Category: Power BI

Marc Lelijveld violates Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

Recently, I run into a case where we wanted to combine Direct Query sources with imported data. Well, this functionality is actually called composite models nowadays.

Having that said, let me start with managing some expectations for this post. The title says composite models, but I have to admit, it is not about the to be released composite models feature where you can combine multiple Power BI datasets. Instead of that, it is about combining Direct Query and Import mode in one single dataset.

In this blogpost I will describe more about my use case, why I considered to use some sources on Direct Query, how this combines with Row Level Security and Query Folding.

Read on for the test.

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Gerhard Brueckl shows us how to work with semi-additive and non-additive measures in Power BI:

In one of my recent projects we wanted to visualize data from the customers analytical platform based on Azure Databricks in Power BI. The connection between those two tools works pretty flawless which I also described in my previous post but the challenge was the use-case and the calculations. We wanted to display the distinct customers across various aggregations levels over a billion rows fact table. We came up with different potential solutions all having their pros and cons:

1. load all data into Power BI (import mode) and do the aggregations there

2. use Power BI with direct query and let the back-end do the heavy lifting

3. load only necessary pre-aggregated data into Power BI (import mode)

Please keep in mind that we are dealing with a distinct count measure here. Semi- and Non-additive measure like this cannot easily be aggregated from lower levels to higher levels without having all the detail data available!

Read on for Gerhard’s thoughts on each as well as the decision and process.

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Patrick LeBlanc shows us how to incorporate images into Power BI data sets:

Are you curious about how images can be used in Power BI? Patrick looks at some different ways to incorporate images into your data model and Power BI Report!

Click through for a video. All of the techniques here use an image URL which gets pulled in rather than storing the binaries in Power BI itself.

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Ed Hansberry shows how to deal with renaming columns whose names regularly change:

The easiest way to rename a column in Power Query is to do it the same way you do in Excel – just double-click it and rename it. Sometimes though the column you are renaming can have different names with each refresh, so this method won’t work. We can use a List in Power Query to make this dynamic. Consider this very simple example:

You receive this file every day, and the column name starting in Row 6, Column B, constantly changes. We are going to extract that date and make it a column, as it should be, and then rename both columns regardless of what they are called.

Read on for the process.

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Erik Svensen answers a question:

The last few month I have used CDS a few times in my solutions – and connected the data to PowerBI.

But one of the things I always search for is the Server URL

Read on for the answer.

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Chris Webb shows off a method for handling multi-select using dynamic M parameters:

Even though the documentation for dynamic M parameters does mention how to handle multi-select in the M code for your Power Query queries, I thought it would be useful to provide a detailed example of how to do this and explain what happens behind the scenes when you use multi-select.

Click through for that explanation and example.

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Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows us a neat way to check that the Format String Expression for a calculation group works:

Currently the only way to create and or edit the Format String Expression is in Tabular Editor. Whilst I love Tabular Editor it does not have any DAX Intellisense.

I kept on editing the Format String Expression and I honestly must have had to edit it 4 times and it still was wrong.

Below is a quick tip on what I did to make sure my Format String Expression was valid and would indeed work!

Read on to see how.

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