New Row – My journey through Business Intelligence and Database Administration

From SQL to Python: A BI Engineer’s Certification Adventure

September 23, 2025 admin Comments 0 Comment

Disclaimer This article was created based on my personal notes with support from Microsoft Copilot. While Copilot assisted in structuring and refining the content, all technical details have been carefully reviewed and developed by me. Yep, the title image has a typo…thanks to the creativity of Copilot…life is sometimes imperfection 😜. Thanks for the photo to Jason Leung on Unsplash . After six months of steady learning—roughly 30 minutes a day, almost every workday—I’m proud to say I’ve officially earned…

Read More Read More

Setting Up a Local Power BI Report Server Demo Environment

September 14, 2025 admin Comments 0 Comment

Disclaimer This article was created based on my personal notes with support from Microsoft Copilot. While Copilot assisted in structuring and refining the content, all technical details have been carefully reviewed and developed by me. So, I’ve got a talk coming up about Power BI Report Server, and naturally, I needed a local test environment to play around with. I figured I’d document the setup here—not just for my own future reference, but maybe it’ll help someone else out there…

Read More Read More

Exploring Many-to-Many Modeling Between Fact and Dimension in Power BI: What I Learned

August 7, 2025 admin Comments 2 comments

Disclaimer This article was drafted with the help of Copilot (AI) – so if it is unusually well structured or my English sounds unusually polished, that’s probably why 😊. I’m not a DAX expert (yet), and the DAX code used here was generated by Copilot too. It worked well for testing, but I’d recommend reviewing it thoroughly before using it in production. The test reflects my specific use case – a many-to-many relationship between a fact and a dimension table. Your scenario might differ,…

Read More Read More

SVG Filters and more SVG crazy stuff at Workout Wednesday 2024_30

July 31, 2024 admin Comments 0 Comment

A new week comes with a new excercise of Workout Wednesday by Kerry Kolosko: Now SVG Filters. Here are my learnings from this excercise. Grab my solution PBIX here, in case you are interested. This exercise was somewhat exotic to me…not only that I have just learnt about Deneb now we are doing visuals as SVG…so it shortly ocurred to me : “Why on earth are the Power BI core visuals not enough?”I am really skeptical if I would go…

Read More Read More

(Failed) Remake of a Tableau Segmented Bar Chart

July 17, 2024 admin Comments 0 Comment

I tried to do the Workout Wednesday Exercise of week 29 but oh boy…this was far to difficult for me.Here’s the PBIX of the failed solution and finally the PBIX of the follow-along-successful solution 😉. Failed approach Data prep and DAX measures I thought were straightforward. I ended up creating a measure for sales for each year and a measure for total sales…sure there are more elegant ways to have this more generic and not have to create a measure…

Read More Read More

Scatter plot showing the path of selected data points

July 11, 2024 admin Comments 0 Comment

Another week with Workout Wednesday: This is my take on the exercise for week 27/2024 which is about scatter plots with paths. The challenge is from Bernat Agullo and uses interesting open data from the website Gapminder. I found it very helpful that Bernat provided a written step-by-step guide and I later discovered his video as well. You can download my solution here. So let’s delve in the new things from my perspective. Join Data in Power Query We start…

Read More Read More

Theme Sentiment Colours with Power BI

July 4, 2024 admin Comments 0 Comment

WoW 2024_26 Today I worked on my first submission to Workout Wednesday. Okay it’s technically Thursday here in Germany but more important I managed to do the whole thing. I chose week 26 which is about Reference Theme Sentiment Colors in DAX and practiced how to design a dashboard in a way where color scheme changes are reflected automatically in the formatting of the visual. I would like to share my personal learnings in a short bullet point list. This…

Read More Read More

Getting Schema Spy to run on databases with lots of tables

September 21, 2023 admin Comments 0 Comment

The other day I ran into issues with Schema Spy pointing it to a database with 1.200 tables for the first time. The problem The error output was the following: Writing/diagramming detailsINFO – Completed summary in 277 seconds INFO – Writing/diagramming details .Exception in thread “main” java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException at java.base/jdk.internal.reflect.DirectMethodHandleAccessor.invoke(DirectMethodHandleAccessor.java:119) at java.base/java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:578) at org.springframework.boot.loader.MainMethodRunner.run(MainMethodRunner.java:48) at org.springframework.boot.loader.Launcher.launch(Launcher.java:87) at org.springframework.boot.loader.Launcher.launch(Launcher.java:51) at org.springframework.boot.loader.JarLauncher.main(JarLauncher.java:52) Caused by: org.schemaspy.output.diagram.RenderException: Failed to generate Table diagram at org.schemaspy.output.diagram.TableDiagram.generateTableDiagram(TableDiagram.java:24) at org.schemaspy.output.html.mustache.diagrams.MustacheTableDiagramFactory.generateRealTableDiagrams(MustacheTableDiagramFactory.java:93) at org.schemaspy.output.html.mustache.diagrams.MustacheTableDiagramFactory.generateTableDiagrams(MustacheTableDiagramFactory.java:57) at org.schemaspy.SchemaAnalyzer.generateHtmlDoc(SchemaAnalyzer.java:488) at org.schemaspy.SchemaAnalyzer.analyze(SchemaAnalyzer.java:289) at org.schemaspy.SchemaAnalyzer.analyze(SchemaAnalyzer.java:135) at…

Read More Read More

Testing SQL Server 2022 QAT Backup Compression Software Mode on AMD

September 19, 2023 admin Comments 2 comments

For me as a DBA one of the interesting new features in SQL Server 2022 is the support for Intel QAT compression with backups with compression algorithm QAT Deflate. Backup and Restore are bread and butter things for us DBAs. Unfortunately as time goes by and database size increases backup processes tend to run longer and longer. As these are small changes over longer time frames it typically is difficult to observe till you wake up one morning….production is not…

Read More Read More

Extended Properties on Stereoids: Document multiple properties easily with Data Dictionary Creator

September 9, 2023 admin Comments 0 Comment

Meet Extended Properties Microsoft introduced Extended Properties in order to document SQL Server Objects. Take a close look…there’s a plural “s” at the end. This allows great flexibility for you to come up with your own extended properties. But there’s a downside to documenting your custom properties: It is time consuming. You would either have to script them all…which is a bit clumsy with all this levelxtype and levelxname. Alternatively set out on a journey with clicking through a lot…

Read More Read More