A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Sandeep Pawar doesn’t have time to refresh everything:
The latest version of Semantic Link (0.4.0) has many methods that provide a convenient abstraction for calling Fabric/Power BI REST APIs. You can see them here. In this blog, I will show how to use the
.refresh_dataset()which uses the Enhanced Refresh API to refresh Power BI semantic models, tables and partitions.
Read on for two ways to do it.
Comments closedPower Query allows you to merge (“join” in database terms) two tables together in a variety of different ways, including left and right anti joins. Unfortunately, as I found recently, anti joins don’t fold on SQL Server-related data sources, which can result in performance problems. Luckily there is a different way of doing anti joins that does fold.
An anti-join, by the way, is the type of thing you use when performing a NOT EXISTS operation: what is in driver table A that is not in lookup table B given some condition set?
Olivier Van Steenlandt builds the docs:
A few months ago, I chatted with colleagues about our Tabular Model. More specifically the lack of Tabular Model documentation. Since we were thinking about replacing our current model, I started to think about how to integrate documentation easily.
Having documentation is 1 thing, making sure it’s used is something completely different. And then we’re not even talking about keeping it up to date. My initial idea was to include the documentation task during the development phase. That said, time to get the thoughts into practice.
Read on to see what Olivier did.
Comments closedIn this video, I show off how easy it is to integrate Azure ML and Power BI, at least once you get past all of the trouble trying to integrate them.
I expected this to be easy. It turns out that the “make it look easy” depends on having several things in place already and using the correct (by which I mean “old”) deployment type.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi updates an older post:
In March 2018, I wrote a blogpost called Four Different Ways to Find Your Power BI Desktop Local Port Number. Last week, Zoe Doughlas from Microsoft left a comment reminding me of a fifth method to get the port which encouraged me to write this quick tip. Thanks to Zoe!
As the name suggests, the blog was about finding Power BI Desktop’s local port number. If you do not have any clue what I mean by local port number, I strongly suggest reading that blog.
Read on to see what that fifth method is.
Comments closedStephanie Bruno doesn’t need a built-in radar chart visual:
Radar (or spider) charts are a way to look at multiple metrics, perhaps with a different range of values for each metric, on a single chart. In this example, we’ll look at characteristics of Taylor Swift songs from a Spotify dataset (I have a daughter who still hasn’t forgiven me for not getting tickets to the Eras tour, so hopefully this will make up for it). A matrix with the radar SVG allows us to quickly compare these song characteristics (you can get the dataset and the descriptions of the characteristics here). There are existing radar/spider custom visual charts that are great, but none of them currently have a small multiple option, so we can’t use them to create the visual below, for example.
Click through to see the full example.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi automates report creation:
In Nov 2023, Microsoft announced Microsoft Fabric’s general availability and Public Preview of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. In a previous post, I explained what Copilot means to Power BI developers, which is valid for other Fabric developers such as data engineers and data scientists as Copilot for Fabric helps with those experiences as well. But the main focus of this blog post is to discuss the requirements, how to enable Copilot, and how to use it from a Power BI development point of view. So, this blog will not discuss other aspects of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. With that, let’s begin.
I haven’t been particularly impressed with the reports it generates, but I suppose this is like the proverbial bear riding a unicycle: it’s not a question of how well it does the task that makes it interesting, but rather that it does it at all.
Comments closedErik Svensen has a clever solution to a problem:
Last week I found a nice little hack that enables us to create a dynamic slicer with one or more levels and let the user pick the different levels in the slicer.
This has been very useful in one of our solutions for our clients where it can limit the number of slicers needed in a report.
Click through to see how to do this.
Comments closedIn this article I’m going to talk about the recent change that Microsoft has made in renaming the underlying database used in Power BI from the term “dataset” to “semantic model” (or as I would call it, “semantic data model”).
Read on to learn more about what the term means and why it makes sense in this context.
Comments closedDenny Cherry dips a toe into unfamiliar waters:
Recently, I upgraded our core Azure SQL Database for MySQL Single Server to Azure SQL Database for MySQL Flex Server. The migration was pretty straight forward and I simply did an export with mysqldump and then an import with MySQL. The problem came up when I tried to use Power BI (PBI) and connect to to the Azure SQL Database for MySQL Flex Server instead. When I tried to connect PBI to the Flex server I kept getting “The given key was not present in the dictionary”.
Read on to see what Denny did to resolve the issue.
Comments closed