A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Have you ever wondered why analytics projects fail? There are hundreds of organizations, thousands of BI teams, and countless consulting companies building analytics solutions every year. Yet a large number of those projects never deliver what they promised.
Why does that keep happening?
Read on for a summary of Reza’s decades of experience.
Leave a CommentChris Webb continues a series from a few years ago:
This is a very late addition to the series of posts I wrote back in 2024 and which started here on Power BI memory errors. It’s about a very rare error that is hard to deal with and often temporary but since people do run into it from time to time I decided to write about it so there is some useful information available about it online.
The error, which can occur when you refresh a semantic model or render a report, has two associated error messages:
Click through to see those two error messages, as well as a simplified version of the root cause and what you can do.
Leave a CommentRuben Van de Voorde hits an endpoint:
Most Power BI developers have come across “XMLA endpoint” somewhere: a tenant setting, a Microsoft Learn page, or a tool’s connection dialog. The term sounds technical, and it is, but the idea behind it is straightforward.
Your semantic model is a database. Like any database, it lives somewhere: on your laptop while you’re authoring it in Power BI Desktop, or in a workspace once you’ve published it to the Power BI Service or Fabric. To use a database with anything other than the application that hosts it, you need a connection. The XMLA endpoint is that connection.
This article walks through what the XMLA endpoint is, where it comes from, how to turn it on, what you can do with it once you have it, and where the alternatives (the Power BI REST API, Semantic Link, and the Fabric REST API) fit in.
Click through for Ruben’s article, which does a good job of demystifying the endpoint.
Leave a CommentValerie Junk pretties up a visual:
Many Power BI developers view tables and matrix visuals as the enemy. They dislike building them, and often think, “the user is just going to export this to Excel anyway.”
But here’s the thing: tables and matrix visuals have an important business case, and sometimes a well-structured table communicates data far better than any chart would.There’s also something we don’t talk about enough: trust. BI developers often assume users trust our data, but that’s rarely true. Many users have been burned before by incorrect data or unreliable tools. Providing a matrix visual for row-by-row verification is a powerful way to rebuild trust.
That said, a matrix visual that looks like default Power BI formatting isn’t doing you any favors.
And they’re probably going to export it to Excel anyhow. Them’s the breaks.
Leave a CommentMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari provide a deeper answer:
A very common request by Power BI newbies is, “How can I use a slicer to filter a measure rather than a regular model column?” The most common answer to this question is, “You cannot filter a measure through a slicer”. The answer is entirely correct because there is no such thing as “filtering a measure”. However, elaborating on the why gives us a good way to explain not only what is wrong with the question, but also how to further reason about the requirements needed to obtain a working solution.
This blog post is an example of how challenging it can be to answer a beginner’s question, where the immediate answer is “No, you can’t do that” but the underlying problem is solvable.
Leave a CommentDid you know that you can configure your Power BI semantic model so that it automatically binds to a data source connection when you publish?
To illustrate how to do this, I created an Import mode Power BI semantic model in Power BI Desktop connected to the Products table in the ContosoSales sample database in the Azure Data Explorer help cluster. Anyone can connect to this source, you just need a Microsoft Account to authenticate.
Click through for the code and some additional tips.
Leave a CommentNicky van Vroenhoven gives the standard consulting answer:
I think I have gotten this question at least five or six times in the last few months, and with Translytical Task Flows reaching GA in the March 2026 Power BI update, I expect it to come up even more. So let me write it down once and for all.
The question usually sounds something like: “We want users to be able to add comments or update values in their Power BI report. Should we use Power Apps or this new Translytical Task Flows thing?”
My honest answer is: it depends 😆, but the decision is simpler than you might think.
Click through for the decision criteria.
Leave a CommentComing back from a long vacation, I’ve almost missed this interesting Power BI enhancement: Power BI unmaterialized calculated columns. Normally, I avoid the traditional DAX calculated columns for a variety of reasons, such as confusion about where business logic is applied, limited support across storage modes (for example, Direct Lake doesn’t support them), longer refresh times, etc. This not to say that calculated columns can’t be useful, such as in the case where you need to flatten a parent-child hierarchy. But unmaterialized calculated columns could open interesting scenarios that go beyond content translation to other languages mentioned by Microsoft in the April 2026 update.
Click through to learn what unmaterialized columns are and how they work.
Leave a CommentNikola Ilic digs into a new feature:
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a session at FabCon Atlanta. It was an amazing session about Direct Lake semantic models and various optimization tips and tricks, delivered by true masters, Christian Wade and Phil Seamark (both from Microsoft). Among many fantastic topics, the one that immediately caught my attention was the new feature that Christian Wade introduced: User-context-aware calculated columns.
Although we all know that DAX calculated columns are the “last island” in what are considered recommended data modeling practices (“Roche’s Maxim”, etc.), this one still stood out for me as something that might be super useful in certain scenarios.
Read on to see how it works and scenarios in which it could be useful.
Comments closedChris Webb tells us don’t panic:
Since March 2026, Power BI semantic models have started showing warnings in their Refresh History in the Service. This has scared a few people but in fact all that is happening is that errors which were there all along and which don’t prevent refreshes from completing are now being flagged. Documentation on this feature can be found here but let’s see an example of the type of errors that can cause these warnings.
Click through for that example.
Comments closed