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Category: Power BI

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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Better Reports with the 3-30-300 Rule

Published 2024-06-04 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler comes up with a good rule:

Effective reports and dashboards should enable users to quickly answer their data questions so that they can focus on their primary business tasks and responsibilities. To help you design effective reports, we introduce the 3-30-300 rule for information design. The 3-30-300 rule is a straightforward and practical approach for you to produce efficient report layouts by structuring reports in a functionally hierarchical way. This rule concisely paraphrases the visual information-seeking mantra from Ben Schneidermann (1996). To make it easier to understand for Power BI developers, we express this rule with respect to approximately how long it should take users to get certain information or perform certain tasks in a report.

It’s a clever mnemonic and Kurt does a good job of showing how you could implement it.

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Power BI Command Memory Limit

Published 2024-06-04 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb is overdrawn at the memory bank:

Continuing my series on Power BI model memory errors (see part 1 and part 2), in this post I will look at the Command Memory Limit which restricts the amount of memory that XMLA commands like Create, Alter and most importantly Refresh and can use.

If you’ve ever been told that your semantic model should consume less than half the amount of memory available to it because memory consumption can double during a full refresh, then that is because of the Command Memory Limit. 

Read on to learn more about the Command Memory Limit and why this advice exists.

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Power BI Studio 2.0 Released

Published 2024-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl moves fast and doesn’t break things:

Due to the great feedback I have received for the first version of my VSCode extension to mange Power BI objects from within VSCode I decided to continue working on it and am finally happy to share that I am releasing a new version – v2.0!

If you already had the previous version installed in VSCode, you do not have to do anything as it will update automatically. If you are a new user, you can install it from the gallery or search for “Power BI Studio” in the VSCode extensions tab.

Click through for the list of updates, as well as how you can install the Visual Studio Code extension.

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Dynamic Historical Partition Refresh in Power BI

Published 2024-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld digs into partition refreshing:

I’ve heard the question pretty often from customers: “You told me to use incremental refresh, but how can I regularly run a full load or refresh onder partitions?” Well, there are perfect ways to do this using Tabular Editor or SQL Server Management Studio. But this often includes manual work to trigger the processing.

Today, this question was asked again to me. I thought, there should be a smarter way to do this. Since I recently explored more in the wonderful world of Fabric Notebooks and Python, decided to dive a bit deeper in this world and see if it is possible to script something like this using Semantic Link. And obviously, the answer is “Yes!”

Read on to learn how to do it with a bit of Python and Microsoft Fabric’s Semantic Link library (sempy).

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