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Category: Power BI

Optimizing Power BI Merge Performance with Table.Join

Published 2020-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows us another way to optimize Power BI merge performance:

The SortMerge algorithm, last in the list above, is the focus of this blog post. I mentioned in my earlier posts that the reason that merge operations on non-foldable data sources are often slow is that both of the tables used in the merge need to be held in memory. There is an exception though: if you know that the data in the columns used to join the two tables is sorted in ascending order, you can use the Table.Join function and the SortMerge algorithm and the data from both sources can be streamed rather than held in memory, which in turn results in the merge being much faster.

That’s the same in the relational world: merge joins are the fastest, assuming that your data is pre-sorted in the proper manner.

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Power Query Performance Differences in When You Remove Columns

Published 2020-06-05 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series on optimizing Power Query merge performance:

In my last post I demonstrated how the size of a table affects the performance of Power Query merge operations on non-foldable data sources in Power BI. Specifically, I showed that removing columns from the tables involved in a merge before the merge took place improved performance. But does it matter when you remove the columns? Is it enough to only select the columns you need when you expand the nested table returned by a merge, for example, or just to remove columns after the merge step? So, today’s question is:

Does it make a difference to Power Query merge performance if you remove unwanted columns from your source tables in the step before the merge or in the step afterwards?

Read on for the result, as well as a pleasant surprise around Power BI’s capabilities.

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Alerting when Power BI Tenant Settings Change

Published 2020-06-04 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates walks us through how to track Power BI tenant settings changes:

This post discusses two methods of receiving an alert when a tenant setting has changed in the Power BI Service: one using Cloud App Security, and the other using the M365 Security & Compliance Center.

Tenant settings in the Power BI Service are among the most important things to get right. Once they are set the way you want, the objective is to ensure all changes are well-controlled. Tip: Check section 10 in the Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment whitepaper—I included some tenant setting recommendations in the latest version.

Read on to see how.

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Working with ADLS Gen 2 in Power Query

Published 2020-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo takes us through some ways to optimize performance when working with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 from Power Query:

With Power Query you can apply filters to the list obtained by the File System View option, thus restricting the access to only those files (or a single file) you are interested in. However, there is no query folding of this filter. What happens is that every time you refresh the data source, the list of all these files is read by Power Query; the filters in M Query to the folder path and the file name are then applied to this list only client-side. This is very expensive because the entire list is also downloaded when the expression is initially evaluated just to get the structure of the result of the transformation.

A better way to manage the process is to specify in the URL the complete folder path to traverse the hierarchy, and get only the files that are interesting for the transformation – or the exact path of the file is you are able to do that. For example, the data lake I used had one file for each day, stored in a folder structure organized by yyyy\mm, so every folder holds up to 31 files (one month).

Read on for more advice in this vein.

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Power BI Report Page Access Control

Published 2020-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers walks us through access control on Power BI pages:

With the update to the latest version in Power BI Desktop there is now the capability to control which users will see which pages in a report.

This is achieved using a combination of Row Level Security (RLS) and conditional formatting. This makes it a secure way of controlling access for specific users. I will demonstrate how this works below.

This is a clever solution to the problem of access control.

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Optimizing Power Query Merges

Published 2020-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb wants to make your joins in Power Query faster:

The first question I decided to investigate was this:

Does the number of columns in a table affect the performance of a merge?

First of all, I created two identical queries called First and Second that connected to the CSV file, used the first row from the file as the headers, and set the data types to all seven columns to Whole Number.

Click through for the answer to this question. Chris promises a series out of this and I would expect there to be enough content for that.

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The Power BI Pro’s Guide to Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2020-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Brett Powell gives a quick overview of a new whitepaper:

The Power BI Professional’s Guide to Azure Synapse Analytics, a white paper I wrote describing the Synapse Analytics platform and its benefits and use cases for Power BI professionals, was published a couple weeks ago. This post discusses a few themes from this paper and also shares a couple notes that weren’t included.

There are some interesting notes in here, so check those out and also get ahold of the whitepaper to understand how Power BI relates to the artist formerly known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

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Finding the Power BI Local Tabular Instance

Published 2020-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Emanuele Meazzo shows which port your local SSAS Tabular instance is running on as you navigate through Power BI:

I’m sure you know that PowerBI tabular models are 100% the same as SSAS tabular models, hence you can use SSMS to connect to a PowerBI Tabular model as if it was SSAS (because it is), to do whatever you want, for example scripting out the objects that you’ve created in the PowerBi Desktop GUI or extract the model to deploy it in SSAS.

The only issue to do so is that PowerBI Desktop each time you open a report creates the local SSAS Tabular instance on a random port, so it’s not like you can save a connection string and that’s it

But Emanuele has a quick Powershell script to find the port for you.

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Sorting a Power BI Table by Multiple Columns

Published 2020-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Fletcher shows us how to sort a Power BI table by more than one column:

A common request that is raised by clients is how to sort a table in Power BI by multiple columns, in the same way you can in Excel.
For a while, there was no way (at least no easy way) to do this until the Power BI March 2020 update.

I learnt this tip from the following YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik0K1H9j2Uc
Full credit to Dhruvin Shah, check his video out.

I would call this feature moderately discoverable—once you see how to do it, you can say “Oh, that makes sense.” But it’s not something I would necessarily have thought to do without this prompting.

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Custom Power BI Maps

Published 2020-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Alice Drummond has two articles on improving the map experience in Power BI. First up is creating drill-down maps:

But why would we want to drill down on a map?

See the big picture: Using drill down, we can visualise the dataset at the ‘big picture’ scale, and then explore finer details for areas of interest (just think of the classic spatial hierarchy of Country à State à City à Suburb)

Save on real estate: We can also display multiple datasets at different levels in the same map – which goes a long way to conserving your precious report page real estate by reducing the number of visuals in your report!  

Performance: Following on from above, less visuals almost always equates to better report performance! And this is especially true when using MapBox, which is at the slower end of the Power BI performance scale at the best of times – so using drill down to reduce the number of maps combined with filtering your datasets goes a long way to speeding up your reports!

The second post is all about styling choropleth maps:

If you’ve played around with MapBox in Power BI – you’ll know that it has loads of great features to create really rich and beautiful maps, including some great ‘out of the box’ map styles (i.e. base maps). However, you might not be aware that it also gives you the ability to design custom styles with your own spatial layers. I discovered this feature on a recent project where my client wanted to include Victoria’s Catchment Management Authority (or CMA) boundaries on their base-map to provide greater context to help interpret their data. Up until this point, the only option I knew of was to purchase an expensive ArcGIS Online licence to create custom map styles. So, you can imagine just how excited I was when I discovered that I could also do this in MapBox – for FREE!!!

Click through for the posts and videos.

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