Techorama 2018 is over, sadly enough. It was a great conference: lots of awesome speakers and sessions and very nicely organized. Big thanks to the organizers, sponsors and attendees of course. My session on data modeling in self-service BI went really well (but I had some time left at the end). I promised to share […]
Author: Koen Verbeeck
Koen Verbeeck is a Microsoft Business Intelligence consultant at AE, helping clients to get insight in their data. Koen has a comprehensive knowledge of the SQL Server BI stack, with a particular love for Integration Services. He's also a speaker at various conferences.
Issue while using SQLCompare against Azure SQL DB
I’ve encountered an issue while trying to compare a local SQL Server database against an Azure SQL DB using Redgate SQLCompare. When trying to specify my credentials, I got the following error: “Unable to load adalsql.ddl”. Following that link actually leads you to a helpful page, where you can download the Active Directory Authentication Library […]
Change SSAS Tabular Data Source using TOM
We’ve all been there. You made some adjustments to your Tabular model and you deploy it to the production server using Visual Studio. Whoops, you forgot to change the server name in the data sources, so now your Tabular model in production is trying to read from the test database. Either it crashes – depending […]
Connect to Power BI Report Server with SSMS
Sometimes you want to connect to a report server instance using Management Studio, for example to create a new security role or modify an existing one. Recently I tried to log into our newly installed Power BI Report Server (March 2018 edition). I was greeted with the following error: The Reporting Services instance could not […]
Stop Previewing the bim.layout File in SSAS Tabular
A quick blog post for future reference, because I know I’ll bump into this again someday. When you’re working with a team on a Analysis Services Tabular project, you most likely will check your code into some sort of source control (yes, you do. If not, start tomorrow). One of the problems is the layout […]
Book Review – Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel
As preparation for my session at Techorama.be about data modeling in self-service BI, I decided to read the book Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel by Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari. The title is quite a mouthful but it gets the point across: the book mostly deals with how to correctly build […]
T-SQL Tuesday #100!
The monthly blog party is back and we’ve reached the mythical number 100. The host of this month is the Creator himself: Adam Machanic (blog | twitter). The topic is the future: what will the world be like when it’s T-SQL Tuesday #200? The very first T-SQL Tuesday was over eight years ago, which was […]
Excel Rendering In Power BI Report Server: You Are Not Licensed To Use This Feature
I recently migrated an SSRS 2017 instance to a Power BI Report Server environment, as you can read in the blog post Migrate SSRS 2017 to Power BI Report Server. After quite some issues, the PBI RS Portal worked and I could happily browse SSRS and Power BI Desktop reports. The last on the last […]
Migrate SSRS 2017 to Power BI Report Server
UPDATE: The blog post doesn’t make this exactly clear, but fiddling around with the report database to get the upgrade working isn’t supported by Microsoft. However, someone from the SSRS team told me the March 2018 release of Power BI Report Server has fixed some bugs, so you should try to upgrade the normal way. […]
Data Modeling for Self-Service BI @ Techorama 2018
I’m delighted to announce I’ll be giving a session about data modeling in a self-service BI environment at Techorama 2018 (the Internet is divided on the correct spelling: modelling or modeling. Apparently it depends on which side of the pond you’re on). Techorama is one of the biggest Microsoft-oriented tech events in Europe (it takes […]