Mike Diehl's WebLog

I've been doing some Power BI work recently where my customers had on-premises databases that were fairly large. After building a data model in Power BI Desktop that accessed the data directly, we published it up to PowerBI.Com, installed and configured a Power BI Data Gateway, and configured scheduled data refreshes. 

One of the best parts of my job as a Business Intelligence consultant is what happens when I get a new customer. Often our first engagement with a customer that is challenged by their BI or reporting capability is a PowerBI Quick Start. This is typically a two-week intensive engagement where an Imaginet consultant (like me) embeds themselves into a team in the organization and helps the customer determine what their needs are, where they would like to be, and to discover a path to get there.

I often work for clients that require me to access their systems remotely, and usually through a VPN. Frequently, I use a Remote Desktop (RDP) session to access their resources after I have connected in via their VPN. I don't mind this, but often it is easier to use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) on my own desktop rather than remotely. 

I've been working with a document database in DB2, getting the document metadata into a SQL Server data warehouse. I've run across some issues with the way DB2 timestamp data types are converted into SQL Server datetime2 when you access the DB2 server via a linked server in SQL.

Hey, I'll be in Edmonton on April 22, at the SQL Saturday #594 event.

Today I needed to install the Microsoft OLEDB Provider for DB/2. A quick search brought up this download page:

I recently was given a CSV file that listed users and the groups they belonged to, from an Active Directory dump.

I've recently been working on a project where we push data from an on-premise database to a set of  Azure SQL databases daily, and use that Azure SQL database as the source for a Power BI dataset. The dataset gets refreshed once a day.