Patrick LeBlanc has a video for us:
Are you not sure if you are hitting your Power BI Aggregations? Patrick shows you some tools you can use to verify if they are being used.
Click through for the video.
Comments closedCategory: Power BI
Why is this important? When you’re tuning the performance of a Power BI report the first thing to do is to look at the performance of the individual DAX queries run and make them run as fast as possible. However when a Power BI report is rendered any one query is likely to be run at the same time as several other queries run for the same report, and this will have an impact on its performance. How much of an impact there is will depend on how many queries need to be run and the number of back-end v-cores available on your Premium capacity, or the number of QPUs available on your Azure Analysis Services instance if you’re using a Live connection to AAS. The more v-cores/QPUs you have available, the more of the work needed for a query that can be run in parallel; you can see a table listing the number of v-cores for each Premium SKU here, and the number of QPUs for each Azure Analysis Services SKU here. As a result of this if you have reports with a large number of visuals that generate slow DAX queries, scaling up your Power BI Premium capacity or AAS instance may improve overall report performance. Reducing the number of visuals on your report and/or reducing the number of visuals needed to display the same information will also reduce the number of queries that need to be run and therefore improve overall performance.
Read on for the demo.
Comments closedRyan Wade shows us how to use a pre-built sentiment analysis model with Power BI:
As of this writing, there are two pre-trained models available: one for sentiment analysis and another for image classification. This example focuses on sentiment analysis.
Both of these installations are freely available to the on-prem version of SQL Server 2017 and later. For more information on how to install these on your instance, reference this article for SQL Server Machine Learning Services and this article for pre-trained models.
Click through for step-by-step instructions.
Comments closedJames Serra takes us through different ways to secure your Power BI dashboards and reports:
Row-Level Security: With Row-level security (RLS) you are given the ability to publish a single report to your users but expose the data differently to each person. So instead of creating multiple copies of the same report in order to limit the data, you can just create one report that will only show the data the logged in user is allowed to see. This is done with filters, which restrict data access at the row level, and you define filters within roles. For example, creating a role called “United States” that filters the data in a table where the Region = “United States”. You then add members (user, security group, or distribution list) who can only see data for the United States to the “United States” role (the assignment of members can only be done within the Power BI Service). If a user should not have access to a report, then just don’t include that person in any of the roles for that report, so they would always see a blank report.
Click through for several more options and links to additional resources.
Comments closedReza Rad has fun with dynamic binning in Power BI:
In the previous article/video, I explained how to create dynamic bins by choosing the count of bins in a slicer in the Power BI report. In this article, I’ll explain, how you can do it the other way around, which is by selecting the size of the bin, you will have bins and buckets dynamically generated.
I like this for its ability to let you select the proper number and size of bins when Power BI is being particularly obstinate about something. In an ideal world, I don’t like this so much as a user-facing feature because we as designers should know the proper number and size of bins.
Comments closedDavid Eldersveld shows how to create a custom Power BI button:
Power BI buttons provide more interactivity in reports, and different states allow unique formatting when users interact with a button. What are the visual icons available when using buttons in Power BI, and is it possible to extend them?
Read on for an example.
Comments closedMarco Russo takes us through some tips when performing currency conversions using Power BI:
The rule of thumb is to apply the currency exchange conversion upfront. Therefore, it is a good idea to solve all the scenarios requiring a single currency in the report by converting all amounts at the time of data import into the data model. When you need to create a report in multiple currencies, computing data in advance could be challenging and expensive. Therefore, a dynamic solution based on DAX measures and a properly designed data model makes more sense.
In this article, we only consider the third scenario, “Data in a single currency, report with multiple currencies”. The second scenario could be implemented by transforming data so that it is imported in the model in a single currency, moving the challenge over to the very scenario we describe in this article. An extended description of the three scenarios with other dynamic solutions is included in a chapter of the Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel book.
This is quite a useful article if you work with multiple currencies.
Comments closedReza Rad shows how to build a Cartesian product using Power Query:
Sometimes, you need to create a multiplication of all sets of all pairs from two different data tables in Power BI. This action is different from Merge (Join) because there is no matching key columns and no way to relate the two tables together. However, you want to create a multiplication as a flatten table. If this process is needed to be done in Power Query, then there is a simple trick to do it, In this article, I’ll explain how you can do it.
Read on for that trick.
Comments closedReza Rad shows how you can get a distinct count in Power Query:
You can have a distinct count calculation in multiple places in Power BI, through DAX code, using the Visual’s aggregation on a field, or even in Power Query. If you are doing the distinct count in Power Query as part of a group by operation, however, the existing distinct count is for all columns in the table, not for a particular column. In this article, I’ll show you a method you can use to get the distinct count of a particular column through the Group By transformation in Power Query component of Power BI.
Click through to learn how.
Comments closedThis was because on the first refresh it has to process all the data before it can incrementally refresh the dataset.
As per the documentation the default timeout for a SQL Server database is set to 10 minutes, and when I am processing a lot of data it can easily take longer than 10 minutes to return all the data.
Read on to see how you can change that if you need to.
Comments closed