Power Query – Part 4

There has been a big push for self service business intelligence tools by Microsoft in recent months. The center of this new universe is Microsoft Excel. I will carry on with talks about Power Query which is a self service ETL add-in for MS Excel. This tool was released in August of 2013. In addition to my blog, the online help is a good place to start learning about this tool. Last time, I demonstrated how the “reduce” section of ribbon has buttons that can refine the number of rows…

Summarizing Data – Part 3

The SELECT reserved word is part of the Data Manipulation Language (DML) defined by Codd and is used to query data from the database. Because of its popularity, there are many clauses and functions that can be used to construct a query to retrieve data. I am continuing our exploration by reviewing SELECT queries that aggregate data. Data aggregation is the process of converting many records into a few records with special meaning. I will be using the Adventure Works 2012 sample database supplied by Microsoft during this talk. I…

Summarizing Data – Part 2

The SELECT reserved word is part of the Data Manipulation Language (DML) defined by Codd and is used to query data from the database. Because of its popularity, there are many clauses and functions that can be used to construct a query to retrieve data. I am continuing our exploration by reviewing SELECT queries that aggregate data. Data aggregation is the process of converting many records into a few records with special meaning. I will be using the Adventure Works 2012 sample database supplied by Microsoft during this talk. Today,…

Summarizing Data – Part 1

The SELECT reserved word is part of the Data Manipulation Language (DML) defined by Codd and is used to query data from the database. Because of its popularity, there are many clauses and functions that can be used to construct a query to retrieve data. Today, I am continuing our exploration by reviewing SELECT queries that aggregate data. Data aggregation is the process of converting many records into a few records with special meaning. Many of the functions used in aggregation have statistical meaning such as minimum value, maximum value,…

Selecting Data – Part 3

The SELECT reserved word is part of the Data Manipulation Language (DML) defined by Codd and is used to query data from the database. Because of its popularity, there are many clauses and functions that can be used to construct a query to retrieve data. Today, I am continuing our exploration by reviewing SELECT queries that aggregate data. Data aggregation is the process of converting many records into a few records with special meaning. Many of the functions used in aggregation have statistical meaning such as minimum value, maximum value,…