, Trainings and Workshops
Book Writer Microsoft Business Intelligence Partner SSAS Maestro – MVP – MCP
a brand of
Agenda
Want to learn DAX? Sorry… one hour is not enough Really, believe me!
Instead, we’ll see what benefits DAX brings to the BI world Seeing DAX in Action! Excel 2013 new features for Self-Service BI: PowerPivot for Excel 2013 The DAX Language Power View Reports PowerPivot for SharePoint Integration
The Scenario
AdventureWorks Fictious company We sell bikes all around the world
We already have a data warehouse Now we need to perform analysis on data Build a lot of reports Share them with the colleagues Not surprisingly, we use Excel 2013
The Data Warehouse
Sales
Dim Date
Dim Customers
Dim Products
Dim Categories
Dim Geography
Our data warehouse is a simple and standard one, after all we will build everything in an hour…
The project in good old style
Start a Business Intelligence Project Find a good BI professional Learn something about data modeling Create the solution Design dimensions and measure groups
We are not going to demo this Just think it means weeks of work And tons of money… Along with some rigidity in further development
The Self-Service BI way
Self-Service BI means Load data in Excel Build a data model by yourself Focus on the result Write your own DAX formulas
Advantages Optimal time-to-market No need to explain business rules to BI professionals
Requirements At least Excel 2010 and PowerPivot; 2013 is better Some data modeling and DAX skills
I Need to Count the Customers…
You want to count the customers? DimCustomer is a dimension!!! If only you told me that before… Well, don’t worry, it can be done I will create a new measure group And setup a fact-relationship with customers
Not a big issue, just a couple of hours
I Need Just Another Count…
You want to count the buying customers? That’s a DISTINCT COUNT over the fact table! Well, yes, it can be done It’s not easy, although… I will create a new DISTINCT measure group Then I will partition the fact table Maybe review the clustered index of the fact table… Otherwise it will be slow...
You thought it was easy? It is not…
Oh, well… while you are here…
Now you want to count the NEW customers??? What do you mean by that? Customers who never bought anything And are buying something now
Not easy at all… Need to review the data model Add snapshot fact tables, computed during ETL Write some complex MDX And fine-tune performance
I Want to Perform Price-Range Analysis…
Analysis by Price Range? Do you mean Banding? Freely configurable?
That need to be carefully planned Need to compute the range during ETL Update the DWH structure Ops… it’s the fact table, that means planning the work
Updating the banding table Need to write some code to update the table That means building a user-interface
ABC Analysis
Clustering technique Helps detecting your core business Classification based on Sales / Revenues
Class Percentage A (few products) 70% B (some products) 20% C (many products) 10% GRAND TOTAL 100%
ABC Analysis Usage
Typically, you find Class A: few products, your core business Class B: some products Class C: a lot of products, less important ones
Time to play with Power View
Searching for insights in data Is there a correlation between Product Cost Sales Amount Gross Margin
I would like to look inside my data in a graphical way At the end, I will produce the report
I want a map chart!!!
I’d like to build a report with a map Pinpoint all the sales as coloured circles Not very useful, but looks damn good! I have seen this on a friend’s reporting system!
Wow… that map looks cool!
I need latitude and longitude Maybe a geography column in the DWH? Where do I start learning about it? And how do I find latitude of Rome? Not speaking about longitude…
Time to google for a solution I need a charting component Write some code to find coordinates And finally mix everything together Not an easy task, indeed…
Nice for Self-Service, can I share this?
I need to share the report with colleagues I want them to Look at the report every day Improve it by adding more intelligence Use it as the basis for new analysis
They need to access from outside of the company This is what «share» means, after all
Self-Service BI and the DAX language
Simple Relational Data Model Tables Relationships
DAX for Calculated Columns and Fields Complex calculations stored in the data model
Incredible Speed No need to author custom data models Simply leverage the tremendous speed of DAX
Simple Development Excel is the only tool you need And some DAX and modeling skills, of course
What Next?
Learn DAX Seriously, learn it! It is not easy, it takes time, but it is worth it! Yes… here I have a conflict of interests
PowerPivot, DAX and Self-Service BI are not A solution to all the problems The only way to the future The only available solution
But the modeling is Faster, Simpler, Cheaper In the hands of users (ok… of Power Users)