Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Power BI

Building Automated Tests in Power BI

Published 2026-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

John Kerski has a use for user-defined functions:

Reuse is a very important term in DataOps. It is defined as the practice of leveraging existing components, code, or processes across multiple projects to reduce redundancy and improve consistency.

However, when it comes to Power BI, reusing DAX measures across projects was a difficult ‘copy and paste’ job. For my teams, we used DAX measures to help with testing our semantic models, but ensuring consistent testing conventions (and standard schemas of the tests) required lots of manual review.

Thankfully, that changed in late 2025 when Microsoft introduced User Defined Functions (UDFs) for Power BI. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to use UDFs for testing, plus how to standardize the way teams test their models.

Click through to see how.

Leave a Comment

Tabular Editor CLI Preview Available

Published 2026-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ruben Van de Voorde makes an announcement:

We are happy to launch the Limited Public Preview of the Tabular Editor CLI, a cross-platform command-line interface that gives humans, AI agents, and CI/CD pipelines headless access to Tabular Editor features. In practice, that means driving Tabular Editor by typing commands instead of clicking through the app. That may sound like extra work for a one-off edit, and it is. The payoff comes when the task repeats: a command is text, so you can save it, version it, and run it again later or unattended, while a click in a dialog does the job once and is gone. Whether you want to script bulk edits across dozens of models, let a coding agent work on your semantic model directly, or automate deployments in your build pipeline: the TE CLI is built for it, on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This will be free until the end of September, after which point you’d need a Tabular Editor 3 license to continue using it.

Leave a Comment

Data Agent Prompt Handling and Semantic Models

Published 2026-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld digs into Microsoft Fabric Data Agents:

What makes Fabric Data Agents particularly interesting is the wide range of supported data sources. Today, Data Agents can connect to nearly everything that lives inside Microsoft Fabric, or data that is linked into Fabric through shortcuts. Whether your data sits in a Lakehouse, Warehouse, KQL Database, Power BI semantic model, or even external storage connected through OneLake shortcuts.

However, the way Data Agents handle sources can differ significantly from one source type to another. Semantic Models in particular behave quite differently compared to other Fabric data sources. In this blog, I’ll dive deeper into how prompt handling works for Semantic Models, what happens behind the scenes, and the common gotchas you’re likely to encounter along the way.

Read on to see how semantic model behavior differs in particular from SQL or DAX queries.

Leave a Comment

DAX UDF Measures vs Calculation Groups for Time Intelligence

Published 2026-05-27 by Kevin Feasel

Bernat Agullo Rosello compares two capabilities:

Ever since DAX UDFs came out as public preview in September 2025, many DAX developers started wondering how they will compare with calculation groups since both have the centralization of code as one of their main selling points. As pointed out in a recent article by SQLBI they are indeed very different beasts, even though they can be used to achieve very similar outputs.

In short, a calculation group is a model-level object whose items swap one DAX expression for another at evaluation time. Once an item is in the filter context, it applies to every measure being evaluated. A DAX UDF is a smaller object: a named, reusable expression with parameters, callable from any measure but invisible to report users.

Read on to see when calculation groups still make sense and when DAX UDFs are the better choice.

Leave a Comment

An Overview of Power BI File Formats

Published 2026-05-26 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad covers a multitude of formats:

Power BI files come in multiple formats. If you have been working with Power BI Desktop for a while, you probably know the PBIX format well. But there are other formats too: PBIT, PBIP, and PBIR. The last two are more recent additions, and there is also a language called TMDL (Tabular Model Definition Language) that comes with its own file type.

In this blog post, I am going to explain the differences between all of these formats, why each one exists, and which one you should use for your scenarios. I will also show you, through a practical demo, what PBIP looks like and how you can use it to make your development process significantly better.

Click through for the video and article.

Leave a Comment

User-Aware Calculated Columns in Power BI

Published 2026-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show off something new:

A calculated column is computed when the table is refreshed and stored in the model (in Import mode), just like any other column, so its value does not depend on the user who is connected. The introduction of user-aware calculated columns in Power BI changes this picture because we can define a calculated column that is evaluated at query time and depends on the user running the query. This behavior can be obtained by setting the Expression Context property of a calculated column to User Context.

Click through to see the benefit of this new functionality.

Leave a Comment

Naming Conventions for Power BI Semantic Models

Published 2026-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Ruben Van de Voorde gets organized:

Naming conventions for your semantic model should be a high priority for any developer. It’s incredibly important not just to ensure your model is organized and professional for developers and users, but also when using AI agents to query or manage it. Without clear naming conventions, people and agents waste time and are more likely to make mistakes.

Click through for a sensible scheme. In the meantime, I’ll provide the joke I normally use around naming. I love naming conventions. In fact, I love them so much, I have five of them and switch interchangeable between them as I develop.

Leave a Comment

Exceeding the Capacity Limit for Power BI Dataset Refreshes

Published 2026-05-18 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb explains an error:

If you have a lot of Power BI semantic models that are scheduled to refresh at the same time in the Service then you may find that some of them fail with the following error:

You’ve exceeded the capacity limit for dataset refreshes. Try again when fewer datasets are being processed.

[Note: “dataset” is the old name for a Power BI semantic model. Someone should update the error message.]

Read on to see what can cause this error and what you can do about it.

Leave a Comment

Creating Better Scatterplots

Published 2026-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Ruben Van de Voorde embraces the second dimension:

Scatterplots are in a weird place in Power BI reports. They’re incredibly good at their core business: showing how two metrics relate across many things, like products, customers, or suppliers.

But they can miss the landing in a few ways. Sometimes the relationship itself matters but the chart asks the reader to do too much inference: “Why should I care about a product’s Gross Margin % vs. Shipping Weight?” Other times, the reader can’t tell what the dots actually are. A reader asking “What does one dot represent?” is the clearest tell, sometimes followed by “Can’t this be a table instead of these dots?”

Click through for musings about scatterplots, their bubble plot cousins, and what’s available in DAX and Power BI to make them work for you.

Comments closed

Semantic Sonar: Canary Testing Power BI Semantic Models

Published 2026-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard has a new tool:

Quarterly sales season always brings the same ritual: a business user opens Power BI, clicks into the sales dashboard, and waits for the numbers to load. It has been a while since anyone looked at this particular report. The numbers look off. Someone hits refresh. The spinner turns, but the data does not budge. The last refresh was weeks ago.

That is when the emails start. “Can you check why the sales model hasn’t updated?” The support thread grows. IT investigates. The answer is usually not in the data. The refresh failed at 3 AM. Or the data source changed its connection string last Tuesday. Or someone revoked the service principal without telling anyone.

By the time the root cause is found, the report has been open in meetings for hours, and the numbers have been wrong for days.

Read on for a free tool that can prevent this sort of issue.

I think the biggest IT super-power is the ability consistently to troubleshoot a problem from limited information. The second-biggest super-power is the ability to discover issues before the people who rely on your services do. Then you get them fixed and they have no idea there was even a potential problem.

Comments closed