Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Power BI

Power BI Architecture Diagram V4

Published 2019-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Dustin Ryan has a new version of the Power BI Architecture Diagram:

First and most importantly, I updated the Power BI logo in the diagram to the latest version of the logo!

Secondly, I included Power BI Dataflows in the diagram tagged #6. Power BI Dataflows are used to ingest, transform, integrate, and enrich big data by defining data source connections, ETL logic, refresh schedules, and more. Data is stored as entities in the Common Data Model in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Dataflow entities can be consumed as a data source in Power BI and by using Power BI Desktop. Read more about Dataflows here.

Click through for a full changelog and a link to download the architecture diagram and legend.

Comments closed

Power BI Violin Plots

Published 2019-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria shows off a violin plot custom visual in Power BI:

A violin plot is a nifty chart that shows both distribution and density of data. It’s essentially a box plot with a density plot on each side. Box plots are a common way to show variation in data, but their limitation is that you can’t see frequency of values. In other words, you can see statistics such as min, max, median, mean, or quartiles, but you can’t see the individual values nor how often they occurred.

Read on for a review of the custom visual available for violin plots, including areas where it does well and where it falls short at present.

Comments closed

No Type Equivalence In M

Published 2019-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann notes an oddity in types in Power Query:

But this function will not return any matches. I also tried out a (potentially) slower version using Table.SelectColumns(Types, each [Value] = x[Types]) – but still no match. 

What I found particularly frustrating here was, that in some cases, these lookups or filters on type-columns worked.

That behavior seems odd to me. Imke shares a link from Microsoft which explains that the behavior occurs, but the why behind it eludes me.

Comments closed

Syncing Slicers In Power BI

Published 2019-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Prathy Kamasani takes us through a recently added feature in Power BI:

As per Microsoft docs:
“This feature lets you create a custom group of slicers to keep synchronized. A default name is provided, but you can use any name you prefer.
The group name provides additional flexibility with slicers. You can create separate groups to sync slicers that use the same field, or put slicers that use different fields into the same group.”

First, let’s look at creating groups to sync slicers that use the same field. The use case Syncing within a page, we can easily use the group functionality to do this.

Click through for a few demos of increasing complexity.

Comments closed

Effective Identities And Power BI Embedded

Published 2019-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Angela Henry shows how you can use Power BI Embedded for row-level security even when the accessing users don’t have Power BI accounts:

Now that you familiar with Row Level Security in Power BI, how do you make it work when you want to pass in your customer’s identifier because your customers don’t have Power BI accounts?  It seems like the only way to make dynamic row level security is to use the Username() DAX function?  But wait, doesn’t that require the user to have a Power BI account?  Sigh, it seems we are going in circles.

The one thing these articles don’t talk about is that when you are using Power BI Embedded, you can pass in whatever you like for the EffectiveIdentity via the Power BI API and it will “overwrite” the Username() function.  What?!  That’s right, it will completely ignore the Username() function and use whatever you give it.  WooHoo!

Read on for the details.

Comments closed

Using Profiler To Get Power Query Timings

Published 2019-02-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows us how we can combine DAX Studio with Profiler in order to time our Power Query operations:

And there you have it, exact timings for each of the Power Query M queries associated with each of the tables in your dataset. Remember that the time taken by each Power Query M query will include the time taken by any other queries that it references, and it does not seem to be possible to find out the amount of time taken by any individual referenced query in Profiler.

There is a lot more interesting information that can be found in this way: for example, dataset refresh performance is not just related to the performance of the Power Query M queries that are used to load data; time is also needed to build all of the structures inside the dataset by the Vertipaq engine once the data has been returned, and Profiler gives you a lot of information on these operations too. 

Check it out if you do any work with Power BI.

Comments closed

Power BI Workspace V2

Published 2019-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shows us the differences between Power BI Workspace V1 and V2:

Workspace version 2 has been available in Power BI Service for more than 6 months now. The new version introduced in August 2018, however, still many people don’t know what it is, and what is the difference of that with the old version, and the most important question: Should you create the new workspace in V2 or V1? Should you click on the Try Now button when you create the new workspace or not? I have previously written about workspaces and their important role in creating a collaborative environment. In this post, I’ll answer all questions above to help you make the right decision when creating the workspace. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

I’ll admit I was unaware of V2 workspaces. This was interesting reading.

Comments closed

Hiding Future Dates In DAX Measures

Published 2019-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo shows how we can define year-to-date measures which don’t include values for incomplete months:

The rows between September 2009 and December 2009 should not be visible. The goal here is to display a blank value in these out-of-range, “future” months.
A similar issue exists for the year-over-year calculation (YOY). Even though the measure tries to show a blank value in case of missing values in current or previous year, the amounts for August 2009 and for CY 2009 might be considered wrong.

The answer is certainly not trivial but it does make for a much nicer display.

Comments closed

Power BI Palette In Charticulator

Published 2019-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld has submitted a pull request for Charticulator:

This morning, I submitted a pull request on GitHub to bring the default Power BI color palette to Charticulator. While Charticulator can export a Power BI custom visual .pbiviz file, there are no color-related Format options in Power BI. Any color choices must occur in Charticulator before exporting (you currently cannot change them later in Power BI). As a result, having the Power BI default palette easily accessible in Charticulator could help bring more consistency between the two tools.

I think this is a good idea. Consistency between products allows people to combine them more effectively.

Comments closed