A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Koen Verbeeck lays out some common mistakes people make when developing Power BI reports:
What are some of the most common mistakes when working with Power BI? For example, when a junior colleague starts on a Power BI project for the first time, what are the pitfalls you try to warn them about? What advice would you give them?
The last one hurts me in particular because .pbip and TMDL aren’t compatible with Power BI Report Server.
Comments closedHamza Boubou builds a dynamic report:
There was a requirement from my client that seemed simple at first but turned out to be a Trojan horse after deeper investigation. The goal was to create a Power BI Time Comparisons Top N Analysis page, giving users complete control over the Top/Bottom N products based on multiple metrics. Users needed to define the period, compare it with other periods, and adjust the N parameter dynamically.
Read on to see how Hamza was able to solve this customer request.
Comments closedJohn Kerski notes a pain point:
“I hate to tell you this, but it’s not available for us yet.” This is an all-too-common phrase I find myself saying to customers in U.S. Sovereign Cloud tenants who come across new features in search engine results only to find they’re not available in our regions. For those unfamiliar, U.S. Sovereign Cloud regions allow U.S. government, public sector, and other highly regulated entities to use the cloud with the security, compliance, and data sovereignty required by their organizations.
If you do a search for “sovereign cloud,” you will find that most of the cloud providers have their own Sovereign Cloud if you are interested in the concept for any other cloud services you need to use. In this article, I am going to look specifically at how you extend this support to Power BI, and make a few suggestions for how I think it could work better.
I call John’s pains and raise him “We can only use Power BI Report Server here.”
2 CommentsMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari talk highlighting:
However, visual calculations are incredibly convenient when it comes to calculations that are specifically tied to a visual. Let us face it: every semantic model contains measures with intricate ISINSCOPE, HASONEVALUE, and SELECTEDVALUE function calls whose only goal is to determine the color of a font or the background of a cell. An example of the intricacy of those measures is in one of our most viewed articles here: https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/filtering-the-top-products-alongside-the-other-products-in-power-bi/.
Visual calculations can be used to control conditional formatting starting with the February 2025 version of Power BI. Several small details must be known to use them, but they are definitely worth learning.
Read on to see how it works. Conditional formatting has always seemed to be oddly difficult to do in Power BI. If you were in the happy path for conditional formatting, it’s a few mouse clicks. But if not, then good luck.
Comments closedChris Webb digs into the dark underbelly of a semantic model:
Following on from my recent post about refreshing semantic models with Fabric Data Pipelines and the semantic model refresh activity, a few people asked me how to refresh hidden tables because they are not displayed in the Pipeline configuration UI. I got the answer from my colleague Alex Powers (aka reddit celebrity u/itsnotaboutthecell) who kindly allowed me to blog about it.
Click through for the demonstration.
Comments closedMarco Russo has some bad news for us:
As one of the founders of OKVIZ—a company dedicated to producing custom visuals—I have been following the recent developments in Power BI Desktop with particular concern. This issue, however, extends beyond our company and affects many other organizations that rely on custom visuals to enhance their business intelligence solutions. For this reason, I use my blog on SQLBI to reach a larger audience.
Click through for the problem. Marco has an update that Microsoft pledges to have the problem fixed with the March release of Power BI Desktop.
Comments closedReza Rad shares something with us:
As I mentioned earlier in Power BI online book, Power Query is a functional language. Knowing functions is your best helper when you work with a functional language. Fortunately Power Query both in Excel and Power BI can use shared keyword to reveal a document library of all functions. I’ve written about shared keyword almost 2.5 years ago, when it was only an add-in for excel. However I still see people in my webinars who are new with #shared keyword functionality and amazed how helpful this little keyword is. So I decided to explain it with the new Power BI. With the method in this post you can find any function you want easily in Power Query, and you won’t need an internet connection to search in functions.
Click through to see what #shared can do for you.
Nikola Ilic locks things down:
You’ve heard about the Oblect-level security feature in Power BI, but you’ve also heard that you CAN’T configure it directly from the Power BI Desktop? And, that you must use an external tool, such as Tabular Editor, to configure and manage OLS.
Well, this is not the case anymore! With the new TMDL view in Power BI Desktop, you can define Object-level security directly in the Power BI Desktop.
Read on for a tutorial on what it takes to implement object-level security.
Comments closedChris Webb has another way for scheduling refreshes:
I’m sure you already know how to configure scheduled refresh for your semantic models in Power BI. While the options you have for controlling when refresh takes place are generally good enough – you can configure daily or weekly refreshes and set up to eight times a day for refreshes to take place – there are some scenarios it doesn’t work for, such as monthly refreshes. Up to now the workaround has been to use Power Automate to trigger refreshes (see here for an example) or to call the refresh API from another application. Now, with Fabric, you have a much better option for scheduling refreshes: Data Pipelines.
Click through for the demonstration.
Comments closedMarco Russo and Alberto Ferrari inform us that we owe them money:
The Accounts Receivable (AR) Aging report helps companies track overdue receivables and better manage their cash flow. It is a common requirement from the finance department that often represents a challenge for Power BI reports, especially when you want to show the trend over time. Here is a typical visualization for the Open Amount at the end of each month, colored by the age range of the Accounts Receivable.
Read on for a dive into the report concept and some of the most common issues you may run into.
Comments closed