Blog

Have you ever needed an automated process to use alternative credentials for a subset of tasks? This post will demonstrate a technique that allows you setup multiple, concurrent authenticated sessions when using the azure-cli and switch freely between them.

Have you or are you about to invest in Azure Databricks? If so, the new Spark offering in Azure Synapse Analytics is likely to have grabbed your attention and rightly so. Why is Microsoft putting yet another Spark offering on the table and what does it mean for you?

Explore 5 key reasons to choose Azure Synapse Analytics for your cloud data needs, based on years of experience in driving customer outcomes.

Explore Power BI Embedded for ISVs, using JavaScript library for personalization, Row-level Security, and modifying Embed Requests for data filtering.

It is possibly that I have only recently discovered one of my favourite pieces of UX whilst on lockdown - Mobile cheques deposits via digital imaging in my banking app. In this short post I share my experience of discovering a simple but practical piece of UX that made me happy.

Explore C# 8.0 nullable references & AllowNull attribute for better null-related bug detection and enhanced expressiveness in properties & generics.

With a lot of people all over the world suddenly finding themselves working remotely, I thought I’d share some thoughts on what I think is one of the most challenging parts of a company going fully remote: maintaining relationships.

Configuring model properties in Power BI allows you to create a model which is far more discoverable and is able to better support the visualisations you need. There are several different model properties which can be configured, some of these focus on discoverability whilst others allow you to alter the ways in which data is sorted/displayed/summarised in the reports.

C# 8.0 nullable references enable us to annotate our code with information that lets the compiler discover possible null-related bugs.

Whilst "read/write XMLA endpoint" might seem like a technical mouthful, its addition to Power BI is a significant milestone in the strategy of bringing Power BI and Analysis Services closer together. As well as closing the gap between IT-managed workloads and self-service BI, it presents a number of new opportunities for Power BI developers in terms of tooling, process and integrations. This post highlights some of the key advantages of this new capability and what they mean for the Power BI developer.

If, like me, you often find yourself unable to decide how to spend your time productively, it might be worth giving this post a read! Here Carmel runs through some of the things to consider when deciding which task to tackle next. These tasks can be anything from "send out finance report", to "call mum", to "decide where to go on holiday next year". We have a huge amount of options when deciding how to spend our time, so here are some strategies for whittling down that choice!

Improve the already-great Windows Terminal experience by following these tips for customizing the application to work best for you.

C# 8.0's nullable references feature dramatically changes a fundamental aspect of the language. In this post, Ian explains how to you can soften the impact by enabling gradually across your projects.

Azure Key Vault safeguards encryption keys & secrets for secure data access. It offers isolated storage, AD integration, RBAC, and access policies.

This is the final blog in a series about DAX and Power BI. This post focuses on the CALCULATE function, which is a unique function in DAX. The CALCULATE function has the ability to alter filter contexts, and therefore can be used to enable extremely powerful and complex processing. This post covers some of the most common scenarios for using CALCULATE, and some of the gotchas in the way in which these different features interact!

Ensure Power BI report quality by connecting to tabular models, executing scenario-based specs, and validating data, business rules, and security.

In order to effectively work with our data in Power BI we need to structure the model as best to support the representations we need. This process is called data modelling. Data modelling includes loading, shaping, cleansing and enhancing the data.This post runs through some of the important steps used in data modelling, and gives an example of loading and shaping data using Power BI.

I doubt that it's escaped anyone's notice that we have suddenly been thrown into a world which is pretty unrecognisable from that of even a few weeks ago. And I don't think any of us can claim to be managine it well all of the time, but in this post Carmel runs through some of the strategies and coping mechanisms which have helped her adjust.

C# 8.0 has two related but distinct notions of nullability. In this article, Ian explains why inferred nullness is a vitally important part of the language's new Nullable References feature.

This is the sixth blog in a series about DAX and Power BI. This post focuses on relationships and related tables. These relationships allow us to build up intricate and powerful models using a combination of sources and tables. The use of relationships in DAX powers many of the features around slicing and page filtering of reports.

Jess and Carmel recently gave a talk at Azure Oxford on Combatting illegal fishing with Machine Learning and Azure - for less than £10 / month. The recording of that talk is now available for viewing!The talk focuses on the recent work we completed with OceanMind. They run through how to construct a cloud-first architecture based on serverless and data analytics technologies and explore the important principles and challenges in designing this kind of solution. Finally, we see how the architecture we designed through this process not only provides all the benefits of the cloud (reliability, scalability, security), but because of the pay-as-you-go compute model, has a compute cost that we could barely believe!

Ensure reliable insights with endjin's automated quality gates for validating Power BI Dataflows in complex solutions.

We are currently living in extremely uncertain times. As we try to process these changes, many of us have found that we do not have the same mental capacity we once did. Some of that might be due to extra constraints on our time, but a lot of our brain-power is also spent trying to process the huge worldwide changes which are currently taking place. In this blog, Carmel talks about some techniques for managing that mental capacity, and how those apply in an ever-changing world.

C# 8.0 nullable references offer benefits besides the obvious win of detecting null-related coding errors. This new language feature can also improve the expressiveness of your code.

This is the fifth blog in a series on DAX and Power BI. This post focuses on table functions. In DAX, table functions return a table which can then be used for future processing. This can be useful if, for example, you want to perform an operation over a filtered dataset. Table functions, like most functions in DAX, operate under the filter context in which they are applied.