A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Melissa Coates has a video and an article for us:
Including documentation alongside the dataset is helpful for teammates who might need to work on this dataset at some point, or even for yourself in the future. It also means you won’t have an empty report, and you won’t need to delete the empty report once the file is published to the service.
Click through for plenty of useful information on the why and how, as well as what to watch out for.
Comments closedImke Feldmann explains how you can perform paging with Power Query:
When you use an API with a paging mechanism (like the example from this blogpost), you’ll might work with a field that contains the address for the next page. You can use this to walk through the available chunks until you reach the last element. That last element in the pagination will not contain a next-field or that field will be null.
There is a bit of nuance to this, so click through and learn how.
Comments closedTeo Lachev hits on an annoyance I have with Power BI:
The Power BI image-rendering visualizations, such as Table or Card, expect image links to public servers hosting the images with anonymous permissions. This has obvious shortcomings. Can we load images from a database or Power BI data table? You bet, as Jason Thomas has demonstrated a long time ago. Here are the steps I followed to show the images from the Production.ProductPhoto table in the AdventureWorks2012 (or later) database. If you want to embed a few images into a Power BI data table (instead of an external database), you can convert them manually to Base64 using any of the online image converters, such as https://codebeautify.org/image-to-base64-converter and embed the resulting string into a Power BI data table (the Enter Data feature). Gerhard Brueckl takes this one step further by showing you how to automate the base64 conversion with many images.
The experience for displaying images isn’t the worst—I don’t mind needing base64 encoded strings for images—but there’s a strict limit on how large your images can be, and that size is puny. I have one dashboard where I show a CPU chart from Grafana and I have to leave it at a very small resolution or else I don’t get to see the whole chart—it cuts off in the middle.
Comments closedBrett Powell has a pair of Power BI templates for monitoring Azure Synapse Analytics:
Upon clicking ‘Load’ you’ll either need to provide your credentials for this source (if you don’t have this data source saved from previous use) or the queries will execute and the following report pages will be available:
– Executions
– Waits
– Sessions
– Waits Detail
– Execution Detail
– Memory
– ExecutionDrillThrough (hidden)
Click through to see what the templates look like and how to obtain them.
Comments closedPrathy Kamasani embraces the power of “and”:
Power BI Bookmarks, the secret behind many sleek reports, It revolutionised the entire PBI Report design approach. Initially, Bookmarks were portrayed more as some saved views, which can be used for storytelling than for navigation. However, we certainly saw more report designers using Bookmarks for navigation than for storytelling. In March 2020, we have a new functionality called Page navigation, which brings us to the dilemma of which one to use and when?
Read on for the comparison.
Comments closedDavid Eldersveld takes us through the Power BI REST API:
Postman is a valuable tool to work with APIs, especially when testing and making ad hoc requests outside of an automated production solution. In terms of where a Power BI developer may find Postman useful, it sits somewhere between the documentation’s “Try It” functionality and a more production-worthy solution incorporating tools like Azure DevOps, Logic Apps/Power Automate, a Power BI custom connector, etc.
The ideas in this post extend an original post from Carl de Souza. Carl shows how to obtain an OAuth2 access token but does so with hardcoded values. Additional API requests use the token from the original response, but he also manually provides this token to those subsequent API calls.
David has a clever technique for getting the bearer token, so check it out.
Comments closedMarco Russo helps us tune Power BI reports containing a large number of card visuals:
Every visual element in a Power BI report must complete a number of tasks to provide the expected result. Visuals showing data must generate one or more DAX queries to retrieve the required measures applying the correct filters. The execution of these queries increases the waiting time for the end user, and increase the workload on the server, especially when multiple users access a published report at the same time. In order to improve the performance and the scalability of a report, the best practice is reducing the number of visuals consuming data published in a page of a report.
The focus is on a single page of the report. Power BI only gets data and build the visualizations required for the active page of a report. When the user switches the focus to a different page, the waiting time only depends on the visuals of the new page. The content of other pages of the same report is not relevant for the performance. The goal is reducing the number of visuals in a single page of a report. This could be challenging in order to obtain the same report layout, but we can look for the right visualization once we realize that the number of visuals in the same page is negatively affecting the user experience.
Less is more here.
Comments closedWhen I first started looking at the calculation groups and changing the currency formats, I thought that my existing currency format was correct. Boy was I wrong and once I found that out and corrected it, my Currency Format Strings started working.
As per the Microsoft documentation found here Dynamic format strings for currency conversion I had to make sure that my Currency format followed the following pattern.
Read on for an example and demonstration.
Comments closedKasper de Jonge shows how you can translate data in Power BI datasets if you’re using Premium:
One request that comes up a lot is to be able to provide translations for the tables and columns of your model (especially here in Europe). Up until now this was not possible in Power BI as there was no UI for it. The new XMLA read/write feature changed all of this. As you probably know in SSAS Tabular this is already possible. The new XMLA endpoint makes any Power BI dataset into a SSAS tabular model with most of its functionalities. So how do you use it in Power BI and add translations? In this blog post I will walk you through it.
Click through for a demo.
Comments closedRecently, I was presenting my session about AI Capabilities for Power BI to make AI Accessible for Everyone for the Virtual Power BI Days Hamburg. A great event organized by Kathrin Borchert. Part of my session was about the Artificial Intelligence capabilities offered as part of Power BI Premium. A day later, Kathrin came up with a great idea how you can leverage these AI capabilities without the need for Power BI Premium.
I was directly enthusiastic about that idea since I thought about this in the past as well. Back then, there were some blockers which are sorted now. I asked Kathrin if she was open for co-authoring this blog and she immediately agreed.
Click through for the technique. Basically, it’s a trade-off between simplicity and cost.
Comments closed