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Category: Power BI

Deploying a Power BI Project File via Azure DevOps

Published 2024-07-02 by Kevin Feasel

Angela Henry deploys to prod:

When it was announced there was a collective cheer from Power BI source control advocates heard ’round the world. Since it’s preview release, Microsoft has also added GIT integration with Fabric workspaces. This makes it so easy to incorporate source control for all (or almost all) of your Fabric artifacts, including Power BI.

But what happens when your organization already has a mature CI/CD process in place using Azure DevOps? Do you really want to break from that pattern and have it controlled somewhere else? That’s what this post is about, using Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines to deploy your Power BI Project files (.pbip).

I’m going to share my experience in hopes that it will save you some time if this is the route you need to take.

Read on for Angela’s experience. Note that this applies both to Microsoft Fabric as well as a Fabric-less Power BI.

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Atomic Design for Report Development

Published 2024-07-02 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler has an interesting approach:

Developing a good semantic model or report takes a lot of time and effort. One way to reduce this cost is by re-using parts of an existing solution for a new model or project. This modular approach is particularly valuable when a developer faces common or recurring challenges and processes. Despite this, many developers commonly repeat efforts when they start new projects, models, and reports. For example, developers will often manually recreate measures, date tables, and patterns in a new model, or spend precious hours formatting visuals in a new report, while they have already created the same or similar things in the past. One reason for this is that it is difficult to identify candidate elements to re-use, or how you can re-use them in a convenient and scalable manner.

In this article, we want to introduce a conceptual framework from UI/UX called the atomic design methodology from Brad Frost. This framework can help developers to approach Power BI models and reports in a modular way to improve productivity and consistency of a developer’s work. The purpose of this article is to introduce the concept as well as some approaches that exist to re-use parts of your model and report. In future articles and videos, we will elaborate on these and other methods in additional detail.

I like the idea a lot, but Kurt does describe some of the challenges you’ll likely need to work through to adopt it.

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DAX Memory Usage from Filtering on a Table

Published 2024-07-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb talks Power BI anti-patterns:

Following on from my last post on the Query Memory Limit in Power BI, in this post I want to look at one of the most common DAX antipatterns and its effect on query memory usage: filtering on a whole table, rather than an individual column, in the filter parameters of the Calculate() function. A lot has already been written on this particular antipattern from the point of view of query performance – for example see here and here – but it’s only with the recent addition of the Execution Metrics Profiler/Log Analytics event that you can see how bad it is for memory usage too.

Read on for an example. In Chris’s case, there’s a 3x memory difference between doing the right thing and the wrong thing, so this can easily add up.

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Power BI Query Memory Limit

Published 2024-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series:

Continuing my series on Power BI memory errors (see part 1, part 2 and part 3), in this post I’ll look at the query memory limit which controls the amount of memory that an individual query can consume. This is a subject which I’ve talked about in a few blog posts in the past: hitting this limit is one of the reasons you’ll see the “This visual has exceeded the available resources” error which I blogged about here and and here. There’s also some official documentation here which is pretty good.

Read on to learn more about what settings you have available for it and a few more tips.

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Explaining Power BI and Fabric Capacity Pricing

Published 2024-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld breaks out the green eyeshade:

P-SKUs, A-SKUs, EM-SKUs and now we also have F-SKUs… all these different capacities that are out there today each have their own specifics. Lately, I’ve been in a lot of conversations around Fabric capacities. There seems to be some unclarity around what you pay for in the end and how it compares to Power BI Premium capacities. Therefore, I thought, maybe this is the right time to write it down – besides the Microsoft documentation that is already out there.

In this blog I will elaborate on differences in purchasing, billing and buying the capacities. I will not deep dive in capacity metrics or how capacity units are consumed.

There’s a lot of good information in the article, especially if you’re looking to price out Microsoft Fabric in your organization.

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Power BI Theme Color Choices

Published 2024-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria explains some of what you get with themes in Power BI:

Power BI reports have a theme that specifies the default colors, fonts, and visual styles. In Power BI Desktop, you can choose to use a built-in theme, start with a built-in theme and customize it, or create your own theme.

Creating your own theme involves specifying formatting options in a JSON file and importing it into your report. This post will focus on the theme colors, but there are lots of other options that can be specified in a theme, including structural colors, fonts, and page and visual formatting options.

Read on to learn more about the three primary sets of colors you can specify.

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Show Top N and Bottom N Records in One Power BI Visual

Published 2024-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Omorodion burns the candle from both ends:

Recently, I wrote an article, Rank and Sort Data Based on Multiple Columns in Power BI Using DAX. However, it is very common for business users to request the ability to dynamically view the Top N and Bottom N values of a measure, like Total Sales, on the same visual. This requirement is simple to implement on either the Top or Bottom N options. But, the challenge is when we need to represent the two options on the same chart simultaneously.

Read on for an example of how to do this.

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Build a Custom Semantic Model for Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad offers up some advice:

The Lakehouse or Warehouse comes with a default Power BI Sematic model, which can be used for reporting and analytics. However, you can also build and use a customized semantic model. There are significant differences when using the semantic model in real-world analytics projects. In this article, I’ll explain the difference between these two, which one is recommended, and why.

Click through for the video, as well as the article.

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Implementing Field Parameters in Power BI

Published 2024-06-05 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic shows how to set up field parameters in Power BI:

To be honest, I can’t remember that one Power BI feature caused so much hype as the Fields parameter, even though it was introduced exactly 2 years ago (May 2022)! I firmly believe that the Fields parameter is one of the things that will forever change the way we are building user experience in Power BI.

One important disclaimer before we jump into the action: Field params is still a preview feature. That means, don’t be surprised if you open Power BI Desktop and you don’t see an option to use Field params. You first need to enable this feature under Options & Settings -> Options -> Preview features.

Read on to see how you can use field parameters to make reports more dynamic.

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