Attention to detail is a key in creating SSRS reports/dashboards that look like a work of a professional; To that end, here’s a tip: How to capitalize the first letter in your string? In other words, how to Camel Case the Text?
Here’s the function that you can use in your SSRS Expressions:
A Business Intelligence (BI) system for Sales is being developed at a company. Here are the events that occur:
1) Based on the requirements, It is documented that the Business needs to analyze Sales numbers by product, month, customer & employee
2) While designing the system IT learns that the data is stored at each Invoice Level but since the requirements document doesn’t say anything about having details down to invoice level, they decide to aggregate data before bringing in their system.
3) They develop the BI system within the time frame and sends it to business for data validation.
4) Business Analysts starts looking at the BI system and finds some numbers that don’t look right for a few products and need to see Invoices for those products to make sure that the data is right so they ask IT to give them invoice level data.
5) IT realizes that even though business had not requested Invoice Level data explicitly but they do NEED the lowest level data! They realize it’s crucial to pass data validation. Also, they talk with their business analysts and found out that they may sometimes need to drill down to lowest level data to find insights that may be hidden at the aggregate level.
6) so IT decides to re-work on their solution. This increases the timeline & budget set for the project. Not only that they have lost the opportunity to gain the confidence of business by missing the budget and timeline.
7) They learn to “Design BI system to have the lowest level data even if it’s not asked!” and decides to never make this mistake again in the future!
This concludes the post and it’s important to include lowest level data in your BI system even if it’s not explicitly requested – this will save you time & build your credibility as a Business Intelligence developer/architect.
BI system allows the analysts & operational specialists to drill down to the lowest data available but here’s a dashboard for executives & Sr. managers:
Internet enabled computers to be connected with each other.
Internet enabled Mobile Devices to be connected with each other.
Now, Internet will be used to enable physical things to be connected with each other. This is what is called “Internet of things” (IoT).
So what happens?
since more devices are connected with internet – we will able to generate more data! This is usually good if there’s a business vision around how to make sense of data to increase efficiency of all these things.
Here’s a nice case study from Microsoft (focus on the business case – the things in this case is “elevator” to drive reliability)
This is all good news for data professionals! There will be increased demand for professionals who can help businesses make sense of data generated via IoT.
Also beware of the “hype” around this technology. It’s important to take incremental steps to achieve the vision – Instead of trying to analyze data from ALL devices in your organization, start with one physical thing that matter the most for your organization or start with data that you have and take incremental steps to spread data culture in your organization!
Now that Big Data has become a mainstream word in IT and business, we have a new buzzword to learn/talk about IoT – but remember it’s all about making sense of data and your skills would be more valuable than ever!
Session Abstract: Microsoft has introduced a new technology for developing analytics applications in the cloud. The presenter has an insider’s perspective, having actively provided feedback to the Microsoft team which has been developing this technology over the past 2 years. This session will 1) provide an introduction to the Azure technology including licensing, 2) provide demos of using R version 3 with AzureML, and 3) provide best practices for developing applications with Azure Machine Learning.
Speaker BIO: Mark is a consultant who provides enterprise data science analytics advice and solutions. He uses Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining, SAS, SPSS, R, and Hadoop (among other tools). He works with Microsoft Business Intelligence (SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, SharePoint, Power BI, .NET). He is a SQL Server MVP and has a research doctorate (PhD) from Georgia Tech.
Classification algorithms are commonly used to build predictive models. Here’s what they do (simplified!):
Now, here’s the difference between Multi Class and Two Class:
if your Test Data needs to be classified into two classes then you use a two-class classification model.
Examples:
1. Is it going to Rain today? YES or NO
2. Will the buyer renew his soon-to-expire subscription? YES or NO
3. What is the sentiment of this text? Positive OR Negative
As you can see from above examples the test data needs to be classified in two classes.
Now, look at example #3 – What is the sentiment of the text? What if you also want an additional class called “neutral” – so now there are three classes and we’ll need to use a multi-class classification model. So, If your test data needs to be classified into more than two classes then you use a multi-class classification model.
Examples:
1. Sentiment analysis of customer reviews? Positive, Negative, Neutral
2. What is the weather prediction for today? Sunny, Cloudy, Rainy, Snow
I hope the examples helped, so next time you have to choose between multi class and two class classification models, ask yourself – does the problem ask you to predict two classes or more? based on that, you’ll need to pick your model.
SSAS Actions are powerful! You can open web pages, open sql server reporting services, customize drill through reports among other things using actions. In this post, you will see a common requirement from users to navigate to a corporate intranet site from the cube – and usually it needs to be dynamic.
For example, user is interested in seeing the Order Entry Page hosted on the corporate intranet site by using the Order ID from the SSAS cube.
Here’s how you can set it up:
1. Open SSAS Cube in SQL Server Data Tools:
2. Navigate to Actions tab:
3. Here you’ll see three types of action that you can configure
a. Standard (this have five subtypes including the URL action)
b. Drill Through
c. report action
4. For the purpose of this blog post, let’s focus on standard action:
5. Once you click on the “New Action” it will ask you to configure the action:
a. Name: Enter the desired name here
b. Target Type: In this case, Order ID is an attribute member but you will have to choose appropriate target type for your scenario
c. Target Object: In this case, it’s something like [Order].[Order ID] – in your case, you’ll have to choose an appropriate target object
d. Type: URL in this case (also don’t forget to check books online for what other types can do as well)
e. Action Expression: the format of the Action Expression if it’s driven by a parameter would go something like:
f. Additional Properties: I like to set the Caption to clearly indicate the user that they are opening the “Order Form for Order ID 123999”. You can do that by setting the caption property. The format goes like this:
[code language=”SQL”] "Open Order Entry page for Order ID: "+[Order].[Order ID].currentmember.member_caption [/code]
Also set the caption is MDX to True if you are using above format.
That’s about it, don’t forget to test it (after deploying the cube) using excel or other end-user tool of your choice. In the Pivot Table, use the Order ID attribute in Row/Column labels > Right Click on any attribute member of Order ID attribute > Additional Actions > The caption with dynamic order id should show by here for users to click and navigate to the specified URL:
