The Dashboard Effect

Brick and Caleb discuss the importance of data modeling and good DAX in Power BI, highlighting common mistakes that can lead to poor report performance. For fast and efficient reporting, you need a sound data model that contains the right level of detail, dimensions, and relationships, avoids snowf...

(This episode is a re-release, but the content is still just as relevant as it was the first time around!) Brick and Caleb discuss the complexities of building an in-house BI department. In addition to sharing their firsthand experience and insight from years of supporting mid-market companies, the...

Brick and guest co-host Greg Brown explore the dynamic between leading and lagging indicators in BI reporting. They share challenges and strategies for integrating these metrics to enhance operational efficiency and financial performance. Greg shares anecdotes from his operations background to emph...

This week, Brick and Caleb get a bit technical and discuss how to improve Power BI report performance through effective semantic modeling and minimizing data transformation with Power BI. They unpack the challenges of managing data transformations directly within Power BI and highlight the advantag...

Brick and Caleb explore the balance between empowering analysts with data access and the governance required to prevent data sprawl and maintain integrity and consistency across reports. They provide strategies for enabling departments to independently use data for their own insights and how to use...

In a continuation of their AI-readiness discussion, Brick and Caleb outline the importance of the human element in preparing for generative AI analytics. They share strategies for ensuring that your company's culture is ready to harness the power of AI, from how to start improving data literac...

Brick and Caleb explore the steps businesses must take to prepare their data for the inevitable integration of generative AI analytics. They use this episode to explain the "why" behind data consolidation and semantic layers.  What you'll learn: Why consolidating your data is the fir...

This episode is the third installment of Brick and Caleb's series on breaking down data terminology. They cover foreign and primary keys, data lakes and data lakehouses, parquet and delta parquet files, ETL and ELT, and data pipelines, before concluding with Python, PySpark, and visualizations...

This episode is the third installment of Brick and Caleb's series on breaking down data terminology. They cover foreign and primary keys, data lakes and data lakehouses, parquet and delta parquet files, ETL and ELT, and data pipelines, before concluding with Python, PySpark, and visualizations...

This episode is the second installment of Brick and Caleb's series on breaking down data terminology. They cover Kimball data warehouse methodology, fact/dimensional tables, star vs. snowflake schemas, and data models vs. semantic layers. Click here to watch this episode on our YouTube channel...

This episode is the first installment in a series of episodes that will serve as a primer on the key terms and technologies surrounding data management. Brick and Caleb begin with the fundamental differences between transactional and analytical databases, explaining concepts like OLAP, OLTP, normal...

In this episode, Caleb and Kate discuss important KPIs for the manufacturing industry. While there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, they outline and provide insight on the leading and lagging KPIs that have helped our midmarket manufacturing clients improve sales operations, inventory management...

Brick and Caleb discuss Blue Margin's use of Azure Data Lake for unified data management. Using a recent client project as an example, Caleb explains how he integrated multiple data sources using serverless SQL to create a single data repository with a semantic model to enhance consistency acr...

In this episode, Brick and Caleb explain the distinctions of and interdependencies between data setup/data pipelines, data modeling, and reporting, emphasizing their individual roles within an effective approach to data analytics and BI.  Starting by explaining the necessity of a solid data pipelin...

Brick and Caleb explain how Blue Margin is using ChatGPT for generating synthetic data to populate data models in Power BI reports. Caleb shares his insights on how this approach has streamlined the process of creating sample reports with fake, yet realistic data, to demonstrate work without compro...