A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Teo Lachev finds three things of note:
I had the privilege to participate in the early preview program of the new TMDL View in Power BI Desktop which is currently in public preview in the latest January release of Power BI Desktop. Without reiterating what was said in the announcement, I’d like to mention three main benefits of this feature:
Click through for those benefits.
Leave a CommentAndy Brownsword works around an issue:
I recently had an issue when sourcing data in Power BI from a server which was accessed by a DNS alias. Here I’ll demonstrate the issue and how to resolve it.
After entering the server details, we could be greeted with the message below:
The server name provided does not match the server name on the SQL Server SSL Certificate. Please contact your administrator or try changing your Connection encryption settings
Click through for a solution if you cannot re-issue the certificate with the relevant DNS alias.
Leave a CommentChris Webb puts the pieces together for us:
For me the biggest new feature in the January 2025 release of Power BI Desktop is the new TMDL View; many other people like Marco are excited about it too. For more advanced Power BI developers (and honestly, I don’t think you need to be that advanced to get value out of it) it makes certain editing tasks for semantic models much simpler, and while I won’t be abandoning the main Power BI Desktop UI completely or stopping using external tools like Tabular Editor it is something I see myself using on a regular basis from now on.
Click through to see one thing you can do with it.
Leave a CommentEugene Meidinger calls out my favorite law of headlines:
If you know Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, then you know the answer is no. But let’s get into it anyway.
Recently there was LinkedIn post that made a bunch of great and valid points but ended on an odd one.
Number one change would be removing Power BI from Fabric completely and doubling down on making it even easier for the average business user, as I have previously covered in some posts.
It’s hard for me to take this as a serious proposal instead of wishful thinking, but I think the author is being serious, so let’s treat it as such.
Read on for a bit of history and why Eugene thinks this is a very bad idea.
Leave a CommentIf you’re using deployment pipelines with Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI you’ll have found that when you deploy your model from one stage to another by default the model still points to the Lakehouse it was originally bound to. So, for example, if you deploy your model from your Development stage to your test stage, the model in the Test stage still points to the Lakehouse in the Development stage. The good news is that you can use the deployment rules feature of deployment pipelines to make sure the model in the Test stage points to a Lakehouse in the Test stage and in this post I’ll show you how.
Click through for the process.
Leave a CommentEugene Meidinger wants you to leave Plato’s cave:
I continue to be really frustrated about the dogmatic approach to Power BI. Best practices become religion, not to be questioned or elaborated on. Only to be followed. And you start to end up with these 10 Power BI modeling commandments:
Click through for those ten, followed by a valuable rant. This one’s a challenge for me because I understand where Eugene is going and agree. But there exists a fairly large subset of the population for whom Power BI (or whatever) isn’t a core part of the job and these people simply want an answer in order to complete a task and move on, not to gain a deeper understanding of the product. And it can be a challenge to differentiate these people from the people who would benefit from the more detailed explanation.
In short, you can drag a man out of Plato’s cave, but you can’t make him think.
Leave a CommentMeagan Longoria performs a switcharoo:
With the PBIR format of Power BI reports, it’s much easier to make report updates outside of Power BI Desktop. One thing you may want to do is to switch out an image in a report. Maybe you need to rebrand a report, updating some of the images (logos and background images). You could import the images or use image URLs with DAX, but that comes with its own problems. If you have some dev ops or automation skills, this becomes pretty easy.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedIn the Power BI service or Microsoft Fabric, you might encounter situations where you can’t download a report or model from a workspace. Depending on your workflow, this could be problematic; for instance, you might need to work further on this file in Power BI Desktop. To do that, you first need to recover a Power BI Desktop (PBIX) file or the newer format, Power BI Projects (PBIP).
Read on for several reasons as to why you might not be able to download the file, and what you can do about it, using the semantic link library and semantic-link-labs.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi shares some data:
This blog series complements a YouTube tutorial I published earlier this month, where I quickly covered the scenario and implementation of shared semantic models in Microsoft Fabric. However, I realised this topic demands a more detailed explanation for those who need a deeper understanding of the processes and considerations involved in one of the most common enterprise-grade BI scenarios.
Read on for part 2 of this series. Soheil also includes a link back to part 1 if you missed it.
Comments closedJon Voege runs into a problem:
A simple comment App embedded in Power BI was supposed to show all the comments in a Sharepoint List which matched the filters set in Power BI. But…. Not all comments were showing up, even though the Sharepoint List only held about 10 comments at the time!
Why you ask? Well, the issue stems from the fact that the table of data being sent from Power BI to Power Apps, the PowerBIIntegration.Data object, has a hard limitation of 1000 rows. And those 1000 rows, is all that we get to work with.
Read on to learn more, as well as a workaround to this issue.
Comments closed