A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Arun Sirpal shows how to connect your Databricks cluster to Power BI:
A very common approach is to query data straight from Databricks via Power BI. For this you need Databricks token and the JDBC address URL. This is found within Account settings of the cluster.
Read on to see how to get this token and how to connect to Databricks using it.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi reminds me of DB/2:
So, here is my scenario. I received about 10 files, including 15 tables. Some tables are quite small, so I didn’t bother. But some of them are really wide like having between 150 to 208 columns. Nice!
Looking at the column names, they cannot be more difficult to read than they are, and I have multiple tables like that. So I have to rename those columns to something more readable, more on this side of the story later.
Fortunately, there’s a way to fix this; click through for that way.
Comments closedEach product in Contoso weighs a certain weight. The weight is stored in two columns: the unit of measure and the actual weight, expressed in that unit of measure. Specifically, Contoso uses three units of measure: ounces, pounds, and grams.
Because the units of measure are different, you cannot aggregate the weight over different products. If you author a simple measure that computes the ordered weight of products by using a simple SUMX, the result is wrong:
Click through to see how you can work through this problem.
Comments closedMatt Allington is back from the future:
The ability to apply custom format strings directly inside the Power BI Desktop report view was first announced back in February 2020. At the time I was quite excited and tweeted about it only to find out shortly thereafter that it hadn’t been released at all! It seems it was a release candidate that was pulled at the last minute, but no one updated the announcement! Then late last week I was doing some work in Power BI desktop and noticed that this feature has now been released and is working (I don’t recall seeing a new announcement at all).
Below I show you how to use custom formatting strings in Power BI.
Click through to see how it works, as well as a couple gotchas.
Comments closedPhil Seamark takes us through creating external tools in Power BI:
For this article, I want to share a way for you to create your own Power BI “Helper Tool” and register it as an external tool in Power BI. This article carries on from some of my recent articles on how you can use Visual Studio Code to help automate specific tasks by taking advantage of the existing Analysis Services client libraries.
In my role, I often connect to AS models (Power BI or Azure AS) and often want to perform specific tasks quickly. The helper tool I share here allows you to connect easily to an AS model and then perform helpful tasks. I’ve deliberately kept the look and feel of the tool to be ‘old school’ like me.
Click through for the step-by-step instructions.
Comments closedIn my recent open data project, I created a single page report model with a sparse slicer. It’s a good trick for anyone who wants to make their slicer look a bit sleeker. Like any other visual in Power BI, Slicers also have many properties. By default, below is how slicer looks in Power BI, but I made few changes to make it look like the one on left, in a few steps.
Click through for the video.
Comments closedPaul Turley continues a discussion on Power BI data model validation:
We often have users of a business intelligence solution tell us that they have found a discrepancy between the numbers in a Power BI report and a report produced by their line-of-business (LOB) system, which they believe to be the correct information.
Using the LOB reports as a data source for Power BI is usually not ideal because at best, we would only reproduce the same results in a different report. We typically connect to raw data sources and transform that detail data, along with other data sources with historical information to analyze trends, comparisons and ratios to produce more insightful reports.
However, if the LOB reports are really the north star for data validation, these can provide an effective means to certify that a BI semantic model and analytic reports are correct and reliable.
Click through for more details.
Comments closedJoseph Yeates looks at some of the new additions to Power BI:
It seems like I cover updated functionality to the Q&A feature every month now! This month, it is the ability to do arithmetic in the visual!
Below, I added together two recognized terms to have the sum displayed. I didn’t need to create a DAX measure to achieve this, it is all done within the visual.
Click through for more.
Comments closedI know that some of this might be able to be done with other calculation groups. I find I have more flexibility when combining Calculation Groups with a disconnected table.
Below are some of my previous calculation group blog posts that might also be of interest:
Click through for the demo.
Comments closedMartin Schoombee gets off the beaten path:
We’ve only used the PowerShell cmdlets for Power BI so far in this series, but things are about to get interesting because there aren’t cmdlets available for everything you might want to do. One such thing is updating parameters, and we’re going to use the Power BI REST API (which the cmdlets use underneath the covers anyways) to achieve that.
REST APIs are usually a little tricky to deal with, especially the process of authentication. Fortunately there is an Invoke-PowerBIRestMethod cmdlet that makes it possible to use the API in PowerShell without the need to deal with some of the underlying complexities.
Read on to see how the whole process works.
Comments closed