Peter Nicholson

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Hi there! My name is Peter Nicholson and Im pleased that you've stumbled across my corner of the internet. I am a big fan of data and number crunching and have loved the idea of running my own blog where I can publish my work into the world. I'm not expecting any people to find my corner of the internet, but if you do I hope you find something useful or interesting here. Peter Nicholson is an independent publication launched in July 2022 by Peter Nicholson. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows Peter Nicholson to continue to exist. Thank you! Source

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Scope International
Language English
Country United Kingdom
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Nobody models the Fabric bill until it lands

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
Every Fabric pricing guide you read in 2026 lands on the same advice: pick the right F-SKU, mind the F64 threshold where Pro licences fold into the capacity, take the reservation discount once your workloads settle. It's all correct, and it's all about the day you buy. Almost none of it is about the eleven months afterwards, which is where the money actually goes. The thing Fabric changed isn't really the price. It's the shape.
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Semantic model sprawl is a symptom, not the disease

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
There's a good piece doing the rounds on semantic model sprawl - the familiar enterprise pattern where report-first development quietly breeds dozens, then hundreds, of overlapping Power BI models. The advice is sound: thin reports over thick ones, certification tiers, separate model and report workspaces. I'd sign off on all of it. But I want to push on the framing, because counting models misses what's actually gone wrong.
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Keeping your ERP upgrades boring

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
"We'll just take the new version when it comes." I hear it from growing businesses all the time, and the instinct behind it is a good one. Cloud ERP isn't the on-premise software of fifteen years ago - updates arrive on a predictable cadence, the vendor does the heavy lifting, and most of the time it does just work. The trouble is the word "just". It's carrying more weight than it looks...
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What to extract before you replace your ERP

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
When you replace an ERP, you're ending a ten-year conversation between people and software. That conversation is messy, half-finished, and full of workarounds nobody ever wrote down. When the new system arrives, the conversation does not get to carry on - it has to be either restated, or abandoned. The single most common mistake at this point is treating the legacy ERP as a database to be copied across. It isn't.
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The semantic model finally has its moment

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
Eighteen months ago I presented a talk called "Why a Semantic Model is the LLM's Best Data Source." It wasn't a contentious position in the room I gave it in (the room was a community of Power BI developers who already had skin in the game), but it was contentious outside the room. The dominant noise at the time was vector embeddings, RAG architectures, and the idea that you could point a language model at a heap of documents and pull useful answers out the other end.
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How to Choose an ERP: Where Do You Even Start?

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
Choosing the wrong ERP is one of the most expensive mistakes a business can make. A company sits through a slick demo, falls for the system that looks great, signs the deal, and spends the next few years regretting it. And here's the part worth sitting with: it's usually not because the software was bad. It's because they never worked out what they actually needed first.
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The budget dashboard I promised you three years ago

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
In November 2021, I wrote a post about leaving YNAB. Near the end of it I made two promises: that I'd write properly about Buckets once I'd settled on it, and that I'd "branch into Power BI" to keep the historical analysis I was nervous about losing when I left. I kept neither promise. For five years. This is me keeping the second one. It just isn't in Power BI. What I was actually afraid of losing The thing that made me hesitate about leaving YNAB wasn't the budgeting.
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Four apps and a Mac Mini under the stairs

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
I have a Mac Mini that runs 24/7. It's called stoa — after the Stoa Poikile, the painted porch in Athens where Zeno taught, which is either a nice bit of Stoic branding or evidence I think about this too much. It started life as an experiment in always-on AI agents. Most of that got torn down. What survived, and what I keep actually opening, is humbler: four small apps for running a household, and a page to launch them from. What's actually running A dashboard over my own budget.
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Upgrade or Migrate? How to Tell Which Your ERP Project Really Is

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
Every ERP project ends up at the same fork in the road. Upgrade what you have, or migrate to something new. Most teams pick badly — not because they pick the wrong vendor, but because they never define the terms. They treat upgrade and migrate as the same kind of project at different scales, when in fact they're different operating models entirely. This is the framing episode for our mini-series on the upgrade vs migrate question.
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5 Conditions for a 6-Month ERP Implementation

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By Peter Nicholson
| Peter Nicholson
The conversation usually goes like this. Leadership has been handed a deadline they don't like, they want it shorter, and they ask the partner: can we do this in six months? The partner says yes, the project starts, and twelve months later everyone is wondering what happened. The honest answer is that a six-month ERP implementation is absolutely possible. But it's not a compressed twelve-month project.
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