Category: Power BI

Ruben Van de Voorde lays out an argument:

The PBIP format is an alternative to PBIX for storing the metadata that defines your semantic model and report. It allows more robust workflows and is far more agent-friendly, while the PBIX binary format packs everything into one file.

In this article, we argue that you should use PBIP format by default, deferring to the PBIX format only when PBIP isn’t an option.

Like when you’re using Power BI Report Server because then you’re not allowed to have nice things.

Andy Brownsword’s appeal is becoming more selective:

When developing Power BI models, we don’t always want to refresh the entire dataset before we start working with the data. We can speed up the refresh – and therefore our development – by reducing the volume we’re working with.

Here we’ll look at a couple of ways to use parameters to adapt production-ready models to reduce and tailor data volumes for development.

Click through to see how.

Eugene Meidinger opens up the command line interface:

The Tabular Editor CLI (TE CLI) is a command-line interface that makes it possible to view, query, build, manage, and test semantic models programmatically. This is different from Tabular Editor 2 or 3, which have a graphical user interface (GUI) and buttons that you click to take actions and make changes. In the CLI, you type and submit te <command> like:

• te connect to connect to a model
• te ls to list its contents
• te vertipaq to run the VertiPaq Analyzer
• te add Sales/Revenue -t Measure -i "SUM('Sales'[Amount])" --save to add a measure

You can also execute these commands in a pre-written script. This typically happens in the terminal. A terminal can be a standalone application that you open (like the default Windows or Mac terminals) or embedded in an application like VS Code or Cursor where you can see files in an explorer:

Click through for more info on how it works. Tabular Editor CLI will be free for another two months (as of the time of this post), so it’s a good time to see if this makes sense for your use cases.

Kurt Buhler shares some thoughts:

In a Power BI semantic model you can set freeform text fields for each object (like tables, columns, and measures) to describe what they do, how to use them, or other information. These descriptions are a convenient and structured way to document each object for developers. They’re also helpful for users, since the descriptions (unlike DAX expressions) show when you hover on the object in Power BI Desktop:

Click through to see what Kurt recommends in terms of items that should go into a description, as well as things that do not belong there. Kurt also has some strong ideas around AI-generated descriptions and what makes a description relatively more useful for a person versus a language model.