Category: Power BI

Teo Lachev digs into a preview feature:

Microsoft announced a public preview of Power BI Dataset scale-out (DSO) for Power Premium, Premium per User (PPU), and Power BI Embedded. In the comments below the announcement, the article implies that this feature is a replacement for the Azure Analysis Services scale-out. “If you have an AAS scale out and you migrate your databases (aka models aka datasets aka cubes) to Power BI Premium, you get scale out automatically and at no extra cost.” Scaling out for free? Sure, where do I sign?

But then further down the comments, we have this clarification “[Power BI DSO happens] if a dataset is on peak load and the vcores of your capacity aren’t maxed out. Keep in mind that scalability on a single instance isn’t linear. By scaling out, we can achieve a better utilization of available CPU resources for high workloads. On the other hand, if your vcores are already maxed out, then scaling out brings no further perf benefit.” Confused? So was I, and I reached for clarification to Microsoft. Below, is my best understanding of what happens behind the scenes.

Click through for the answer.

Reza Rad brings order to things:

The question I often get in my Power BI architecture consulting sessions is; “How should we organize our workspaces? should we have one workspace with all the reports in it? Or multiple? Should we split it based on each report? Business unit? or something else?” In this article and video, I’ll explain a guide on how to organize and set up workspaces in your organization.

Click through for a video and a helpful article.

Chris Webb breaks the limits:

My recent post on passing any value to a Power BI dynamic M parameter from a report generated quite a lot of interest but only among people who use DirectQuery mode and who want more flexibility when filtering. In this post, however, I’ll show you an application for this technique that is useful for anyone, regardless of whether they are using DirectQuery mode or Import mode, and which is nothing to do with filtering.

You’re probably familiar with Power BI’s what-if parameter feature which allows end users to pass values into calculations. It’s great but it has one big limitation: all the values that can be used need to be hard-coded in a calculated table at design time. What if (haha) you could let your users enter the values they wanted to use in the report instead? Let’s see a simple example of how to do this.

There’s a little bit of trickery but this solves a problem that I’ve had with What-If scenarios for a while: by asking the question, you naturally invite additional scenario ideas and people want to try them out right then and there.

Imke Feldmann performs a balancing act:

This article presents a method to automatically plug or balance your balance sheet in Power BI. You can use it if your bookkeeping system doesn’t contain the Profit and Loss (PnL) bookings yet. Or for planning or financial modelling purposes when your calculated balance sheet figures don’t add up.

Click through for the example, which pertains to including a current year profit/loss on the reporting breakdown.