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Category: Power BI

Building a Simple Date Table in Power BI

Published 2020-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo has a simple method for building a date dimension in Power BI:

With the recent introduction of custom format strings in Power BI, we can use a different approach that no longer requires additional columns, and that can also remove the need to use the Sort by Column feature. The basic idea is that we always store a date for a period like Year, Month, or Week. The custom format string displays the text we want to see in the user interface; however, because the underlying data is a number we automatically get the right sort order and the ability to use the Continuous Type in the X-Axis of a line chart.

Read the whole thing.

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Managing Power BI Administrators

Published 2020-09-29 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates has some guidance for us:

The Power BI administrator role is a high-privilege role which should be carefully managed. As with many aspects of administration and governance, this involves having a balance between people being able to get things done and risk of when too many people having elevated permissions.

Click through for the blog post as well as a video.

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Problems with Power BI’s Publish to Web

Published 2020-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Saxton explains when you might not want to use the Publish to Web option in Power BI:

Some don’t realize that Power BI Publish to Web is not secure. Adam shows you that this is the case. It’s a bit scary and there are other options to have secure embedding.

For demos and other resources which are supposed to be accessible to everybody, Publish to Web works great. But if you’re deploying company dashboards, not so much.

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Power BI Premium Per-User Licensing

Published 2020-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

John White has some thoughts on a big announcement at Ignite:

The new Premium per user (PPU) license promises to solve this problem. Premium per user will be a new license that will include all of the capabilities of the Pro license, but will also include almost all of the features available in Premium. It will NOT include unlimited sharing. Users with this license will be able to publish content to a PPU workspace, and that content can be consumed by other users that have a PPU license.

The next question is of course going to be “great, so how much is it?”. Therein lies the rub.

This is why I’m interested, but not yet excited. I’d expect it to be more than $10 per user per month, as otherwise nobody would get a Pro SKU. But where, exactly, it lands above that is the key question. The number $50 per user per month comes to mind—the idea being that you save money up to 100 users, after which point it makes sense to switch to the fixed-price licensing. We’ll see what the real number looks like once they announce it.

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Connecting to Azure Databricks from Power BI

Published 2020-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl walks us through the Power BI connector to Azure Databricks:

I work a lot with Azure Databricks and a topic that always comes up is reporting on top of the data that is processed with Databricks. Even though notebooks offer some great ways to visualize data for analysts and power users, it is usually not the kind of report the top-management would expect. For those scenarios, you still need to use a proper reporting tool, which usually is Power BI when you are already using Azure and other Microsoft tools.

So, I am very happy that there is finally an official connector in PowerBI to access data from Azure Databricks! Previously you had to use the generic Spark connector (docs) which was rather difficult to configure and did only support authentication using a Databricks Personal Access Token.

Click through to see how it works.

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Refreshing a Power BI Dataflow without Refreshing Downstream Dataflows

Published 2020-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche wants to limit the refresh zone of influence:

The email included a screen shot from the lineage view of a Power BI workspace, some context about working to troubleshoot a problem, and the question “We want to refresh this dataflow, and not have it refresh the downstream dataflows. Is this possible?”

I almost said no, and then I remembered this post and realized the answer was “yes, sort of.”

Click through to see how it all fits together. And I’m in favor of buying Matthew a sword—can’t have too many of those.

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Space Savings from Separate Date and Time Columns in Power BI

Published 2020-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson runs an experiment:

As you may have already heard, one of the easiest ways to reduce a Power BI model (dataset) size is by splitting DateTime columns into separate Date and Time columns but the question is how much space reduction can you achieve by doing so. As I show in this blog post, the reduction can be significant and up to % 80 or % 90 depending on the number and cardinality of the datetime columns.

That’s a lot of savings.

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Power BI Report Performance: Number of Visuals on a Page Edition

Published 2020-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb looks at some extreme scenarios:

You may have read the title of this post and guessed that I’m going to talk about reducing the number of visuals that display data from your dataset as a way of improving performance, but that’s not the case. In this blog post I want to show how visuals that do not display any data from your dataset can have a significant impact on report performance. Before we carry on I suggest you read the series of posts I wrote late last year on measuring the performance of reports in the browser using Chrome/Edge DevTools (part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here) because I’ll be using techniques described in these posts in my testing.

Click through for an interesting demo.

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Connecting to an API with Username and Password in Power Query

Published 2020-09-18 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers has a challenge:

In the blog post I am going to show you the steps that I took to get data from the XE.COM API which uses a username and password to log into the API

You might be thinking that I could put in the username and password when I used the Web Connector.

My challenge is that I wanted to create a function that I could pass through multiple currencies to the API. And in order to do that I wanted to store the details within the function.

Read on to see how Gilbert solves this.

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