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Category: Power BI

Improving Power Query CSV File Performance with Data Columns

Published 2025-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb makes things go faster:

A few weeks ago I replied to a question on reddit where someone was experiencing extremely slow performance when importing data from a CSV file using Power Query. The original poster worked out the cause of the problem and the solution themselves: they saw that removing all date columns from their query made their Power Query query much faster and that using the Date.FromText function and specifying the date format solved the problem. While I couldn’t reproduce the extreme slowness that was reported I was able to reproduce a performance difference between the two approaches and Curt Hagenlocher of the Power Query team confirmed that this was expected behaviour.

Read on for the example and explanation.

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Retrieving Power BI Licenses in a Tenant

Published 2025-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants to figure out who has licenses:

In this blog post I am going to show you how to get all the Power BI licenses in your tenant.

This can be very useful to understand how many licenses you have, what type of licenses are being paid for, and potentially how you can save by removing licenses due to inactive use or if the licenses are no longer required.

I’m going to be pulling on my previous Blog post where I explained how to get the Entra ID users and groups using a Service Principal for access

Click through for the demonstration.

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Choosing the Right Power BI Canvas

Published 2025-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska shares some advice:

The same goes for your Power BI report—get the size wrong, and your users will struggle with cluttered visuals, excessive scrolling, or awkward gaps. Or worse, you’ll create a report that looks amazing on your screen but completely breaks when someone else opens it.

Trust me, I’ve seen it—an ultrawide masterpiece designed for the boss’s fancy monitor… except no one else at the company had that monitor.

Yeah, this brings back memories, though in my case, it was that the developers (including me) had wide-screen monitors in 1080p and the people using our product had standard resolutions like 1280×1024 or even 1024×768.

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Reducing Query Timeout on DAX and MDX Queries

Published 2025-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shuts it down:

The recent announcement of Surge Protection gives Fabric/Power BI capacity admins a way to restrict the impact of background operations on a capacity, preventing them from causing throttling. However, at the time of writing, Surge Protection does not prevent users that are running expensive DAX or MDX queries – which are interactive operations – from causing problems on your capacity. Indeed, right now, there is no direct way to stop runaway queries from consuming a lot of CUs, although there is something you can do which will help a lot: reducing the query timeout.

Read on for information about why Surge Protection doesn’t currently work with DAX and MDX queries, and how you can change the query timeout. This is kind of interesting considering that, outside of the Microsoft Fabric world, we typically move the query timeout higher rather than lower, to deal with long-running queries.

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Git for the Power BI Developer

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley has a tutorial:

Both Azure DevOps and GitHub are supported Git hosts for Power BI and Fabric workspace integration. I will demonstrate using GitHub rather than Azure DevOps because, it is free for personal use. Getting started with GitHub is quite easy, and anyone can have a free GitHub account. Simply navigate to http://GitHub.com and sign-up for an account. You may create a personal or organizational account, and your personal account can be associated with multiple organizations.

Click through for the process.

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Automatically Refreshing a Power BI Semantic Model after Dataflow Loads

Published 2025-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad refreshes a model:

Although this seems to be a simple thing to do, it is not a function that you can turn on or off. If you have a Dataflow that does the ETL and transforms and prepares the data, then to get the most up-to-date data into the report, you will need to refresh the Power BI semantic model after that, only upon successful refresh of both dataflow and semantic model is when you will have the up-to-date data into the report. Fortunately, in Fabric, this is a straightforward setup. In this article and video, I’ll explain how this is possible.

Click through for the video and the blog post. Granted, this feature is in preview, but using it is pretty straightforward.

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Power BI Embedded and Direct Lake Mode

Published 2025-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Abo Shally announces a new preview feature:

As we step into 2025, we’re excited to announce the preview of Power BI Embedded with Direct Lake Mode, a new feature designed to enhance how developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) provide embedded analytics in their applications. This capability, available in preview starting Q1 2025, leverages the power of Direct Lake Mode to allow an even enhanced performance and experience for embedded analytics.

This probably affects a small audience, though the functionality is good to see.

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Trusted Servers for Power BI TLS Connections

Published 2025-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Andy 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.

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An Example of TMDL View in Action

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris 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.

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