Challenges in combining multiple data sets in PowerBI 20 March 2014 Nico-Jacobs Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office Relationship between house price and income A few days ago the media reported that Belgium was amongst one of the most expensive European countries to buy a house, if you compare the house price relative to the income. A few days ago I wrote a blog post on how we could analyze the Belgian house mar... [More]
Analyze the Belgian house market… yourself 07 March 2014 Nico-Jacobs Office, Power BI, Business Intelligence From time to time articles get published about the evolution of the Belgian house market. Interesting to learn about general trends but… sometimes you whished these analyses would be more tailored to your situation. It’s nice to know that prices for villas have stabilized last year, but does this tr... [More]
Power BI Training: Business Intelligence with Excel 29 January 2014 Nico-Jacobs Business Intelligence, Excel Power BI allows business users to solve certain business intelligence problems without the need of IT specialists. Since 2010 Power Pivot allows Excel users to create their own data models and do advanced analytics on this. Excel 2013 out of the box contains Power View as well, allowing people to cr... [More]
The whole world in a SQL Server database 29 January 2013 Nico-Jacobs SQL Server, Integration Services Some people have the whole world in their hand, but last weekend I tried something slightly less ambitious: Getting (part of) the whole world in a SQL Server database. Loads of spatial data from OpenStreetMap I’m always looking for interesting datasets. I was still lacking a large dataset with spa... [More]
Validation sets in SQL Server Data Mining 22 January 2013 Nico-Jacobs Analysis Services, SQL Server BI, Data Mining What are validation sets? Data Mining Data mining analyses historical data to find patterns that might help us better understand how our business works, or might help predict how the business might evolve in the future: Instead of doing ‘traditional BI’, where we pick some attributes and ask for a... [More]
Using reporting services with Oracle package / stored procedure 16 December 2010 Nico-Jacobs SQL Server BI, Reporting Services Reporting services can create data sets on top of Oracle stored procedures. Sure, the manual says so, but this afternoon, I tried to get things up and running, and I want to share some of the dead ends and problems I experienced in that, maybe it can help you avoid these obstacles. Don’t panic, not ... [More]
Scripting in integration services data flow 24 November 2010 Nico-Jacobs If you wander how we can program our own conditional splits in SSIS data flow, or implement our own asynchronous transformations, or implement things such as a Year-To-Date, then you forgot to attend my session at the SQL Server Day. Luckily you can catch up with the slides and code samples on my we... [More]
Analysis Services documenter 13 March 2010 Nico-Jacobs Good news for those of you who are using our Analysis Services documenter tool: we just added a new feature. If you generate HTML documentation from a cube, then in the ‘full documentation mode’, the MDX script of your cube will be scripted as well into a bulleted list (one calculated member, named ... [More]
5 things SQL Server does different from what many developers expect 06 February 2010 Nico-Jacobs That’s what I will talk about tomorrow at Techdays Belgium. I notice in my courses that many developers are sometimes still surprised with the way SQL Server responds to transactions, or try-catch blocks, or the way it handles stored procedures, indexes and statistics. So if you’re at Techdays, come... [More]
Service oriented architecture in SQL Server with Service Broker 30 November 2009 Nico-Jacobs Wouldn’t it be nice if a stored procedure could run certain statements in parallel, if we could easily scale out SQL Server applications,… When you have code that can run asynchronously, all these things become possible, if you implement them with the Service Broker: Service Broker is an service ori... [More]