Category: Power BI

Benni de Jagere does some digging:

The other day, I was chatting with one of my clients about Premium Per User, and I gave them the practical guidance to not build any production level dependencies based on PPU features or workspaces, until some of the unknowns have been cleared up. If there’s end users relying on this for their actual daily job, then I’m calling it a production level dependency. Right now, these are preview features, and this client is not actively monitoring changes in the Power BI Landscape.

Shortly after, I got a message that some of their business users did build actual production reports and dataflows in PPU workspaces. And, they were not sure who in the company actually has access to PPU. And that’s where chase down the rabbit hole began

I imagine that this will get easier over time but right now, it doesn’t seem that simple.

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Chris Webb troubleshoots an issue:

Some time ago I wrote a pair of popular posts about using the Query and RelativePath options of the Web.Contents function in Power Query and why they are important for dataset refresh. I have recently learned something extra about this subject which merits a new post, though: how to handle multiple URL query parameters with the same name.

It’s interesting to see how Power Query handles this, as there’s no defined standard behavior. Some renderers give you just the first item, some just the last, and some (like IIS + .NET) give you back a list of all items when you have a query string like ?param1=x&param1=y&param1=z.

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Paul Turley continues a series on relationship modeling in Power BI:

So far, you’ve seen that the essential components of a data model include tables related to each other. Filtering records in one table prorogates the filter to related tables(s), causing records in the related table to be filtered. This dimensional model schema is the foundation of the reporting solution. Once the fact and dimension tables are in-place, you can create more advanced solutions by working outside of this standard relationship pattern.

Read on for the full story.

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Chris Webb answers a timeless question:

One question I get asked all the time is this:

Why don’t you add [insert feature idea here] to Power BI?

It’s sometimes followed up by one or more of the following comments:

It would be so easy for you to do
I can’t believe you haven’t done it already
Power BI is unusable without it
[insert competitor name here] has had this feature for years

…and a real or virtual exasperated sigh.

Read on for the answer. This isn’t special to Power BI or even Microsoft—once you start to have customers with competing interests, these decisions get a lot harder.

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Wolfgang Strasser explains the notion of chaining when working with Power BI datasets:

In my last blog post I introduced the new concept of DirectQuery for Power BI datasets. This feature allows you to extend and modify a (remote) published Power BI dataset with the help of a local model.

The local model does not contain a copy of the remote dataset but a reference to it. You, as Power BI developer, are able to extend the referenced model with new data sources (like the Excel file I used in my previous example) and/or extend the model with new measures, columns and so on. For a new data model, relationships between the two data islands can be created.

Read on for examples of how this can be useful and what the current limitations look like.

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