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Category: Power BI

Date Dimensions and Large Power BI Files

Reza Rad explains why your Power BI data size might be abnormally large:

If you have a large *.pbix file, you can investigate what are the columns and tables that causing the highest storage consumption, using Power BI Helper. You can download Power BI Helper for free from here. I opened the file above in Power BI Helper, and in the Modeling Advise tab, this is what I see:

As you can see in the above output, the Date field in the Date table is the biggest column in this dataset. taking 150MB runtime memory! This is considering that we have only three distinct values in the column! Seems a bit strange, isn’t? let’s dig into the reason more in deep.

Read on for Reza’s explanation and what you can do to fix it.

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Conditional Formatting on Text Fields in Power BI

Matt Allington shows how you can apply conditional formatting to non-numeric fields in Power BI:

The high level process is to:
1. Create a measure that returns a colour as the result

1. It can be a word, such as blue, red, green
2. It can be a hex code for a colour, like #40E0D0″, “#FFA07A”
2. Use conditional formatting and use the measure to apply the formatting on the text as a rule.

Read on for a demo.

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Building a Power BI Dashboard on Streaming Data

Annie Xu shows us how to build a Power BI dashboard on a streaming data source in Azure:

This post is about something new I have tried last week. The goal was to create simulated streaming data source, feed it into Power BI as a streaming dataset, create a report out of the streaming dataset, and then embed it to an web application. With proper directions provided by my teammates, I finished the implementation from end to end within 1.5 hours. I was super impressed by how awesome it is and how easy it is to implement so that I want to share those directions to you.

The source data is simulated but the process is the same with real data sets.

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Running Totals in Tableau and Power BI

David Eldersveld shows how to create running totals in both Tableau and Power BI:

What about a separate Power BI Date table?
This setup is built for consistency of comparison. As people go deeper into Power BI, they typically add a separate Date table as part of a more robust data model and add relationships between tables. At the same time, they disable the default Auto Date/Time built-in hierarchies. This more advanced setup with a separate Date table allows several conveniences as well as performance and storage benefits. It’s especially true with larger models that include many facttables that each join to Date and other possible dimension tables. Tableau doesn’t currently have a comparable data model. We’ll stay conveniently away from that setup in Power BI because we only have one simple sample table.

I think both of them make this an easy operation, though Tableau is probably easier here.

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Power BI Keyboard Commands

Meagan Longoria shows off some of the new keyboard commands in Power BI:

The March 2019 release of Power BI Desktop has brought us keyboard accessible visual interactions. One of Power BI’s natural strengths is that you can click on a data point within a visual and have it cross-highlight or cross-filter the other visuals on a page. But keyboard-only users weren’t able to use this feature until now. This greatly raises the accessibility of the Power BI report consumption experience.

Click through to see a few of these shortcuts in action.

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Flattening Dimensional Models

Reza Rad explains why it makes sense to build flat dimensional models, particularly for Power BI:

The article that I wrote earlier this week about the shared dimension had a lot of interest, and I’m glad it helped many of you. So I thought better to write about the basics of modeling even more. In this article, I will be focusing on a scenario that you have all faced, however, took different approaches. Is it good to have too many dimension tables? can you combine some of those tables together to build one flatten dimension table? how much should you flatten it? should you end up with one huge table including everything? In this article, I’m answering all of these questions and explaining the scenarios of combining dimensions, as usual, I explain the model in Power BI. However, the concepts are applicable to any other tools. If you like to learn more about Power BI; read Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Given how closely the ideal Power BI data model matches the Kimball model, Reza’s advice makes perfect sense.

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Parameterized Direct Query In Power BI

Gerhard Brueckl shows how you can parameterize your SQL queries in Power BI, letting you switch server or database names and easily target a different location altogether:

I frequently work on projects where we have multiple tiers on which our solution is deployed to using continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI / CD) pipelines in Azure DevOps. Once everything is deployed, you also need to monitor these different environments and check the status of the data or ETL pipelines. My tool of choice is usually Power BI desktop as it allows me to connect to e.g. SQL databases very easily. However, I always ended up creating a multiple Power BI files – one for each environment.

Having multiple files results in a lot of overhead when it comes to maintenance and also managing these files. Fortunately, I came across this little trick when I was investigating in composite models and aggregations that I am going to explain in this blog post.

I have had to do exactly this same thing, so I’m going to have to try it out myself.

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Showing Totals on Power BI Stacked Column Charts

Reza Rad shows us how to add a totals figure to Power BI stacked column charts:

As you can see, there are data labels for each subcategory (means gender and education), but no data label showing the total of each education category. for example, we want to know how much was the total sales in the High School category. Now that you know the problem, let’s see a way to fix it.

Read on for Reza’s solution to the problem. In general, if people might care about the total, do them a favor and show the total.

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Power BI AutoML

Teo Lachev takes a look at AutoML in Power BI:

Let’s see how AutoML works based on what’s in the private preview (the usual disclaimer is that things will probably change). To start with, AutoML requires a dataflow (a note to Microsoft here is that AutoML will become more pervasive if it’s available in Power BI Desktop and it doesn’t require a premium capacity). In the private preview, AutoML requires the following steps. Presumably. the first (and most difficult step), preparing the dataset and cleansing the data is already done and available as a dataflow entity:

It looks like Microsoft’s taking what they learned from Azure ML and trying to port it over to Power BI.

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