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Category: Power BI

Moving a Power BI Data Model to Tabular

Published 2019-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant provides some tips on migrating from a Power BI data model to an Analysis Services Tabular model:

Unless you are upgrading to analysis services on SQL Server 2019, chances are you are going to have to review your DAX code and make some modifications as DAX on the other versions of SQL Server are not the same as Power BI. I was upgrading to AS on SQL Server 2016, there were some commands that I had to manual edit out of the JSON file. If you have any new DAX commands, take them out of your Power BI Model which means you will not have to manually edit the JSON file to remove them when the new commands are flagged as errors. Make sure your Power BI Model does not include commands such as SELECTEDVALUE, GENERATESERIES as well as all of the automatically generated date hierarchies. After your Power BI desktop file is clean, leave it running as you are going to need to have it running for the next step.

Click through for more details.

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Creating R Visuals in Power BI

Published 2019-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason takes us through showing an R-based visual in Power BI:

The R engine isn’t included with the installation of Power BI desktop. I won’t go into detail on this, so just know you’d need to install that separately. I had already installed the R component as part of Machine Learning Services for SQL Server 2017. I also had RStudio installed. Within Power BI desktop, take a moment to click File | Options and settings | Options to open the Options page. Then click R scripting in the list of Global Options. Here you’ll see options to set the R home directory and the desired R IDE.

Click through for the demo.

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Power BI Performance Analyzer

Published 2019-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo takes us through the Power BI Performance Analyzer:

The Power BI Performance Analyzer is a feature included in the May 2019 release of Power BI Desktop that simplifies the way you can collect the DAX queries generated by Power BI. You can use DAX Studio to capture them (as described in Capturing Power BI queries using DAX Studio), but the Performance Analyzer integrated in Power BI is simpler and provides a few insights about the time consumed in other activities, such as the rendering time of any visuals.

You can enable the Power BI Performance Analyzer by clicking the Performance Analyzer checkbox in the View ribbon of Power BI Desktop.

Read the whole thing.

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Dynamic Top N in Power BI

Published 2019-05-27 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl shows how to create a Top N slicer in Power BI, as well as some of the problems you might need to work through:

As I said, this pretty much depends on the business requirements and after discussing that in length with the users, the solution is usually to simply add an “Others” row that sums up all values which are not part of the TopN items. For regular business users this requirement sounds really trivial because in Excel the could just add a new row and subtract the values of the TopN items from the Grand Total.

However, they usually will not understand the complexity behind this requirement for Power BI. In Power BI we cannot simply add a new “Others” row on the fly. It has to be part of the data model and as the TopN calculations is already dynamic, also the calculation for “Others” has to be dynamic. As you probably expected, also this has been covered already:
Oraylis – Show TopN and rest in Power BI
Power BI community – Dynamic Top N and Others category

This is a pain point that ideally I’d like the Power BI team to address. Gerhard does a good job showing how to do it, but Tableau has that (and more) built in.

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Storing Large Images in Power BI

Published 2019-05-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows us how to store a large image in Power BI:

Jason Thomas and Gerhard Brueckl have both blogged on the subject of storing images as text inside a Power BI dataset:
http://sqljason.com/2018/01/embedding-images-in-power-bi-using-base64.html
https://blog.gbrueckl.at/2018/01/storing-images-powerbi-analysis-services-data-models/

Since they wrote those posts, however, Power BI has added the ability to set the Data Category property on measures as well as columns in tables. This means it is now possible to have the output of a DAX measure displayed as an image in a Power BI report and this in turn opens up a lot of new possibilities – including the ability to work around the maximum size of a text value that can be loaded into Power BI (see my previous blog post for more details) and therefore work with larger images.

I don’t understand why they make this so complicated. I have a Grafana dashboard widget that I show in a Power BI dashboard and have it scaled way down so it fits in under 32K. I appreciate Chris’s answer but that’s a lot of work to show an image.

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Power BI Connection String Capitalization

Published 2019-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin ran into a problem with capitalization on connection strings with Power BI Report Server:

The message actually says:
“Several errors occurred during data refresh. Please try again later or contact your administrator.”
SessionID: 1b80301e-3898-417a-af9c-2e77ec490728
[0] -1055784932: Credentials are required to connect to the SQL source. (Source at SQLServerName;DBA_Pro.). The exception was raised by the IDbCommand interface.
[1] -1055784932: The command has been canceled.. The exception was raised by the IDbCommand interface.
[2] -1055784932: The command has been canceled.. The exception was raised by the IDbCommand interface.

In my case the cause of the problem was very silly thing. PowerBI Server assigned only one data source connection string to my report, while in my report I had two data sources with only the difference in a Database Name capitalization:

This was a weird scenario.

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Getting Prior Year’s Year-To-Date with DAX

Published 2019-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Kasper de Jonge takes a look at how to calculate a prior year’s year-to-date over the same period as the current year:

Well maybe.. what happens here is that the DAX engine took the whole date range we have in context and shifts it back 12 months. This means for year 2019 it will use January first to December 31. So we get the entire year, is that what we want? Or do we want to see the sales for the previous year until the day we have data for this year so we can compare? Both need different DAX so let’s take a look.

Read on for a detailed analysis, including where you might go wrong.

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Using Power Query to Expand Out Missing Dates

Published 2019-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington solves a problem in Power Query:

Suppose you have data in the form of dates (not consecutive) with a value for each of the dates (see the table below left side). You need to expand the rows of the table (create the missing rows) so that you will have all the consecutive dates in the given range and each of the dates has the previous updated value (see the table below right side).

The solution has a pretty large number of steps but is straightforward.

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Reverse Engineering the Key Influencers Visual in Power BI

Published 2019-05-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb learns how the Key Influencers Power BI visual works, including some interesting undocumented functions:

A fascinating insight into how Power BI works, but is this any practical use to us? Let me be clear: I don’t think you should be using any of these functions yourself in a real-world report. I’m sure all this would be documented and publicised if Microsoft did want us to use it ourselves! Another consideration is that these new functions return tables and that makes them awkward to use in regular .pbix Power BI reports – I guess we could create calculated tables although that’s not as flexible as returning a table from a query as shown above. That said, even though we can’t write our own DAX queries in regular Power BI reports, we can write our own DAX queries in Paginated Reports and we can now create Paginated Reports that use a Power BI dataset as a data source. I tested putting one of the queries generated by the Key Influencers visual into a Paginated Report connected to the same dataset and it worked ok (even after publishing). You can also embed DAX queries connected to a published dataset in Excel too, as I show here. Hmm, plenty to think about then…

Chalk this up as “fun to know but not recommended to use yourself.”

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