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Category: Power BI

Building a Radar Chart in Power BI with SVG

Stephanie Bruno doesn’t need a built-in radar chart visual:

Radar (or spider) charts are a way to look at multiple metrics, perhaps with a different range of values for each metric, on a single chart. In this example, we’ll look at characteristics of Taylor Swift songs from a Spotify dataset (I have a daughter who still hasn’t forgiven me for not getting tickets to the Eras tour, so hopefully this will make up for it). A matrix with the radar SVG allows us to quickly compare these song characteristics (you can get the dataset and the descriptions of the characteristics here). There are existing radar/spider custom visual charts that are great, but none of them currently have a small multiple option, so we can’t use them to create the visual below, for example.

Click through to see the full example.

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Generating Reports in Azure ML with Copilot

Soheil Bakhshi automates report creation:

In Nov 2023, Microsoft announced Microsoft Fabric’s general availability and Public Preview of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. In a previous post, I explained what Copilot means to Power BI developers, which is valid for other Fabric developers such as data engineers and data scientists as Copilot for Fabric helps with those experiences as well. But the main focus of this blog post is to discuss the requirements, how to enable Copilot, and how to use it from a Power BI development point of view. So, this blog will not discuss other aspects of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. With that, let’s begin.

I haven’t been particularly impressed with the reports it generates, but I suppose this is like the proverbial bear riding a unicycle: it’s not a question of how well it does the task that makes it interesting, but rather that it does it at all.

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Azure Database for MySQL Flex Server and Power BI

Denny Cherry dips a toe into unfamiliar waters:

Recently, I upgraded our core Azure SQL Database for MySQL Single Server to Azure SQL Database for MySQL Flex Server. The migration was pretty straight forward and I simply did an export with mysqldump and then an import with MySQL. The problem came up when I tried to use Power BI (PBI) and connect to to the Azure SQL Database for MySQL Flex Server instead. When I tried to connect PBI to the Flex server I kept getting “The given key was not present in the dictionary”.

Read on to see what Denny did to resolve the issue.

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Computing Accurate Percentages in Power BI with Row-Level Security

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari don’t want to let any information slip out:

Let us start with a simple challenge: we want to show the percentage of sales in Europe, compared to the sales made to all customers worldwide. It is a relatively trivial question, the kind of DAX code you learn at the beginning of your Power BI career, and it can be solved with a simple measure:

But what happens when the model includes security roles? Well, that’s what you’ll have to read on to learn.

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Many-to-Many Power BI Relationships and Table Refreshes

Dany Hoter gives us a reason to minimize use of many-to-many relationships in Power BI:

I must admit that in the last two years I’ve told many Power BI/Kusto customers not to worry about relationships that are created as M:M.

I was pretty sure that with Direct Query, such relationships are fine,

Indeed, the generated queries looked fine and performed as expected.

I recently became aware that the number of queries generated for some visuals e.g. Matrix and tables can be affected by the type of relationships between the participating tables.

Read on for a description of why you shouldn’t load your Power BI semantic models with many-to-many relationships, especially once Kusto is involved.

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A Pattern for DAX Time Intelligence Functions

Allison Kennedy checks the calendar:

Time Intelligence functions in DAX change the filter context on the Date table of your model. 

Step 0: Prepare 

Before using Time Intelligence functions, you should:

Read on for a four-step process covering how to apply a time intelligence function like DATEADD() or DATESYTD() in DAX.

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Power BI Datasets? Semantic Models!

Chris Webb shares some thoughts:

The name change proved to be surprisingly uncontroversial. Of course it’s very disruptive – trust me, I know, I have around 500 blog posts that I need to do a search-and-replace on at some point – so I have a lot of sympathy for people with books or training courses that need updating or who are getting calls from confused end users who are wondering where their datasets have gone. But there was a general consensus that the change was the right thing to do:

Read on for a bit more of the story, as well as some great links to get additional information on semantic modeling.

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Version Control with Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Reza Rad talks version control:

Power BI and Microsoft Fabric use Azure DevOps as the core component for their version and source control. The integration with Azure DevOps and Git helps maintain a copy of the source code and version it. It allows access to it anytime needed, plus the multi-development aspect added. In this article and video, you will learn how this integration works.

Click through for the article and video.

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