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Category: Power BI

Tips for Optimizing Power BI Semantic Models

Published 2024-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck shares some tips:

Power BI is designed to be user-friendly. With just a few clicks, you can import data from various sources, combine them together in one data model and start analyzing it using powerful data visualizations. This sometimes leads to a scenario where people are just importing data into the tool without giving it too much thought. When you’re working on a solo project on a small dataset, there probably won’t be too many issues. But what if your report is successful and you want to share it with your colleagues and maybe other departments? Or more data is loaded into the model, but refreshes are taking more and more time? Even other data sources are added into your model, but writing DAX formulas has become hard, and reports are slowing down.

In this article, we’ll cover a couple of tricks that will help you make your Power BI models smaller, faster and easier to maintain. In the immortal words of Daft Punk: “Harder. Better. Faster. Stronger”.

Click through for those tricks and tips.

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Implementing Role-Playing Dimensions in Power BI

Published 2024-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev puts on a mask:

Role-playing dimensions are a popular business requirement but yet challenging to implement in Power BI (and Tabular) due to a long-standing limitation that two tables can’t be joined multiple times with active relationships. Declarative relationships are both a blessing and a curse and, in this case, we are confronted with their limitations. Had Power BI allowed multiple relationships, the user must be prompted which path to take. Interestingly, a long time ago Microsoft considered a user interface for the prompting but dropped the idea for unknown reasons.

Given the existing technology limitations, you have two implementation choices for implementing subsequent role-playing dimensions: duplicating the dimension table (either in DW or semantic model) or denormalizing the dimension fields into the fact table. The following table presents pros and cons of each option:

Click through for that table, as well as some thoughts on viable approaches, including an edge case.

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Constrained Kerberos Delegation with SSRS and Power BI Gateways

Published 2024-10-07 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards doesn’t want just anyone to double-hop:

Ok, many of you will already be aware that in order to use Integrated Authentication successfully with SSRS particularly, that you have to configure Kerberos Authentication. At a very basic level, this allows the credentials of the user running the report, to be passed to the report server (hop 1) and then along to the target of the SSRS datasource (hop 2), also known as “Double hop” authentication. The delegation part of this signifies where the service (PBIG or SSRS) is allowed to pass these credentials along to.

  • anywhere, ie…Unconstrained delegation, or
  • to a restricted set of targets…Constrained delegation.

Read on to see how you can set up constrained delegation.

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Recovering Power BI Reports You Cannot Download

Published 2024-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler grabs a report:

Below are some reasons why you might not be able to download your Power BI report or model from a workspace:

  • The report was created in the service:
    • Someone created the report manually (using the User Interface) and connects to a model in another workspace.
    • Someone created the report programmatically (for instance, using the REST APIs).
    • Power BI created the report automatically (for instance, it copied the report to a workspace that belongs to a later stage in a deployment pipeline)
  • You used the REST APIs to re-bind a report (changed which model it connects to as a data source).
  • The model has incremental refresh enabled.
  • The model uses automatic aggregations.
  • The model was modified via an XMLA endpoint.
  • Other scenarios described in the limitations in the Microsoft documentation.

When you encounter this scenario, you see something like the following image, which shows the Download this file option greyed out from the File menu of the Power BI report.

Read on to see how you can nonetheless recover these published reports using the semantic-link-labs library.

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Programmatic Power BI Report Modification via semantic-link-labs

Published 2024-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler makes a change:

Whether building reports in Power BI Desktop or in the web browser via the Power BI service, you have limited options to batch or streamline changes. Put another way; it’s tedious and slow to make many small changes to one or more Power BI reports. It’s also easy to make mistakes

When initially designing or building a report, this is not so much of a problem. Unless you’re using a template, you want to control report layout and formatting, yourself. However, certain changes can be little more than a waste of time. Some examples include:

  • Replacing fields when there’s a broken reference due to i.e. renaming a model measure or column.
  • Swapping one measure or column for another in the report
  • Changing visual container styles, like background, border, and shadow/glow.
  • Changing text or text styles across multiple visuals, pages, or reports.
  • Changing chart formatting (like color) or properties (like edit interactions) across multiple visuals, pages, or reports.

Read on to see how you can make some of these changes in Python code using the semantic-link-labs library.

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Managing Power BI Assets with semantic-link-labs

Published 2024-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler takes us through a Python library:

Thus far, the part of Microsoft Fabric that I’ve personally found the most interesting is not Copilot, Direct Lake, or its data warehousing capabilities, but a combination of notebooks and simple file/table storage via Lakehouses. Specifically, the library semantic link and its “expansion pack” semantic-link-labs, spearheaded by Michael Kovalsky. These tools help you build, manage, use, and audit the various items in Fabric from a Python notebook, including Power BI semantic models and reports.

Semantic-link-labs provide a lot of convenient functions that you can use to automate and streamline certain tasks during Power BI development; both of models and reports. For me, I’m particularly interested in the reporting functionalities, because this is where I typically find that I lose the most time, and because there is a drought of tools to address this area.

Read the whole thing.

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Debugging a DAX Measure with DAX Query View

Published 2024-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres sorts out an issue:

DAX Query View was created some time ago and it was a great tool to run DAX inside Power BI environment.

However, testing a measure in DAX Query View may not be something so obvious. While the measure in a report obeys to the filter context and most of times results in a single value, the filter context doesn’t exist in Query View and the execution needs to return a table.

In this way, a simple copy/past of the measure in DAX Query View will not run. The measure needs to be adapted to be tested.

Let’s analyze one sample case to discover how this happens.

Click through for the answer.

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Creating Custom Visuals in Power BI with DAX

Published 2024-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler shows one way to customize Power BI visuals:

When creating reports in Power BI, you regularly come across scenarios where you want to show data in a certain way that is not straightforward in the standard “core visuals”. Sometimes, the visualization needs to reflect particularities about an organization’s business processes or its data. Other times, you simply want a more creative design to visualize the data in the most effective way. In this article, we discuss what to do in these scenarios, describing one method where you can make custom visualizations by using a single DAX measure, and the caveats and limitations of this particular approach.

In this article, our objective is to produce a matrix visual with the Timeline SVG, like in the following diagram.

Read on for several methods to handle when Power BI doesn’t do something out of the box, and a focus on creating a custom visual via DAX measure with an SVG. But do read the whole thing, as Kurt explains why this isn’t necessarily a great method.

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Connecting to Power BI as a Guest User

Published 2024-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck can only enter a tenant with explicit permission:

Sometimes your Microsoft Entra ID account (formerly known as Azure Active Directory) is added as a guest user in another tenant. This happens quite a lot when you’re a consultant and your client can’t create a new user in their own tenant, so they add the account of your own company as a guest instead. If you’re not a consultant, it can also happen after a merger or acquisition and you’re suddenly stuck with multiple tenants.

Yeah, this is a real annoyance with Microsoft Fabric / Power BI. Koen links to a 5-year-old feature request that I recommend upvoting.

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