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Category: Power BI

A Primer on TMDL Security Risks in Power BI

Published 2025-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

John Kerski gives us the low-down:

The Tabular Model Definition Language (TMDL) provides a simpler way of defining Power BI Semantic Models. Unlike the JSON-based Tabular Model Scripting Language (TMSL), TMDL uses a more accessible tab-based format for specifying DAX measures, relationships, and Power Query code.

Click through for the various ways things could go wrong, as well as how to mitigate those risks.

Mind you, “security risks” is a very broad concept and is not an indictment of the product, but rather something to keep in mind as you attempt to write secure code. For example, did you know that bad guys could potentially access all of your data in your database by using a series of SELECT statements?

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Creating a Day-Level Slicer in Power BI

Published 2025-08-12 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson knows what day it is:

Whether you’re tracking daily sales, monitoring customer behaviour, or managing service operations:

Day-level slicers in Power BI give you the precision your reports need.

Power BI offers great flexibility for filtering by year, quarter, or month.

But when daily trends drive your decisions, default settings just aren’t enough.

Read on to see how you can take the normal slicer and make it a bit better for working with dates. And, of course, it also makes sense to have a date dimension to help out with these sorts of things.

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Moving Items around in Power BI

Published 2025-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad sends this item to the back of the line:

When you have multiple items overlapping, you often need the feature to bring one forward or move it backward. In Power BI, this feature isn’t available by right-click. Instead, there is a Selection pane where you can easily set the order of elements. The selection pane also has other benefits. In this article and video, you will learn how to use the Selection pane to build the right order for your visuals.

Read on to see how it works.

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Grouping and Binning in Power BI

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad pulls an older post out of the archives:

The latest update of Power BI Desktop (October 2016) has many features. Two of these features are grouping and binning. These features used to create groups of items and visualize them better in the report. Previously you could do that by Power Query or DAX calculated columns, now it is all possible simply through the graphical user interface of report editor. In this post I’ll show you how to create banding (binning) and grouping simply with these features. If you like to learn more about Power BI; read the Power BI online book from Rookie to Rock Star.

How long has Curated SQL been around? Long enough that I covered this the first time. But hey, it’s still valid information.

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Data Dictionaries in Power BI

Published 2025-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson builds a dictionary:

Have you ever opened a Power BI report and felt overwhelmed by all the columns, measures, and tables?

It can feel like a guessing game trying to figure out what each field represents.

A well-built data dictionary eliminates that confusion, giving you clarity and confidence when exploring reports.

This is one of those bits of documentation that can be incredibly useful but people rarely keep it up to date.

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What-If Analysis in Power BI

Published 2025-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson takes us through a what-if analysis:

What If Analysis is a modelling technique used to evaluate different outcomes by changing key input variables.

In Power BI, it uses What If parameters and dynamic DAX measures that recalculate outputs based on user input. Users can ask questions like:

  • “What if sales increase by 10%?”
  • “What if production costs drop by 5%?”

The parameters are created in the Modelling tab, where you define value ranges. Power BI automatically generates a slicer and a measure, which can then be used in DAX calculations to dynamically adjust metrics like revenue, cost, or profit.

Read on to see how it works, understanding that you have to provide the formulas for behavior. In other words, if your what-if parameter is around the unit price of some product, there is no built-in concept of price elasticity for the product. That’s something you’d have to implement yourself.

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Storytelling with Time Series Scatter Charts in Power BI

Published 2025-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad takes us through data changes:

Column or Bar chart can be easily used for showing a single measure’s insight across a category. Mixed charts such as Line and Column chart can be used for showing two measure and comparing their values across a set of categories. However there are some charts that can be used to show values of three measures, such as Scatter Chart. Scatter chart not only shows values of three measure across different categories, it also has a special Play axis that helps you to tell the story behind the data. In this post you’ll learn how easy is to visualize something with Scatter chart and tell a story with that. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read Power BI online book; from Rookie to Rock Star.

Read on for the blog post as well as a video version.

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Power BI Performance Load Testing in VS Code

Published 2025-07-30 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wraps up a series on Power BI performance load testing:

This is the final part of my blog series for Power BI Performance testing, where I will finally run the Power BI Performance Load testing using Visual Studio Code.

In this blog post I will show you how I set up the test, run the test and view the outputs from the performance testing.

Read on for that, as well as links to the prior posts if you’re missing them.

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Building out a PBIReport.json File for Power BI Performance Load Testing

Published 2025-07-23 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers continues a series on Power BI performance load testing:

I am going to be using Visual Studio Code to edit the PBIReport.JSON.

It is free to download and use, it works on any device.

And most importantly it will also show you errors in the JSON file. This can help when there are potential issues.

For the test I will be putting in the following details below into the PBIReport.JSON

Click through for the process, which is fairly complex all things considered.

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Goodbye, Default Semantic Models

Published 2025-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Pradeep Srikakolapu makes an announcement:

Microsoft Fabric is officially sunsetting Default Semantic Models. This change is part of our ongoing efforts to simplify and improve the manageability, deployment, and governance of Fabric items such as warehouse, lakehouse, SQL database, and mirrored databases.

This is definitely a good thing. The idea of a default semantic model wasn’t bad, especially early on in Microsoft Fabric’s development life. But those default models almost never had enough information to do what customers actually want, so they would sit there as a distraction.

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