A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chris Webb gives us the scoop:
There’s a new M function rolling out now that allows you to read metadata from Delta tables (at the time of writing it’s available in Dataflows Gen2 and will be available soon in Desktop). It builds on the DeltaLake.Table M function that allows you to read data from Delta tables and is similar to the Parquet.Metadata function that was released last year.
Click through for an example of how to use it against a Delta table in OneLake.
Comments closedReza Rad does a bit of configuration:
Aggregation can speed up the performance of DirectQuery sourced tables significantly. To use it, firstly, you need to create an aggregation table. Secondly, you must set up proper storage modes for tables in the model. Finally, you have to configure the aggregation functions, which I will explain in this post. You can learn about aggregation in other posts of this series and continue the example here. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.
Read on to learn more.
Comments closedChris Webb makes things go faster:
A few weeks ago I replied to a question on reddit where someone was experiencing extremely slow performance when importing data from a CSV file using Power Query. The original poster worked out the cause of the problem and the solution themselves: they saw that removing all date columns from their query made their Power Query query much faster and that using the Date.FromText function and specifying the date format solved the problem. While I couldn’t reproduce the extreme slowness that was reported I was able to reproduce a performance difference between the two approaches and Curt Hagenlocher of the Power Query team confirmed that this was expected behaviour.
Read on for the example and explanation.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers wants to figure out who has licenses:
In this blog post I am going to show you how to get all the Power BI licenses in your tenant.
This can be very useful to understand how many licenses you have, what type of licenses are being paid for, and potentially how you can save by removing licenses due to inactive use or if the licenses are no longer required.
I’m going to be pulling on my previous Blog post where I explained how to get the Entra ID users and groups using a Service Principal for access
Click through for the demonstration.
Comments closedElena Drakulevska shares some advice:
The same goes for your Power BI report—get the size wrong, and your users will struggle with cluttered visuals, excessive scrolling, or awkward gaps. Or worse, you’ll create a report that looks amazing on your screen but completely breaks when someone else opens it.
Trust me, I’ve seen it—an ultrawide masterpiece designed for the boss’s fancy monitor… except no one else at the company had that monitor.
Yeah, this brings back memories, though in my case, it was that the developers (including me) had wide-screen monitors in 1080p and the people using our product had standard resolutions like 1280×1024 or even 1024×768.
Comments closedThe recent announcement of Surge Protection gives Fabric/Power BI capacity admins a way to restrict the impact of background operations on a capacity, preventing them from causing throttling. However, at the time of writing, Surge Protection does not prevent users that are running expensive DAX or MDX queries – which are interactive operations – from causing problems on your capacity. Indeed, right now, there is no direct way to stop runaway queries from consuming a lot of CUs, although there is something you can do which will help a lot: reducing the query timeout.
Read on for information about why Surge Protection doesn’t currently work with DAX and MDX queries, and how you can change the query timeout. This is kind of interesting considering that, outside of the Microsoft Fabric world, we typically move the query timeout higher rather than lower, to deal with long-running queries.
Comments closedBoth Azure DevOps and GitHub are supported Git hosts for Power BI and Fabric workspace integration. I will demonstrate using GitHub rather than Azure DevOps because, it is free for personal use. Getting started with GitHub is quite easy, and anyone can have a free GitHub account. Simply navigate to http://GitHub.com and sign-up for an account. You may create a personal or organizational account, and your personal account can be associated with multiple organizations.
Click through for the process.
Comments closedAlthough this seems to be a simple thing to do, it is not a function that you can turn on or off. If you have a Dataflow that does the ETL and transforms and prepares the data, then to get the most up-to-date data into the report, you will need to refresh the Power BI semantic model after that, only upon successful refresh of both dataflow and semantic model is when you will have the up-to-date data into the report. Fortunately, in Fabric, this is a straightforward setup. In this article and video, I’ll explain how this is possible.
Click through for the video and the blog post. Granted, this feature is in preview, but using it is pretty straightforward.
Comments closedHasan Abo Shally announces a new preview feature:
As we step into 2025, we’re excited to announce the preview of Power BI Embedded with Direct Lake Mode, a new feature designed to enhance how developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) provide embedded analytics in their applications. This capability, available in preview starting Q1 2025, leverages the power of Direct Lake Mode to allow an even enhanced performance and experience for embedded analytics.
This probably affects a small audience, though the functionality is good to see.
Comments closedTeo Lachev finds three things of note:
I had the privilege to participate in the early preview program of the new TMDL View in Power BI Desktop which is currently in public preview in the latest January release of Power BI Desktop. Without reiterating what was said in the announcement, I’d like to mention three main benefits of this feature:
Click through for those benefits.
Comments closed