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Category: Power BI

Diagnosing DirectQuery Connection Limit Issues

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb goes troubleshooting:

To kick off my series on diagnosing Power BI performance problems with Performance Analyzer in the browser (which I introduced last week with my post on vide-coding a custom visual to visualise Performance Analyzer data), I want to revisit a subject I blogged about two years ago: how hitting the limit on the maximum number of connections to a DirectQuery data source can lead to queries queuing for an available connection and performance problems. In my original post on this topic I showed how you can use the Execution Metrics event in Profiler/Log Analytics/Workspace Monitoring to see when this queuing happens. In this post I will show how you can do exactly the same thing with Performance Analyzer.

Read on to learn how.

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Object-Level Security in Power BI

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Vin Mai Quang lays out an explanation:

For a POC project, my team lead asked me to practice and build a demo Power BI report that applied OLS (Object Level Security). Although it sounded simple at first, I was surprised by how OLS actually behaves in Power BI. In this blog, I would like to share my findings with you.

Click through for a demonstration of how it all works, including how to deal with scenarios in which customers shouldn’t get access to specific columns but should still be able to see others.

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The Year in DAX 2025

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo lays out a list:

This was a big year for DAX, with the public preview that started in September for two new features: user-defined functions (UDFs) and calendar-based time intelligence.

The user-defined functions are the most significant update to the DAX language since 2015, when Microsoft introduced variables. Can you believe that for more than five years we had to write DAX code without variables? Well, the user-defined functions we just mentioned will have an even bigger impact in the long term.

Read on for more information on key additions, new DAX functions, and all of the neat stuff that the SQLBI team put together this year.

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Thoughts on Power BI Pro/PPU to Fabric

Published 2025-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some advice:

Performance is difficult to translate because Power BI Pro/PPU run in a shared capacity, meaning compute resources (v‑cores) are pooled across many tenants and dynamically allocated, whereas Fabric capacities are dedicated, meaning that Microsoft grants specific resources expressed as number of cores and memory. Therefore, Fabric performance is predicable while Pro/PPU might not be, although I’m yet to hear from client complaining about unpredictable performance.

Read on for some high-level thoughts on performance and cost.

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Measuring Promotion Impact in Power BI

Published 2025-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari take us through a scenario:

Marketing campaigns drive sales, but not all sales can be directly attributed to a specific campaign. A customer might see a promotion and later purchase the product without using any discount code or campaign link. How do you measure this broader influence? This article presents data modeling and DAX measures to analyze campaign effectiveness by separating attributed sales (transactions for which we can clearly identify the one campaign that generated the sale) from influenced sales (all sales of products participating in one or more campaigns, regardless of whether the sale can be attributed to one exact campaign). The solution includes several measures using a many-to-many relationship between products and campaigns, combined with dynamic CROSSFILTER manipulation, to provide a complete view of the campaign’s impact.

Read on to see how you can use DAX capabilities to build attribution measures.

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Workspace Identity Authentication in Power BI

Published 2025-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev looks at a new way of authenticating:

What credentials do you use to refresh your Power BI semantic models from Azure SQL SKUs, such as Azure SQL Database. Probably your credentials or a designated Entra account? Both are not ideal for a variety of reasons, including requiring a password. More advanced users might be using service principals, which are more secure but require secret renewal after a maximum of 24 months, which is a hustle.

Read on to learn about a new alternative in workspace identities.

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Accessing Excel Files from OneDrive via Power BI

Published 2025-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Kristyna Ferris is happy:

I can’t believe it’s finally here! A way to have Excel live in OneDrive and access it from Power BI nearly live! We can officially short cut files to our OneLake from both SharePoint and OneDrive! I am super excited about this feature, and I hope you are too. This feature plus User Data Functions allows us to not only have data from Excel in our reports but keep it as fresh as needed. Imagine having budget allocations that you want to adjust right before or during a meeting. Now you can! You can edit a file in Excel and hit one button to see the new numbers in your report. In the past, we relied on 3rd party services or Power Apps licensing to accomplish this sort of experience. Now we can just use Excel, an old data friend.

Kristyna does note that this is in preview, so take it with that caveat in mind and read on to see how it all works.

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Building a Lollypop Visual in Power BI

Published 2025-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk creates a visual:

In this tutorial I want to show a fun little trick in Power BI. We are going to create a lollipop visual. And yes, I am still searching for a strong business case, but it is a very nice visual and the steps you take to build it can help in many other situations.

If you want to show trends without focusing too much on exact numbers, this visual works surprisingly well. And the best part is that you can build it with the standard line chart.

Read on to see how.

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Calendar-Based Time Intelligence and DirectQuery Performance

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb hits the Turbo button on his PC:

Calendar-based time intelligence (see here for the announcement and here for Marco and Alberto’s more in-depth article) is at least the second-most exciting thing to happen in DAX in the last few months: it makes many types of time intelligence calculation much easier to implement. But as far as I know only Reid Havens, in this video, has mentioned the performance impact of using this new feature and that was for Import mode. So I wondered: do these benefits also apply to DirectQuery mode? The answer is on balance yes but it’s not clear-cut.

Click through to see what Chris found.

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Common Star Schema Mistakes

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson gets back to basics:

Sometimes the culprit isn’t actually your DAX, it’s your data model.

Star schema mistakes are incredibly common in Power BI, and really hard to track down.

When your data model isn’t a clean star schema, you end up with broken filters, confusing relationships and slow visuals.

It’s important to get it right from the start! So we broke down the top 10 most common mistakes people make, how to identify them and how to fix them!

This is where reviewing (or reading) Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Toolkit can save you a lot of time and stress. The Microsoft data analytics world is predicated so heavily on Kimball-style dimensional modeling that the choices tend to be building a proper star schema up-front or spend processing and developer time trying to fix it in post-production using DAX or trickery.

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