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Category: Power BI

Calendar-Based Time Intelligence and DirectQuery Performance

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb hits the Turbo button on his PC:

Calendar-based time intelligence (see here for the announcement and here for Marco and Alberto’s more in-depth article) is at least the second-most exciting thing to happen in DAX in the last few months: it makes many types of time intelligence calculation much easier to implement. But as far as I know only Reid Havens, in this video, has mentioned the performance impact of using this new feature and that was for Import mode. So I wondered: do these benefits also apply to DirectQuery mode? The answer is on balance yes but it’s not clear-cut.

Click through to see what Chris found.

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Common Star Schema Mistakes

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson gets back to basics:

Sometimes the culprit isn’t actually your DAX, it’s your data model.

Star schema mistakes are incredibly common in Power BI, and really hard to track down.

When your data model isn’t a clean star schema, you end up with broken filters, confusing relationships and slow visuals.

It’s important to get it right from the start! So we broke down the top 10 most common mistakes people make, how to identify them and how to fix them!

This is where reviewing (or reading) Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Toolkit can save you a lot of time and stress. The Microsoft data analytics world is predicated so heavily on Kimball-style dimensional modeling that the choices tend to be building a proper star schema up-front or spend processing and developer time trying to fix it in post-production using DAX or trickery.

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Power BI Build Permissions

Published 2025-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb explains what the Build permission actually does:

If there is sensitive data in your Power BI semantic model that you don’t want some users to see then you need to use row-level security or object-level security to control access to that data. You’re an experienced Power BI developer – you know that, right? But what about Build permissions? If an end-user only has access to a report you’ve built and doesn’t have Build permissions on the underlying semantic model, and if there’s no other security on the semantic model, can they access data in the semantic model that isn’t visible in the report? The answer is potentially yes: you can’t rely on Build permissions for security.

I’ve found that the best method of security is never deploying products to begin with. Also, never using a computer.

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Accessing a Former Employee’s Power BI Workspace

Published 2025-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers says it’s MY workspace now:

One of the common challenges I’ve seen in organizations is when a team member leaves and their Power BI reports are stored in their personal My Workspace. These reports often contain valuable datasets and dashboards that are still in use or need to be maintained. So, how do you access and recover these reports?

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the steps to access a former employee’s My Workspace, assign it to a supported capacity, and download the reports using Fabric Studio.

Read on for the instructions, and be sure to do the “Look at me. I am the captain now” meme when it works.

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Power BI Projects and PBIR Format Admin Settings

Published 2025-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck notes a new default:

The Power BI Enhanced Report Format (PBIR) will soon become the default, and that’s a good thing because it significantly makes git integration easier. You can already enable it in the preview features of Power BI Desktop (also enable PBIP and TMDL to make git integration of the model itself much easier).

Read on to see the administrative setting associated with this, as well as reasons why you should keep it on.

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Binding Power BI Thin Reports to a Local Model

Published 2025-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Hansberry cuts the fat:

You may have an issue though where it isn’t in the service and you need to connect your report to a local model on your desktop. This can be useful if you need to do some testing and don’t want to connect it to a model in the service, or you temporarily don’t have access to the service. Let’s see how this works.

What you need:

  • Your thin PBIX report file. You can download this from the service if necessary.
  • Your local model in Power BI Desktop. It must be up and running.
  • Windows File Explorer

Read on for the process and a demonstration.

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Multiple Record Writeback for Translytical Task Flows

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge wants to write multiple records at a time:

Having presented a few sessions on Translytical Task Flows at conferences in the past moths, there is one major recurring question:

How do you write-back multiple records at once?

If you ask me, the questions of bulk write-back/writing back multiple records at once can be understood as two separate user stories, which sound similar, but are technically different:

Click through for those two questions as well as the answer to the first.

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Tying DAX Studio Queries to Workspace Monitoring

Published 2025-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb correlates some data:

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about how you can now link event data from Workspace Monitoring to data in the Fabric Capacity Metrics App using OperationId values. In the latest (3.4.0) release of DAX Studio there’s a new feature that you might have missed that link queries run from there to Workspace Monitoring and the Capacity Metrics App in the same way.

Read on to see how it works.

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Using the OKVIZ Synoptic Panel for Ticket Sales Data

Published 2025-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Victor Rivas visualizes some sales data:

This use case demonstrates the powerful capability of Synoptic Panel to analyze and visualize spatial data at large venues like The Sphere in Las Vegas, which seats 9,205 people. The study addresses the challenge of visualizing over 1 million ticket sales records from 200 events, including concerts and conferences, to gain insights into revenue and average occupancy percentage across different seating categories, sectors, and individual seats.

The objective is to demonstrate how spatial data visualization helps stakeholders understand revenue distribution and audience behavior related to seating arrangements, enabling more informed decision-making.

Click through for the case study. H/T Marco Russo.

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Primary Keys and DAX Query Performance

Published 2025-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Seamark explains why including primary keys in summarize statements can be a bad thing:

When writing DAX queries, performance tuning often comes down to small design decisions that have big consequences. One such decision is whether to include Primary Key columns from Dimension tables in your SUMMARIZECOLUMNS statements. This is particularly important when those Dimension tables use DUAL or IMPORT storage modes.

This article explains why doing so can lead to inefficient query plans. It describes what happens under the hood. It also shows how to avoid this common pitfall.

Read on to learn more.

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