Category: Power BI

Gilbert Quevauvilliers has a follow-up from a post:

Following on from my successful blog post How you can incrementally refresh any Power BI data source (This example is a CSV File), I found a way where I can just use dates created in Power Query to get data refreshing incrementally.

Full credit goes to Rafael Mendonç who actually figured this out. All that I have done is to translate what Rafael Mendonça did in his PBIX and put it into steps that you can follow along with.

https://www.rafaelmendonca.com/2020/06/incremental-powerbi-csv-api-excel-odbc.html

In this blog post I am going to demonstrate how to get this working with what I hope is very easy to follow.

Read on for the process.

Imke Feldmann shows how we can match specific patterns in Power Query, which lacks regular expresssions:

I plan to approach this by

1. stepping through the string and check each character if it is valid.
2. If so, store it
3. and if not, forget it. And in that case, also forget the stored values so far so the collection starts from scratch.
4. Then if a series of matches builds up, I will have to check the count of the stored values to not exceed the length of my target pattern.
5. Once the length is reached, no further checks shall be performed and the found values be returned.

My aim is to find a generic way so that this solution can be adapted to many other similar use cases as well. Therefore the pattern must be described in a scalable way and the identification of the pattern elements should be easy to compute.

It’s good to be able to adapt, improvise, and overcome, though this is exactly what regular expressions are intended to do. It’s odd that there appears to be no built-in capability, where instead you’d have to do something like bring in external languages like JavaScript.

David Eldersveld lays out a few differences between Tableau and Power BI’s data models:

Prior to 2020.2, Tableau had a physical data model that allowed joins between tables. This layer is still present, and it is similar to Power BI’s merge capability within Power Query to join multiple tables into a single table.

With the introduction of the logical model in Tableau 2020.2, a single logical table may consist of one or more physical tables. Two or more logical tables may be related to each other. This approach shares many similarities with Microsoft’s tabular model, but there are currently some core differences that may impact how you approach data modeling in one tool versus another. It’s not always going to be a straightforward scenario to apply knowledge of how to build a data model in one product to building it in the other.

NOTE: This post considers some core differences between Tableau and Power BI modeling as of June 2020. It does not go into detail on announced roadmap features such as Power BI’s enhanced composite models coming later in 2020, which will allow scenarios like combining a “live connection” composite model with additional data sources, or even multiple live connection models.

Read on for four differences David has found.