A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Reza Rad offers up some advice:
The Lakehouse or Warehouse comes with a default Power BI Sematic model, which can be used for reporting and analytics. However, you can also build and use a customized semantic model. There are significant differences when using the semantic model in real-world analytics projects. In this article, I’ll explain the difference between these two, which one is recommended, and why.
Click through for the video, as well as the article.
Comments closedNikola Ilic shows how to set up field parameters in Power BI:
To be honest, I can’t remember that one Power BI feature caused so much hype as the Fields parameter, even though it was introduced exactly 2 years ago (May 2022)! I firmly believe that the Fields parameter is one of the things that will forever change the way we are building user experience in Power BI.
One important disclaimer before we jump into the action: Field params is still a preview feature. That means, don’t be surprised if you open Power BI Desktop and you don’t see an option to use Field params. You first need to enable this feature under Options & Settings -> Options -> Preview features.
Read on to see how you can use field parameters to make reports more dynamic.
Comments closedKurt Buhler comes up with a good rule:
Effective reports and dashboards should enable users to quickly answer their data questions so that they can focus on their primary business tasks and responsibilities. To help you design effective reports, we introduce the 3-30-300 rule for information design. The 3-30-300 rule is a straightforward and practical approach for you to produce efficient report layouts by structuring reports in a functionally hierarchical way. This rule concisely paraphrases the visual information-seeking mantra from Ben Schneidermann (1996). To make it easier to understand for Power BI developers, we express this rule with respect to approximately how long it should take users to get certain information or perform certain tasks in a report.
It’s a clever mnemonic and Kurt does a good job of showing how you could implement it.
Comments closedChris Webb is overdrawn at the memory bank:
Continuing my series on Power BI model memory errors (see part 1 and part 2), in this post I will look at the Command Memory Limit which restricts the amount of memory that XMLA commands like Create, Alter and most importantly Refresh and can use.
If you’ve ever been told that your semantic model should consume less than half the amount of memory available to it because memory consumption can double during a full refresh, then that is because of the Command Memory Limit.
Read on to learn more about the Command Memory Limit and why this advice exists.
Comments closedGerhard Brueckl moves fast and doesn’t break things:
Due to the great feedback I have received for the first version of my VSCode extension to mange Power BI objects from within VSCode I decided to continue working on it and am finally happy to share that I am releasing a new version – v2.0!
If you already had the previous version installed in VSCode, you do not have to do anything as it will update automatically. If you are a new user, you can install it from the gallery or search for “Power BI Studio” in the VSCode extensions tab.
Click through for the list of updates, as well as how you can install the Visual Studio Code extension.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld digs into partition refreshing:
I’ve heard the question pretty often from customers: “You told me to use incremental refresh, but how can I regularly run a full load or refresh onder partitions?” Well, there are perfect ways to do this using Tabular Editor or SQL Server Management Studio. But this often includes manual work to trigger the processing.
Today, this question was asked again to me. I thought, there should be a smarter way to do this. Since I recently explored more in the wonderful world of Fabric Notebooks and Python, decided to dive a bit deeper in this world and see if it is possible to script something like this using Semantic Link. And obviously, the answer is “Yes!”
Read on to learn how to do it with a bit of Python and Microsoft Fabric’s Semantic Link library (sempy).
Comments closedNikola Ilic looks at Power Query templates:
In this “ocean” of innovations, there are certain features that don’t get the deserved limelight – as they somehow go under the radar. Some of them, I really consider “hidden gems” – you might not use them in each and every solution, but in some scenarios, they can be of immense help.
A hidden gem that I’m introducing today is called Power Query Template. As of today, this feature is still in preview (the same as many others in Microsoft Fabric), but this doesn’t minimize its potential.
Read on to see why Nikola likes capability this so much.
Comments closedChris Webb gives Internet sleuths something to chew on:
The ever-vigilant folks on the internet have spotted that there’s a new M function in the latest versions of Power BI and Excel: Module.Versions. This function, at the time of writing, returns a record with a single field in that contains the version number of the Power Query engine currently in use.
Click through for an example of calling the function and what it returns as of right now.
Comments closedThe Synthelize blog performs a compare-and-contrast:
In this article we will compare the two main ways to manipulate data in Power BI – Power Query and DAX (Data Analysis Expressions). Along the way we will look at the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and give suggestions on how to make the most of each method.
Click through for the comparison. H/T Toby Basalla.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld tries out a feature:
It has been roughly two years since the last update on the Power BI Model Documenter, an external tool that I developed to auto-document Power BI Semantic Models. Back then, we still called it datasets though. Looking at the stats of my website, the model documenter and related posts/pages are still most read on my website – every month again.
As the technology has kept on improving, there are new options that will help you to kick-start generating documentation about your semantic model. In this post, I will elaborate on how you can use AI in Power BI to enrich your Model Documenter output, by helping you describing the measures you’ve added to your semantic model.
Read on for a demonstration, as well as what the auto-generated results get right and wrong.
Comments closed