Continia builds bridge between Databricks and Power BI with Tabular Editor 3

Continia Software is a Danish software company that creates financial management add-ons built directly into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. With its scalable software and local operations across the globe, Continia is trusted by more than 21,000 customers worldwide.

The tools in Continia’s software suite automate and digitize routine accounting tasks within the user’s own ERP interface, including invoice processing, expense tracking, and bank reconciliation.

At Continia, BI enables decision-making. The BI department is a small team, comprised of people working in data engineering, AI/ML, and Power BI. The team supports other departments across the organization with insights into the customer base, product usage, and more, while also overseeing the centrally unified data.

In practice, this means that all their measures, relationships, and hierarchies are defined once in Tabular Editor and pushed out from there. While the data is held in Databricks, and the final reporting and consumption are done in Power BI, the important middle step takes place in Tabular Editor, where the data is shaped into the semantic model that their reporting is based on.

Without Tabular Editor, maintaining their semantic models would either become decentralized, with the BI team maintaining local models, or result in everyone developing directly in SSMS without easy CI/CD processes, ultimately leading to a slower turnaround time for delivering on the organization’s requests.

How Tabular Editor creates value for Continia Software

With the help of Tabular Editor, the BI team at Continia is now able to deliver best-practice models in a cost- and time-effective way while maintaining governance. They use a variety of features within Tabular Editor that, both alone and in combination, make their work with semantic models faster and easier.

Identifying anomalies with Vertipaq Analyzer

A feature the team often uses is the Vertipaq Analyzer. Used to identify anomalies in data refreshes and fixed outliers, the Vertipaq Analyzer enables the team to quickly identify data columns with high cardinality that would otherwise result in a slow and inefficient model. The Vertipaq Analyzer offers this information up front, rather than presenting an error or loading for a long time, as other BI tools do.

Built-in BPA rules ensure high quality

It hasn’t been necessary for the BI team at Continia to define and write their own custom Best Practice Analyzer rules, as the built-in ones within Tabular Editor 3 do the job. The team uses the built-in rules to catch issues such as missing descriptions, bad naming, and hidden foreign keys, without having to define and maintain their own rule set.

Consistency across the organization

Another benefit the team has experienced from utilizing Tabular Editor 3 is the increased consistency across the organization. With Tabular Editor, the analysts working on the model have a shared best practice, and with the help of Tabular Editor’s C# scripting capabilities, the team only has to define the model formats once to ensure that all use the same definitions and methods. This ultimately results in fast and reliable data insights you can trust, and even stakeholders and users within the organization have noticed the faster development cycles.

A tool that sticks