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Category: Power BI

Multi-Parent Hierarchies in Power BI

Published 2019-10-04 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann has another way to solve the multi-parent problem in Power BI:

If you have parent-child-hierarchy with multiple parents, my function will a table like below, where the children with multiple parents still reside in different rows:

Due to this, the table cannot directly be connected with the FactTable, as NodeKey is not unique. Solution is to create DimNode-table that contains only unique values from the NodeKeys. Use it as a bridge between the 2 tables and implement a bidirectional filter to the Nodes-table:

Read on for the complete answer and to grab a copy of the PBIX file.

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Power BI Column Concatenation

Published 2019-10-04 by Kevin Feasel

Alexander Arvidsson shows how we can concatenate columns in Power BI using DAX:

Finally we can tackle the last hurdle – the column that shows both the current number of certifications and the requested goal. Had this been Excel it would have been dead easy – we just create a new cell that concatenates two other cells like this:

Then we copy the formula to all the rows. Easy. But this is not Excel. The “goal” part is simple – that’s just another column. The trick is to count all the other rows in the table with the same key. Let’s add the key column to the table so we see what we’re working with. “CompKey” is the concatenated key we created in the previous blog post. “Number of certs” is a count of the rows in the table, and because of row context it gets evaluated per key.

Read on for the solution.

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Query Folding, Azure DevOps, and Power BI

Published 2019-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger tries to work around a query folding limitation:

Query folding is one of the most powerful tools in Power Query and Power BI. It is the automatic process of pushing down filters and other transformations back to the data source. This can dramatically improve performance for your queries.

Unfortunately, OData is not guaranteed to support query folding. According to the Power BI documentation on incremental refresh.

Click through for Eugene’s alternative solution.

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REMOVEFILTERS() in DAX

Published 2019-10-02 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington takes us through the REMOVEFILTERS() function in DAX:

Recently Microsoft introduced a new function in DAX called REMOVEFILTERS(). This is a very useful and well named function and it does exactly what its name suggests. Its purpose is to act as a table filter parameter inside CALCULATE() as shown in the following example.

Total Sales All Products REMOVEFILTERS() = CALCULATE([Total Sales],REMOVEFILTERS(Products))

Read on to see how this compares to the prior/alternative solution and for more information on REMOVEFILTERS().

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Power BI Performance Tuning

Published 2019-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger gives us a detailed guide to Power BI performance tuning:

As a report developer, it can be frustrating a report developer, knowing that something is slow, but not being able to put your finger on it. In my mind, there are 4 main areas where there might be a slowdown:

1. Data refresh
2. Model calculations
3. Visualization rendering
4. Everything else

Identifying which one of these is the problem is the first step to improving performance. In most cases, if a report is slow it’s an issue with step 2, your data model.

Eugene has plenty of good advice here.

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ADLS Gen2 Navigation in Power Query

Published 2019-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows off hierarchical navigation in Power Query against Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2:

While the documentation on how to import data from Azure Data Lake Gen2 Storage into Power BI is pretty detailed, the connector (which at the time of writing is in beta) that supports this functionality in the Power Query engine has some useful functionality that isn’t so obvious. If you look at the built-in documentation on the AzureStorage.DataLake M function in the Power Query Editor you’ll see there are a lot of options that aren’t in the documentation on the web yet:

Click through for an example.

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Using the Power BI API

Published 2019-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Pries takes us through the Power BI API with Powershell:

The Power BI API is a way of essentially bypassing the web interface of powerbi.com and asking questions directly to the back-end of the service (without bypassing security). Using this allows you to issue a command, such as “Give me a list of all of the workspaces” and receive just the result data in a bulk data format. While outside the scope of this exercise, the API also allows reading actual business data from Power BI assets and even manipulating assets.

For my first attempt at interacting with the API, I decided to try the Microsoft developed Powershell Cmdlets. These are a set of free Powershell commands which can be installed on your workstation and then will query the Power BI API and return results in a standard way without the need to write any code (C# or otherwise) or understand how to read a JSON response.

Jeff does more than just hit API endpoints, though, so read the whole thing.

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Storytelling with Power BI

Published 2019-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld wraps up a series on storytelling with Power BI:

Let them ask questions
As a report author, you start building your reports based on the information needs and business requirements you collected before your project. However, every answer to a question, triggers a new question to come up. In the end you end-up with more questions to answer than you thought about up front. Maybe even with scope creep in agile projects.

However, it is very unlikely that you answer all the business information needs in your dashboard or report within one iteration. So why not give them the ability to exploitative interact with the report and ask questions in a native language to their dataset? Power BI has the ability to ask questions to your data in your native language in just a few clicks.

This is probably one of the most underutilized aspects of Power BI.

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Power BI Admin API Updates

Published 2019-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche takes us through a few updates to the Power BI Admin API:

Even with these new experiences, there will still be times when you want or need to use the Power BI API to get insight into all the workspaces in the Power BI tenant for which you are an administrator. This ability isn’t new, but some recent updates to the Power BI admin API have made it easier.

I don’t do a lot of development these days, so when a post titled Avoiding workspace loops by expanding navigation properties in the GetGroupsAsAdmin API showed up on the Power BI blog, I didn’t pay much attention. I should have.

Read on for the full set of updates.

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Divide, RankX, and N/A

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Collie has some fun with DIVIDE():

A blank cell in a report is sometimes a source of confusion for those human beings consuming our work. “What does a blank cell mean,” they ask.  “It’s a division by zero,” we reply.  “Wut,” they then ask.  “Trust me,” we say, “you don’t want to see the alternative.”  “But I don’t trust you, and now I don’t trust this whole report,” is what they sometimes say next – whether under their breath or out loud.

But “N/A” is a lovely value to display.  It raises far fewer eyebrows.  “Oh, it says our Profit Margin % for electric blankets sold in Cancun is “N/A” – I get it, we’ve never sold that product there.”  No convo required.

Click through for the full story.

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