It is very common to use CONCATENATE function in excel to generate the SQL statements for small set of data to be loaded from excel files. But when date fields are involved, the concatenate function fails unless the date column is converted to TEXT first.

sample :

if A1 has date and B1 has a integer number, below ways shows excel serial number

A1: 01/01/2000

B1: 1

=Concatenate(“select ‘”, A1, “‘,'”, B1, “‘”)

output:select ‘36526’,’1′  –> Incorrect

=CONCATENATE(“select ‘”, TEXT(J5, “YYYY-MM-DD”), “‘,'”, K5, “‘”)

output:select ‘2000-01-01′,’1’ –> Correct

Power BI has seen so many iterations probably no other enterprise MSBI product has seen.

Power BI Stage 1

• Power Pivot Excel 2010 add-on
• Power View in SQL Server 2012/SharePoint 2010
• Power Query add-on for Excel 2010

Power BI Stage 2

• Excel 2013 – Power Pivot, Power Query, and Power View (as well as the new Power Map) are all integrated
• ETL the data using power query
• Model in Power Pivot
• Visualize in Power View

Power BI Stage 3

• Then a cloud based version without having the SQL or SharePoint licenses, using o365
  Q&A
• Natural language processing
• oData feed to query on premise environments

Issues:
1) Still had issues with multiple editions of o365
2) Usage of silverlight which had browser compatibility and mobile rendering issues
3) Cannot add calculated measures without going back to the power pivot model

Power BI Stage 4

• Dedicated power BI site created with no hassle of o365 editions
• Easily accessible and cheaper
• Standalone power BI designer (It has Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View)
• The file is created in pbix format and can be uploaded straight to power BI site.
• HTML5
• ios app for power BI
• Power view interface allows addition of new fields using DAX
• Reports and dashboards have different interface (like other visualization tools like tableau & qlikview)
• Dedicated feedback forum for additional features (wow not another connect link)

Issues:
1) Data refresh is limited to excel which uses power query or tabular model but no direct refresh from SQL Server or Cubes or other RDBMS
2) Limited Q&A Support
3) No export options at all (export to PDF ranks top as user feedback as of today)
4) No tooltips on hover

But since the development on power BI is much more agile than other products (may be like SSRS) we can potentially expect most of feedback might go into product development quite quickly.

Here are few ways  to enable remote errors in SSRS.

(Even though web.config is available in the reporting services folder on the server where SSRS is installed, it doesnt have an option to enable remote errors)

Native Mode :

• open SSMS, connect to the reporting services, mention the servername. Then right click the properties and look for advanced option at the end of all options and make enableremoteerrors as true.

• Connect to the DB engine from SSMS, enter the servername and use below query :

[cc lang=”sql”]

use [ReportServer]
go

update [ConfigurationInfo]
set value = ‘True’
where name = ‘EnableRemoteErrors’

select * from [dbo].[ConfigurationInfo]
where name = ‘EnableRemoteErrors’

[/cc]

Then restart the reporting services service for the changes to effect.

• Import the EnableRemoteErrors.txt file
• rename to EnableRemoteErrors.rss and copy to a temp folder
• Navigate to the temp folder and issue below command

rs -i EnableRemoteErrors.rss -s http://servername/ReportServer

All of a sudden my workstation stopped complaining of this error.

Try to login with admin credentials as a first step (if you are NOT local admin on the system)

Solution is 3 steps:

1) Check if config.ini exists in the folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation). If it does not exist, create a file called as config.ini in the same above folder.

If it already exists add the line

vmmon.disableHostParameters = "TRUE"

2) Now copy the modified config.ini file to the %appdata%\vmware path

3) Reboot the system and launch VMWare workstation again.

If you are trying to use MySQL migration toolkit and unable to install the MySQL odbc connector because of error 1918 as below, use below steps.

1) Install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=14632

2) Re-install the MySQL ODBC Driver