Category: Office 365

Using Excel With External Data – What’s the Right Tool?

Published May 30, 2015

Excel has been used with external data for… well, as long as I’ve been using Excel. So why would anyone bother to write a blog post about this given that the capability is so mature? In recent years, Excel has adopted a number of new, and frankly better mechanisms for working with external data, while retaining the old. Given that there are now multiple tools in Excel for working with external data, it’s not always clear as to which one is the best, and unfortunately there is no single tool that wins over all, although I believe that that will be the case soon.

The answer, as always is, “it depends”. When it depends, the important thing is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. With that said, let’s have a look at all of the options.

ODC Connections

ODC (Office Data Connections) are the traditional method of accessing data in Excel. You can create or reuse an ODC connection from the Data tab in the Excel ribbon.

When using an ODC connection, you establish a connection with a data source, form some sort of query and import the resultant data directly into the Excel workbook. From there, the data can be manipulated and shaped in order to support whatever the end user is trying to do. The one exception to this behaviour is the connection to SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). When a connection is made to SSAS, only the connection is created. No data is returned until an analysis is performed (through a pivot table, chart etc), and then only the query results are retrieved.

When the workbook using an ODC connection is saved, the data is saved within it. In the case of an SSAS connected workbook, the results of the last analysis are saved along with it. For small amounts of data, this is just fine, but any large analysis is bound to quickly run into the data limits in Excel which is 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns in Excel 2013. In addition such a file is very large and extremely cumbersome to work with, but even as such, Excel has been the primary tool of choice for business analysts for years.

Data loaded into the workbook can be refreshed on demand, but it can also be altered, shaped, mashed up, and as is too often the case, grow stale. Workbooks such as these have become known as “spreadmarts” and are the scourge of IT and business alike. With these spreadmarts, we have multiple versions of the same data being proliferated, and it becomes harder to discern which data is most accurate/current, not to mention the governance implications.

SharePoint has provided a way to mitigate some of the concerns with these connections. SharePoint itself supports ODC connections, and therefore users can access these workbooks stored within SharePoint and it also allows them to refresh data from the source either on demand or on open. A single point of storage along with a measure of oversight and browser access helps to restore a modicum of sanity to an out of control spreadmart environment, but the core issues remain.

In order to help with the core issues, Microsoft introduced PowerPivot in 2009.

PowerPivot Connections

Created in PowerPivot

PowerPivot was originally (and still is) an add-in to Excel 2010, and is a built in add-in to Excel 2013. PowerPivot allows for the analysis of massive amounts of data within Excel, limited only by the memory available to the user’s machine (assuming a 64 bit version). It does this by highly compressing data in memory using columnar compression. The end result is that literally hundreds of millions of rows of data can be analyzed efficiently from within Excel.

You can see that compression at work by comparing the same data imported into an Excel workbook directly, and into a PowerPivot model with a workbook. The following two files contain election data, and represent the maximum number of rows that Excel can handle directly (1,048,576) and 25 columns.

Getting data into the model was originally (and still can be) a completely separate process from bringing it into Excel. PowerPivot has its own data import mechanism, accessed from the Power Pivot window itself. First, click on the PowerPivot tab in Excel and then click manage. If you don’t have a PowerPivot tab, you will need to enable the add-in. If you don’t have the add-in, you have an earlier version of Excel – you’ll need to download it.

Once the PowerPivot window opens, the “Get External Data” option is on the ribbon.

Once the appropriate data source is selected and configured, data will be loaded directly into the data model – there is no option to import that data into a worksheet. Once the data is in, pivot tables and pivot charts can be added to the workbook that connect to the data model much like when creating an ODC connection to Analysis Services. In fact, it’s pretty much exactly like connecting to Analysis services, except that the AS process is running on the workstation.

Created in Excel

PowerPivot, and more importantly the tabular data model was included in Excel 2013. With that addition, Microsoft added a few features to make the process of getting data into the data model a little easier for users that were a little less tech savvy, and may be uncomfortable working with a separate PowerPivot window. That’s actually part of the thinking in leaving the PowerPivot add-on turned off by default.

When a user creates an ODC connection as outlined above, there are a couple of new options in Excel 2013. First, the “Select Table” dialog has a new checkbox – “Enable selection of multiple tables”.

When this option is selected, more than one table from the data source can be selected simultaneously, but more importantly, the data will automatically be sent to the data model in addition to any other import destinations.

Even if the multiple selection option wasn’t chosen, the next dialog in the import process, “Import Data” also has a new check box – “Add this data to the Data Model”.

Its purpose is pretty self-explanatory. It should be noted that if you choose this option, and also choose “Only Create Connection”, the data will ONLY be added to the model, nowhere else in the workbook. This is functionally equivalent to doing the import from the PowerPivot window, without enabling the add-in.

Power Query Connections

When Power BI was originally announced, Power Query was also announced and included as a component. This was very much a marketing distinction, as Power Query exists in its own right, and does not require a Power BI license to use. It is available as an add-on to both Excel 2010 and 2013, and will be included with Excel 2016.

Power Query brings some Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) muscle to the Excel data acquisition story. Data can be not only imported and filtered, but also transformed with Power Query and its powerful M language. Power Query brings many features to the table, but this article is focused on its use as a data acquisition tool.

To use Power Query, it must first be downloaded and installed. Once installed, it is available from the Power Query tab (Excel 2010 and 2013).

Or from the data tab, New Query (Excel 2016)

Once the desired data source is selected, the query can be edited, or loaded into either the workbook, the data model, or both simultaneously. To load without editing the query, the load option at the bottom of the import dialog is selected.

Selecting “Load To” will allow you to select the destination for the data – the workbook, the model or both. Selecting Load will import the data to the default destination, which is by default the workbook. Given the fact that the workbook is an inefficient destination for data, I always recommend that you change their default settings for Power Query.

To do so, select Options from the Power Query tab (2010 and 2013) or the New Query button (2016), click the Data Load section, and then specify your default settings.

Data Refresh Options

In almost every case when external data is analyzed, it will need to be refreshed on a periodic basis. Within the Excel Client, this is simple enough – click on the data tab, and then the Refresh All button, or refresh a specific connection. This works no matter what method was used to import the data in the first place. Excel data connections can also be configured to refresh automatically every time the workbook is opened, or on a periodic basis in the background.

However, workbooks can also be used in a browser through Office Web Apps and Excel Services (SharePoint and Office 365) or as a data source for Power BI dashboards. In these cases the workbooks need to be refreshed automatically in order that the consuming users will see the most up to data when the workbooks are opened. The tricky part is that not all of the connection types listed above are supported by all of the servers or services. Let’s dive in to what works with what.

SharePoint with Excel Services

Excel Services first shipped with SharePoint 2007, is a part of 2007, 2010, and will be included with 2016. From the beginning, Excel Services allowed browser users to view and interact with Excel workbooks, including workbooks that were connected to back end data. The connection type supported by Excel Services is ODC, and ODC only.

Excel Services has no mechanism for maintaining data refresh. However, the data connection refresh options are supported which means that the workbook can be automatically refreshed when opened, or on a scheduled basis (every xxx minutes in the background). Unfortunately, this can come with a significant performance penalty, and once refreshed it is only in memory. The workbook in the library is not updated. The data in the workbook can only be changed by editing the workbook in the client, refreshing it, and re-saving it

Workbooks with embedded data models (PowerPivot) can be opened in the browser, but any attempt to interact with the model (selecting a filter, slicer, etc) will result in an error unless PowerPivot for SharePoint has been configured.

SharePoint with Excel Services and PowerPivot for SharePoint

PowerPivot for SharePoint is a combination of a SharePoint Service application and Analysis Services SharePoint mode. When installed, it allows workbooks that have embedded PowerPivot data models to be interacted with through a browser. The way that it works is that when such a workbook is initially interacted, the embedded model is automatically “promoted” to the Analysis Services instance, and a connection is made with it, thus allowing the consuming user to work with it in the same manner as with a SSAS connected workbook,

The PowerPivot for SharePoint service application runs on a SharePoint server and allows for individual workbooks to be automatically refreshed on a scheduled basis. The schedule can be no more granular than once per day, but the actual data within the model on disk is updated, along with any Excel visualizations connected to it.

When the refresh process runs, it is the functional equivalent of editing the file in the client, selecting refresh all, and saving it back to the library. However, there is one significant difference. The Excel client will refresh all connection types, but the PowerPivot for SharePoint process does not understand Power Query connections. It can only handle those created through the Excel or PowerPivot interfaces.

Power Pivot for SharePoint ships on SQL Server media, and this limitation is still true as of SQL Server 2014. At the Ignite 2015 conference in Chicago, one of the promised enhancements was Power Query support in the SharePoint 2016 timeframe.

Office 365

Office 365, or more precisely, SharePoint Online supports Excel workbooks with ODC connections and PowerPivot embedded models in a browser. These workbooks can even be refreshed if the data source is online (SQL Azure), but they cannot be refreshed automatically. In addition, only ODC and PowerPivot connections are supported for manual refresh. Power Query connections require Power BI for Office 365. In addition, Office 365 imposes a 30 MB model size limit – beyond that, the Excel client must be used. In short, the Office 365 data refresh options are very limited.

Power BI for Office 365

Power BI for Office brings the ability to automatically refresh workbooks with embedded data models. Data sources can be on premises or in the cloud. On premises refresh is achieved through the use of the Data Management Gateway. It also raises Office 365’s model size limit from 30 MB to 250 MB. With Power BI for Office 365 both manual and automatic refreshes can be performed for both PowerPivot and Power Query connections, however Power Pivot connections are currently restricted to SQL Server and Oracle only.

The automatic refresh of ODC connections is not supported. A workbook must contain a data model in order to be enabled for Power BI.

Power BI Dashboards

Power BI Dashboards is a new service, allowing users to design dashboards without necessarily having Office 365 or even Excel. It is currently in preview form, so anything said here is subject to change. It is fundamentally based on the data model and it works with Excel files as a data source currently, and it is promised to use Excel as a report source as well. The service has the ability to automatically refresh the underlying Excel files on a periodic basis more frequent than daily.

In order for a workbook to be refreshed by Power BI, it must (at present) be stored in a OneDrive or OneDrive for Business container. It also must utilize either a PowerPivot, or a Power Query connection. At present, the data source must also be cloud based (ie SQL Azure) but on premises connectivity has been promised.

SQL Server Analysis Services

Another consideration, while not a platform for workbooks is SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). Excel can be used to design and build a data model, and that data model can at any time be imported into SSAS. As of version 2014, SSAS fully supports all connection types for import – ODC, PowerPivot and Power Query. Once a data model has been imported into SSAS, it can be refreshed on a schedule as often as desired, and you can connect to it with Excel, and share it in SharePoint. You can also connect to it in Power BI Dashboards through the SSAS connector. From both a flexibility and power standpoint, this is the best option, but it does require additional resources and complexity.

Refresh Compatibility Summary

For convenience, the table below summarizes the refresh options for the different connection types.

	ODC	PowerPivot	Power Query
Excel Client	M	M	M
SharePoint/Excel Services	M
SharePoint/Excel Services/PP4SP	M	A
SQL Server Analysis Services Import	A	A	A
Office 365	M	M
Office 365 with Power BI		A*	A
Power BI Dashboards		A	A

M – Manual refresh

A – Both Manual and Automatic Refresh

* only limited data sources

The Right Tool

I started out above by saying that the selection of import tool would depend on circumstances, and that is certainly true. However, based on the capabilities and the restrictions of each, I believe that a few rules of thumb can be derived. As always, these will change over time as technology evolves.

Always use the internal Data Model (PowerPivot) when importing data for analysis.
Power Query is the future – use it wherever possible

All of Microsoft’s energies around ETL and data import are going into Power Query. Power Query is core to Power BI, and announcements at the Ignite Conference indicate that Power Query is being added to both SQL Server Integration Services and to SQL Server Reporting Services. Keep in mind that we have been discussing only the data retrieval side of Power Query – it has a full set of ETL capabilities as well, which should also be considered.
PowerPivot or ODC Connections must be used on premises

PowerPivot for SharePoint does not support Power Query for refresh. This means that you MUST use PowerPivot connections for workbooks with embedded models. If you are already using SSAS, use an ODC connection within Excel.
Power Query or PowerPivot must be used for cloud BI.

PowerPivot connections will work for a few limited cases, but more Power Query support is being added constantly. Where possible, invest in Power Query
If on-premises, consider importing your models into SSAS

SSAS already supports Power Query. If, instead of using PowerPivot for SharePoint, Analysts build their models using Excel and Power Query, they can be “promoted” into SSAS. All that is then required is to connect a new workbook to the SSAS server with an ODC connection for end users. The Power Query workbooks can be used in the cloud, and the SSAS connector in Power BI Dashboard can directly use the SSAS models created.
Choose wisely. Changing the connection type often requires rebuilding the data model, which in many cases is no small feat.

In summary, when importing data into Excel, the preferred destination is the tabular model, and to import data into that model, Power Query is the preferred choice. The only exception to this is on premises deployments. In these environments, consideration should be given to connecting to a SSAS server, and failing that, PowerPivot imports are the best option.

21 Comments

Ignite 2015 Impressions

Published May 12, 2015

I don’t normally do conference summaries, but Ignite was just so big, and there was so much information that I felt the need to record my thoughts around it, and decided to share. Ignite was very much cross product, which is in line with where Microsoft seems to be headed – a focus on the function, not the tooling. With around 24,000 people in attendance, the conference, and the logistical issues that it imposed was too big for my taste, but the amount of information was excellent, and I imagine that I’ll be digesting it for some time to come. For now, here’s how I interpreted it all.

Azure and Office 365

Cloud services are killing it.

Between Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructiure as a Service (IaaS) and Office 365’s Software as a Service (SaaS), Azure Active Directory is already sporting over 450 million active users. Azure Active Directory is what is used by Office 365, and the accounts within are otherwise known as Organizational Accounts. It’s an important metric because I believe that the Microsoft strategy is to own identity online. It makes sense when you look at what they seem to be doing.

For years, they absolutely dominated operating systems. Nothing to this day has ever really touched them on the desktop, but Apple changed the base with mobile, and developers flocked there. Google tried to do the same thing to Apple, and has been quite successful, but not fully so. While Android is in the majority in the mobile space, iOS is still quite strong, and shows no signs of diminishing. Windows isn’t really a factor in mobile, but still dominates the desktop which remains significant (about 300 million units/year), and is a factor on tablets. Microsoft got flanked by Apple and Android, and is holding the fort, but not conquering any new territory.

Microsoft now seems to be focusing on cloud services, and they don’t care what platform is being used to consume them. I think that at the core of this strategy is cloud identity – whether it is consumer (Microsoft Account) or enterprise (Azure Active Directory). With this identity strategy, Microsoft is attempting to again change the base – to outflank both Apple and Google and make the operating system almost irrelevant. Every app they’re putting out now is usually for iOS first, then Android, then Windows Phone. The new Universal app platform likely means that they will come out for Windows (desktop, phone, whatever) at initial launch with iOS, but the bottom line is that an awful lot of effort is going into supporting all platforms all the time. If the apps work well across platforms, then the choice of operating system simply becomes one of personal preference, not of features. It gets marginalized, and Microsoft owns the back end service. That’s why I think that so much effort has gone into this strategy.

Another thing that I sensed at the show was that in the past, all of the talk around identity and federation (ADFS) was about bringing your on-premises identities into the cloud to support a few new services. Now, there seems to have been a real shift, and the reason for adopting ADFS is to bring the Azure Active Directory identities back down on-premises to where legacy applications can use them. It’s a subtle shift, but discernable.

One of the more interesting product introduced into Azure recently is Logic Apps. As far as I can tell, Logic Apps are the cloud manifestation of BizTalk, which is an excellent product with a steep learning curve. Logic apps remove the learning curve and allow you to quickly connect and flow data through multiple systems. The session on logic apps can be seen here:

SharePoint 2016

In the past, SharePoint announcements would warrant their own post, but now SharePoint is probably best seen as part of a greater whole. Details on SharePoint 2016 details were first announced at Ignite, and I feel that the most informative session was Bill Baer’s on Wednesday morning where he outlined the major architectural changes:

Not surprisingly, this release will be very much about hybrid Sharepoint/Office 365 scenarios. Some of the notable items from the talk are:

SharePoint Server 2016 Will require 64 bit Windows Server 2012 or Widows Server 10, and SQL Server 2014 SP1 as a minimum
Standalone installations are no longer supported. It will be possible to install SharePoint and SQL Server on the same machine, but full SQL Server will be required, and SQL Express will no longer be supported. This obviously raises questions about whether or not there will be a free SharePoint Foundation SKU with the next release.
PerformancePoint will in fact be included with SharePoint 2016. I doubt very much that there will be any investments in it at all, but it will at least be there. I’d view this as legacy support.
SharePoint 2016 will support SAML claims as a first class citizen. That means that it will be possible to login with Azure Active Directory credentials, and is an example of bringing cloud identities on prem. However, don’t trash that domain controller just yet, I’m sure that service accounts will still need to be NTLM – SQL Server needs it.
There will be a new Roles Based installation. It will be much simpler to install and maintain servers with specific roles such as web front end, search, etc. BI will be one of the roles.
There will be new boundaries. Content databases up to Terabyte sizes, 10 GB file size limit, list thresholds of much greater than 5000 items (although how much greater was not specified)
No more FIM. The user profile engine that we’ve all grown to….. deal with from SharePoint 2010 and 2013 is no longer embedded. The full Forefront Information Manager can be used, but the default profile import mechanism will be the good ol’ User import from SharePoint 2007.
Durable resource based links. Every object in SharePoint will receive its own resource based URL. That means that it can be moved around in the farm, and reference URLs will still work. This is like permalinks in WordPress.
While not final, a preview was shown of some operational reporting. This is primarily “speeds and feeds” type information that would interest a farm administrator, although simple usage reporting could be seen.
Integration with the Office Graph – see below section on Delve.

SQL Server 2016

The next release of SQL Server was announces at Ignite. Its chock full of new things, focused primarily at hybrid operation and analytics. One of the more interesting concepts in this version is the ability to “stretch” a database into the cloud. With this, you can take an on-premises database, and extend it into Azure SQL, specifying rules to determine which data goes where. Given that online storage is significantly cheaper than on-premises, this makes total sense, and they’ve figured out a way to make it work reliably. The overall SQL Server keynote can be found here:

I’m very interested in the analytics capabilities, and the session outlining the improvements to SQL Server BI is found here:

I found the following items particularly notable:

A comment was made during the BI session that Microsoft is “Super Committed” to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Hopefully this helps quell the naysayers. SSRS is receiving a major facelift in this version, bringing a modern design experience. In addition, the parameters pane has received a great deal of attention, adding, among other things, support for cascaded dropdowns.
Datazen is a visualization company based in Toronto that was recently acquired by Microsoft. There is a good demo of Datazen in the session, and I highly recommend watching it. It will be included with SQL Server 2016.
Datazen has KPIs. It also has “sub-KPIs”. I’m not sure about you, but that sounds a lot like a scorecard to me. This may sound the eventual (see the SharePoint section) death knell for PerformancePoint, given that that’s about all that it uniquely provides to the BI stack.
Tabular models in SSAS (and presumably PowerPivot) will support many-many relationships and a host of other new features.
Tabular models in SSAS and PowerPivot will have time intelligence built in. No longer will separate time intelligence tables be required. It’s an open question however as to how extensible they will be and when.
SharePoint will allow browser editing on PowerPivot embedded workbooks. Currently, you need to launch Excel to edit a PowerPivot embedded workbook.

Office 365 Groups

I attended the roadmap on Office 365 Groups:

(video unavailable as of posting – should be shortly)

During this session, the light really went on for me. Groups was (were? Not sure about the grammar on this…it’s a name) introduced last year and appeared to be a glorified distribution list with Sharepoint artifacts. However, its about to become the center of the Office 365 collaborative experience. It ties together Azure Active Directory objects, a SharePoint site collection, One Note, Skype, and OneDrive into a single cohesive, non-customizable experience. It currently uses Exchange exclusively for social conversations, but full Yammer integration is promised. No date was given for the integration, but my guess is that the target is early 2016.

The current User interface is limited – too limited for my own use at the moment, but during the demonstration, a rather useful interface was shown that is coming soon. You can access groups presently through the Outlook web client in Office 365. I’m running Office 2016 preview on my laptop, and there is a very nice interface contained there. There was chatter, particularly in the Yammer community about confusion as to what tool should be used when, but I think that the coming deep integration of Yammer into Groups will render this point moot’

The next UI, demonstrated in the above session looks really good, and offers a lot of benefits. There is also a mobile app coming very shortly for, you guessed it, iOS and Windows Universal, then Android.

One unanswered question from the show is whether Groups would be available on-premises.

Power BI

Power BI content was sort of sprinkled throughout the conference, without specific focus. There was a session on the new DAX features available in Power BI Designer that is worth a watch from a modeling perspective:

One talk that really impressed me was by Lukasz Pawlowski and Josh Caplan entitled Power BI for Developers:

They cover content packs are mentioned, real time analytics, and an in depth analysis of the “how old” app that went viral during Build.

It was also announced in the SQL BI session that SSRS will in fact be included in Power BI shortly, although little detail was provided. Finally, for development, the best place to get started is http://dev.powerbi.com.

It should also be noted that Power BI was at the center of almost any analytics discussion during the conference. This is by no means a little side project.

Delve/Office Graph

Delve is a newer product in Office 365 that provides insights around what content is relevant in an organization, and how people interact with it. It’s available directly from the app launcher in Office 365, and recently, user profiles have moved to the Delve application. It’s powered by the Office Graph, which in essence an advanced index that contains content from Exchange and SharePoint, and will very shortly, be extensible for multiple content types. The roadmap session for Delve/Graph is available here:

During the session, it was stated that “Delve is the evolution of Enterprise Search”. Given that all of the work on Delve and the Graph is coming from Oslo and the former team from FAST search, this just makes sense. One of the major announcements around SharePoint 2016 was that SharePoint 2016 content can be crawled by the Office Graph to provide both search results and Delve results in Office Graph. The reverse will also be true in that the on-premises crawler will be able to index Office 365 content for search results, but Delve and the Graph will remain in Office 365. The surprise here was that later this year, it will be possible to do the same thing with Sharepoint 2013 through a coming enhancement.

Much of this Graph goodness can also now be accessed through the new Office 365 Universal API:

tyGraph

tyGraph is our product that provides advanced analytics for Yammer. It had something of a coming out party at Ignite, and while we didn’t have a booth or any launch sessions, we were fortunate enough to have several folks, customers and thought leaders present talks that at least in part featured tyGraph. If you’re interested in analytics for your Yammer network, I recommend that you watch some or all of these sessions:

Enterprise Social, from “Ooh, Shiny” to Business Success – Melanie Hohertz, Cargill

The Microsoft Enterprise Social Journey: How We Did It – Chris Slemp, Microsoft

Gain Organizational Insights with Yammer Data Mining and Analytics – Steve Nguyen, Microsoft and Tammy Young Heck, EY

Yammer Mining: Dig in and “Listen” to What Your Big *Social* Data Is Saying – Richard diZerega, Microsoft

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Something Went Wrong When Connecting Power BI to SSAS

Published February 2, 2015

One of the more powerful features in the new Power BI preview is the ability to connect your Power BI dashboard to an on-premises instance of SQL Server Analysis Services. This is done by installing a connector on-premises that connects to bot the SSAS server(s) and to the Power BI service. Installation is straightforward, but quite often the first attempt to connect to the data results in the “oh-so-helpful” error message, “something went wrong”.

The message isn’t very helpful, unless you’re speaking with a support representative.

I have found that the problem in most cases is that the user connecting to the data does not have sufficient rights on the SSAS server, or the server does not understand who the user is. This may very well be the same user that was used to connect from the SSAS Connector back into the service, but that doesn’t matter. The problem is that SSAS does not know about that identity.

To explain, first, we need to consider how the connector is registered.

When the connector is registered, two sets of credentials are provided. One credential is used to connect the connector to the SSAS server. This is an Windows credential (typically in the form of DOMAIN\username, and it must be an Administrator on the SSAS server. The reason for this requirement is that it will be used to funnel all Connector queries to the SSAS server, and it uses the EFFECTIVEUSERNAME feature in SSAS. EFFECTIVEUSERNAME requires admin level access.

The second credential is used to connect the connector to the Power BI service. This one is used to register the connector with the service so that it can be used by dashboard authors, and isn’t extensively used afterward. This credential will be an Organizational Account (i.e. an Office 365 identity/Azure Active Directory) and needs to have enough rights to register a data source with Power BI.

Once registered, it works as follows.

When a dashboard user interacts with the dashboard, or accesses the data source, a request is sent to the connector with the credentials of the user making the request. The connector then establishes a connection with the SSAS server, using the admin credentials registered with the connector, and issues the query using the EFFECTIVEUSERNAME parameter, which basically means “run this query using the provided user’s credentials”. The user provided is the one making the request. This allows for per-user level security for Power BI, but unfortunately, it is what typically causes the error above.

The issue is that SSAS only understands Windows (NTLM and Kerberos) credentials. Without doing anything else, it has no idea what an Organizational ID is. So how can it work at all? There are two ways.

The first, is that your domain can be federated with Azure Active directory, specifically with the Azure Active directory that your Power BI (Office 365) tenant is using. Once federation is complete, your AD domain (domainxxx.com) will be registered and trusted with your internal NTLM/Kerberos domain and your users will be mapped to their Azure ID identities. SSAS will then understand who they are, and if granted permission, they will be able to access SSAS data via the Power BI dashboard. This is the only supported method, and is what should be used in a production environment. There is however another way.

If AD federation is not an option in the short term, or you simply need to get a development or demonstration environment spun up, it is possible to “hack” your active directory to allow SSAS to understand the organizational IDs. First, the AD domain is registered directly with Active directory, then the Active Directory users can be set to use that directory. The key part is that the user name in the internal AD (ie DOMAIN\xxx) must match the user portion of the Azure AD account (ie xxx@domainxxx.com). The entire procedure is outline very well by Greg Galloway in this article, and I won’t repeat it here.

Going back to the original error, it would be nice if it could be a little more descriptive. I’d be happy with “Access Denied”. These are early days, and the product is still in preview – I expect this will change. Security also may not be the only cause of this error, but it’s the only one that I’ve seen thus far.

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The New Power BI – Now With Enterprise!

Published January 28, 2015

Yesterday Microsoft announced the next step in the evolution of Power BI. It’s getting quite a bit of attention, and rightly so for its aim of bringing Business Intelligence closer to users. Democratizing BI has always proved a challenge – it’s the realm of the gurus in the white coats that hold the keys to the data. Microsoft is aiming to accomplish this democratization through a combination of user focus, and as of yesterday, a drastic change in its pricing model. Power BI just went from about $40 per user per month, to free, or $9.99/user/month for advanced capabilities. That’s quite a drop, and arguably the biggest announcement from yesterday – it will have a massive impact. The detailed price breakdown can be found here.

However, all of the focus around personal BI is, in my opinion, missing a key component. Power BI and its components have always focused squarely on both personal and team BI solutions. That is to say the ability for a power user to model data, visualize it quickly and easily and to share it out with fellow team members. While that capability is certainly retained in the new Power BI, this new version contains the first appearance of enterprise grade BI in the cloud for Microsoft.

To fully understand this, it’s necessary to touch on the Microsoft BI stack as it stands today.

Microsoft BI On Premises

The On-Premises BI story from Microsoft may be confusing, and occasionally difficult to understand, but it is very powerful, and relatively complete. In a nutshell, the story is good from a personal, team and enterprise perspective.

On the enterprise side, there are products from both the SQL Server team, and the Office team. Data warehousing is served by SQL Server and ETL duties fall to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Multidimensional analysis storage is served by SQL Server Analysis Services in both OLAP and Tabular modes, and Reporting is performed by SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). The SQL product line doesn’t have much on the client side for analysis apart from SSRS, but this slack is taken up by the analysis tools available in Excel, and through Performance Point services in SharePoint.

Indeed, SharePoint also provides a platform for SSRS via SSRS SharePoint mode, and for Excel based analytical workbooks connected to SQL Server and to SSAS through Excel Services.

On the personal BI side, that role has traditionally fallen to Excel. The pitfalls of importing data into Excel workbooks for analysis are well documented and don’t need to be discussed here, but the bulk of those issues were addressed with the introduction of PowerPivot several years ago. PowerPivot allows for massive amounts of data to be cached within the Excel file for analysis without any data integrity concerns. The addition in recent years of analytic visuals (Power View, Power Map) and ETL capabilities (Power Query) have further rounded out the offering.

Taking that Excel workbook and sharing it brings us into the realm of Team BI. This is to say that the analyses are relatively modest in size, and of interest to a targeted group. These models may not require the rigour or reliability associated with enterprise BI models. Once again, the technology involved here is SharePoint. A user can take a workbook with an embedded PowerPivot model, share it through a SharePoint library, and other users can interact with that embedded model using only a browser. This capability requires PowerPivot for SharePoint, which is really a specialized version of SSAS, along with a SharePoint service application.

One thing to note about these seemingly disparate approaches is that a power user can build a Power Pivot data model with Excel, share it to a team via SharePoint, and when it requires sufficient rigour or management, it can be “upgraded” into SSAS in tabular mode. This common model approach is powerful, and is key to understanding Microsoft’s entire BI strategy. You can also see here that SharePoint straddles the two worlds of team and enterprise BI.

Moving to the cloud

The BI workload is one of the last Microsoft workloads to move to the cloud, and with good reason. Massive amounts of data present problems of scale, and security or data sovereignty concerns tend to keep data on premises. However, there is a very real need to provide BI to users outside of the firewall.

SharePoint is the hub of BI on prem, so it’s logical to assume that with SharePoint Online, it could continue to perform that function in the cloud. The big catch here is that on-prem, SharePoint is simply the display platform. In the enterprise scenario, users connect through SharePoint to the back end servers. This isn’t an option in the cloud, so enterprise BI was left off the table.

With the personal and team BI scenarios, data is cached in a Power Pivot data model, which could be supported in the cloud. When Office 365 moved to the SharePoint 2013 code base for SharePoint online, rudimentary support for embedded Power Pivot models was indeed added. Essentially PowerPivot for SharePoint “light” was added. I call it light for two major reasons. Firstly, data models could be no larger than 10 MB. Secondly, there was no way to update the data contained within the Power Pivot cache, outside of re-uploading the Excel workbook. This is still true without a Power BI license. The inability to refresh the data renders team BI almost useless, except in static data scenarios.

The first generation of Power BI changed all of that. With a Power BI license, it was possible to install a Data Management Gateway on premises that would connect to team BI workbooks in Office 365 and update them on a scheduled basis. Yes, the gateway had many limitations (many of which have been removed over time), but finally, the on-prem refresh story was solved. In addition, the model size limit was increased to 250 MB. However, we were still left with a number of problems or limitations.

Daily data refresh schedule. Automatic data refreshes could be daily at their most frequent. Manual refreshes could be done anytime
Capacity. The maximum size of a data model was increased to 250 MB, which is relatively small for enterprise scenarios. In addition, refreshes aren’t differential, which means that the entire model is re-uploaded on every refresh
Data sensitivity/sovereignty. The refresh problem was solved, but because the data is still cached in the workbooks, there can be reluctance to sending it outside of the corporate firewall
Per User Security – Power Pivot data models have no concept of user security in a workbook (tabular models in SSAS do). Security is at the workbook level
Cost. This initial cost of Power BI was $40 per user per month. A power BI license was required to interact with any workbook that had a data model larger than 10 MB. Considering that a full Office 365 E3 license was around $25 per user per month, this price tended to limit the audience for sharing.

All of this is to say that Power BI in its first (and as yet current) incarnation is suitable for personal and team BI only. There has been no enterprise cloud BI story.

Power BI V2

The announcements yesterday outlined the next generation of Power BI. Going forward, Power BI will be available as a standalone offering, at the price points offered above. Office 365 users will continue to be able to use it from Office 365, but Office 365 will no longer be required to use it. In it’s early days, Power BI was a SharePoint app, but a careful examination of URLs in the current offering quickly reveals that it’s actually two apps currently, both running on Azure (not in SharePoint).

https://sites.powerbi.com/………
https://xxxxxx.admin.powerbi.com/…..

If you’ve signed up for the new Power BI preview, you may notice that the URL is http://app.powerbi.com/…… so this move isn’t a big surprise.

With the new model, Excel is no longer the central container. Users connect to data and publish it directly to Power BI. Behind the scenes, the service is doing a very similar thing as what it does with Power Pivot models – it’s storing them in SSAS. In fact, the same limits still apply – 250 MB per model (at least for now) Excel can still be used, but now it is as a data source.

Visualizations are performed through Power Views, and data is acquired through Power Query. These are no longer add-ons, but available on their own through Power BI Designer. This decoupling is good for those that have not made an investment in SharePoint Online, or Excel.

These changes to the architecture and the cost are great news for adoption, but don’t address the needs of the enterprise. Except for one thing – The SSAS Connector.

One of the data sources available to the new Power BI is the SSAS data connector. This connector is a piece of code that runs on premises (it actually includes the Data Management Gateway). It acts as a bridge between the Power BI service, and an on prem SSAS server.

The biggest distinction worth noting is that with the gateway, data is NOT being uploaded to the service, it remains on prem. The way that it works is that when a user interacts with a visualization from the cloud, a query is sent to the SSAS server through the gateway. That query is run, and its results sent back to the user’s visualization, and the data is not persisted.

In addition, when the query is sent back to the SSAS it is run with the permission of the user making the request. This is accomplished through the EFFECTIVEUSERNAME feature in SSAS. This provides for full user level security, and since tabular models in SSAS can utilize per user security, we no longer need to rely on proxy accounts/document level security.

Finally, because the data is being stored in an on prem SSAS server, it can be refreshed automatically as often as desired. For the same reason, we have no capacity limits – you can grow your own SSAS servers as large as you like.

The SSAS connector removes most of the limitations that prevent cloud based enterprise Business Intelligence, and the new pricing model removes the rest. Certainly there are going to be feature limits in the near term, but it appears to me at least that the back of this thorny problem has finally been cracked.

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This Column Name is not What You Think – Be Careful With Column Names in SharePoint 2013 / Office 365

Published December 18, 2014

I’ve been involved with SharePoint for a very, very long time, since 2001 in fact. One of the basic truths that we old timers learned very early on was that an internal list column name wasn’t necessarily the same as its display name. For the most part, when a column is created, the name is the same, but any subsequent changes to the name only affect the way that it is displayed, and the original name stays the same. In fact, even on creation, if a space is used in the name, when saved, the internal name replaces the space with “_x0020_”. This is why it is a best practice to create all entities using no spaces, and then edit them later adding any desired spaces. It just makes life easier for people working with internal names.

Who works with internal names? Anyone that needs to extend SharePoint really. Any explicit reference to a SharePoint column normally needs its internal name. Given that display names are editable, this makes sense. Because of this, for a long time, I’ve gotten used to being careful about column names when creating them, so that it’s easy to reference them later.

Recently, I ran into a very odd behavioural change with SharePoint 2013 (Also with Office 365). My situation was that we needed to display a rotating banner on a page. I decided to use Marc Anderson’s SPServices to do the heavy lifting. Also, since I’m not that great at JQuery (or Javascript for that matter) I turned to Mark Rackley’s blog, who had an excellent example of an image slider using SPServices.

The way that the slider works is by reading entries from a custom list. This list contains a couple of columns named HTML and Picture. I added a third named DestinationURL to make the image clickable. I created this new list, and then edited it using the “traditional” method of accessing List settings. The HTML and DestinationURL fields were simple text fields, and the Picture field was a Picture column. Once created and populated, everything worked great.

Next up, I had to repeat this on a different site. I couldn’t save the custom list as a template because the destination site was in a different language. I therefore decided to just go ahead and create another list manually, but this time, I added the field with the new SharePoint 2013 “Quick List Editor”. If you haven’t seen it before, it shows up as a “+” symbol when you use it.

You simply click the “+” symbol, choose the column type type the name of your column and keep going. If you choose the “More Column Types…” option, you are presented with the traditional column creation dialog box. I needed to use this for my “Picture” column.

Once complete, everything looked great.

I then went ahead and populated the list with content, and implemented the slider code on the home page. The trouble is that it wouldn’t work. After tearing out my hair a fair bit, it appeared that while the picture column was returning data, the HTML and DestinationURL columns were not. I found this very odd as I had been careful with the names, and this was a new list. Additionally, the Picture type column is more complex. If any column was going to give me grief, I’d think it’d be that one.

Finally, I decided to confirm the column names, because I don’t trust myself. The easiest way to do that is to go into List Settings, hover the mouse over the column definition, and check the destination URL that pops up as it contains “Field=fieldname” in it. I then did so for my HTML field:

What? The fieldname is “vtwo”. Upon checking, the DestinationURL field had an equally random name (“vn1m”). However, the Picture field was “Picture” as expected. How did this happen? Why did it happen to only two columns?

As it turns out, it’s the quick list editor is the culprit. When you add columns using it, it has no mechanism to check your column name against existing columns, so it doesn’t even try – it just forces a random column name. However, when you choose “More Column Types” it loads the traditional column editor, which does have such control, and therefore, my Picture field worked as expected.

After going back, deleting and recreating my two columns (and repopulating the content), everything worked as expected.

Lesson learned – when changing a list schema, stick to the list settings interface. Don’t use the Quick List Editor for adding new columns.

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