Here are Our Latest Publications

Dashboard in a Blog (or Two) – Part 2

Welcome back! This is part 2 of our Dashboard In a Blog (or Two) series. If you missed part 1, click here [CD1] to catch up and then come back here to continue with part 1.

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Dashboard in a Blog (or Two) – Part 1

If you’ve been watching the Power BI space for some time, I’m sure you’ve seen many offers to go to a seminar or watch a webinar to show you how easy it is to build a “Dashboard in a Day” or even a “Dashboard in an Hour” with Power BI. I’ve seen many of these presentations, and they are fantastic! ...

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Unit Testing: Testing Private Methods

Introduction As part of contemporary application development methodologies, unit testing is employed to automate the testing of a single unit of work. Unfortunately some developers carry the belief that only public methods exposed through an interface, can be tested. This blog will describe a ...

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Data Denormalization Made Easy

Power BI Query Editor Value and Table Columns Data stored as part of a transactional data processing system, for example a database to information on package deliveries, is often difficult to work with when it comes time to explore that data or create reports. This is because of a process called ...

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Power BI Column From Examples

One of the most intriguing features added in April 2017 is the Column From Examples functionality. You can use this feature to have Power BI craft a data transformation for you based examples of what you want the content of the new column to look like.

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Power BI Custom Cache Refresh Schedules

I recently read a post on the Power BI blog about a new enhancement to the scheduled cache refresh process with DirectQuery. The post does a great job of explaining how to implement it, but I wanted to write about why you may want to consider this for your environment.

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Where Does Power BI Fit in Our Data Journey?

Power BI is the newest business intelligence offering from Microsoft. It’s a product that a lot of people have been talking and thinking about for the past year or two, and it is gaining more and more traction every day. I like to refer to it as “The best tool that people don’t realize they should ...

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Microsoft Recognizes Superior Consulting Services’ John Gnazzo as Most Valuable Professional for Second Consecutive Year

Minneapolis – January 17, 2017 – Superior Consulting Services (SCS), a technology firm that combines highly experienced IT professionals with Microsoft products and tools to solve business problems, today announced John F. Gnazzo has been recognized as a Microsoft Visual Studio and Development ...

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Power BI Ad Hoc Grouping

One of the exciting features recently added to Power BI is ad hoc grouping. Released at the end of October 2016 and then improved upon at the end of November 2016, ad hoc grouping allows us to create one or more groups of items while visualizing data, view totals for that group as a whole, and ...

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Back to School Isn’t Just for Kids

SCS Resources for the IT Industry

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SCS uses best-in-class tools to deliver database, reporting and data platform and analytics solutions. We partner with your team to develop custom solutions.

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Make Your MVC Web Applications Beautiful with Google Charts

I recently was asked to develop a dashboard application for tracking the data flow metrics for a large financial firm. Having had no experience developing a ‘dashboard’ application, I began to do some research into how I could do this efficiently and with a minimum amount of effort designing the ...

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Ditch the Decimal Data Type and Use Double in Your C# Code

Introduction Currently there are four (4) native numeric data types in C#, including Integer, Float, Double and Decimal. This blog will discuss why using the Double data type over the Decimal datatype to significantly improve performance with almost no loss in computational accuracy.

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Power BI Connection Types

The most common way to use Power BI is to import the data into Power BI and define the structure of the data model there. In many situations, this is the best way to use Power BI. However, it is not the only way to use Power BI.

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R and Reporting Services

SQL Server 2016 includes R Services and Advanced Analytics Extensions. R Services makes it possible to run R scripts within SQL Server. As a result, R analysis results can be delivered through Report Manager using SQL Server Reporting Services.

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Using Filtered Indexes in SQL Server

There are many types of indexes in SQL Server, but not all of them get a lot of use or get used to their fullest potential. One of the less commonly-used types is a Filtered Index. Available beginning in SQL Server 2008, the filtered index feature is worth understanding, so that you know when it ...

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Programming Against NoSQL Databases

Introduction A NoSQL database defines a type of database that is non-relational. Some advantages of a NoSQL database over Relational databases include:

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Superior Consulting Services’ John Gnazzo Awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award

Minneapolis – January 15, 2016 – Superior Consulting Services (SCS), a technology firm that combines highly experienced IT professionals with Microsoft products and tools to solve business problems, today announced John F. Gnazzo has been recognized as a Microsoft Visual Studio and Development ...

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Quarterly Connection: SCS Newsletter for IT Leaders

Superior Consulting Services provides our valued clients and partners with important IT industry news, insights and perspectives through our e-newsletter — Quarterly Connection.

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Consuming a Web Service in a SSRS Report

I recently worked on a project that used web services to feed information to the SSRS reports that were created for the various business segments at this particular organization. Stemming from that project, this blog post will present how to create a simple web service that returns a serialized ...

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Using String Interpolation to Format Strings in C# 6.0

Introduction Many software applications present formatted data to the user via user interfaces and reports. Often times the code that formats the data is difficult to read and maintain. This blog will briefly touch on a new C# 6.0 feature, String Interpolation, to format string data. In many cases, ...

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Improve Your Performance and Profitability Today

SCS uses best-in-class tools to deliver database, reporting and data platform and analytics solutions. We partner with your team to develop custom solutions.

GET STARTED

Superior Consulting Services is Recognized by TechServe Alliance with “Excellence Award”

Honor recognizes top performing IT & engineering staffing and solutions firms. Burnsville, MN (November 5, 2015) – Superior Consulting Services today announced it has earned the annual Excellence Award from TechServe Alliance. The award recognizes IT & engineering staffing and solutions ...

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Tips for Using Transact-SQL CASE for Key-value Columns

Searching for keys in key-value columns and retrieving values in another table.

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ASP.NET MVC 5 – Passing Data From a View to a Controller

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern separates an application into three main components: the Model, the View and the Controller. The ASP.NET MVC framework provides an alternative to the ASP.NET Web Forms pattern for creating web applications. It is a lightweight, highly-testable ...

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Logging Application Utilization of an ASP.NET MVC 5 Web Application

Introduction During development of an ASP.NET MVC 5 Web application, the customer needs to understand and determine who is using the application and how they were using it. To assess how users are using the application, one would have to instrument the application in such a way as to collect ...

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