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Category: Power BI

Tracking Power BI Import Throughput Variance

Published 2023-07-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series on using Log Analytics with Power BI:

In the second post in this series I discussed a KQL query that can be used to analyse Power BI refresh throughput at the partition level. However, if you remember back to the first post in this series, it’s actually possible to get much more detailed information on throughput by looking at the ProgressReportCurrent event, which fires once for every 10000 rows read during partition refresh.

Here’s yet another mammoth KQL query that you can use to analyse the ProgressReportCurrent event data:

Click through for the KQL query, an explanation of how it works, and some practical examples.

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Near-Real Time Reports with Power BI and KQL

Published 2023-07-28 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter can’t wait:

Real time and near real time are subjective terms.

For some businesses, real time is up to 1 ms latency and for other cases 10 minutes latency is considered close to real time.

Lately I encountered a few cases in which Page refresh in PBI was used on a dataset using Direct Query against Kusto/ADX/RTA.

In this article I’ll cover a few best practices to ensure that such an implementation will be successful and conserve on resources.

I’m a bit of a stickler for the term “real-time” so I appreciate Dany’s preface here. The way I learned real-time versus online (versus batch) is, online is when you expect a result quickly but real-time is something you’d put in a fighter plane. And it turns out that, when you explain what the bill will look like, very few companies have the need for true real-time results.

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Testing Multi-User PBI Row-Level Security in Excel

Published 2023-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers performs a test:

I have been doing a fair amount of work on Row Level Security (RLS) where the requirements were quite complex to implement.

Once I had completed the implementation of RLS there were two outstanding items I needed to test.

  1. Make sure that the users are only viewing the data they should see.
  2. Ensure that the performance of a selected user is still as fast as possible.

I would like to mention that this certainly can be done using DAX studio to get the query performance stats, I wanted to test this using Excel.

Gilbert had to do a fair amount here, but there’s a nice walkthrough indicating how to do it all.

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Variety in Power BI Bar Chart Designs

Published 2023-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler builds a series of charts from the Power BI bar chart visual:

These are only a few examples; there are many more. Knowing how to create these different bar chart variants is important to address these use-cases. While many of these visuals can be created custom in Deneb or from SVGs, you can also create them in the core visuals. However, it’s important to know the limitations of the core visuals in Power BI, and when this “Macguyvering” of the core visual formatting settings goes too far.

Kurt gives us a template (in pbib format) and explains various options we have around customizing visuals, not just taking what’s built in.

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Power BI Dataset Data Source Credential Options

Published 2023-07-25 by Kevin Feasel

Angela Henry puts together a list:

If we are using enterprise-wide datasets, we don’t want Power BI datasets owned by individuals; we want them to be owned by a Service Principle so they aren’t relying on specific individuals when things go sideways (and because we all want to go on vacation at some point). However, it’s not always clear on what credentials will actually be used for our data sources in our datasets when using a Service Principle. In a previous post, I talked about how to set up a service principle to take over a dataset when using data gateways, but one of the pre-requisites I listed was that your data sources needed to be configured with appropriate credentials. That’s where this post comes in.

You essentially have three options for data source credentials, depending on your data source type.

Click through for that list of three options, as well as the trade-offs inherent in each.

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Tracking High-Level Power BI Import Throughput Stats

Published 2023-07-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb collects some measurements:

In the first post in this series I described the events in Log Analytics that can be used to understand throughput – the speed that Power BI can read from your dataset when importing data from it – during refresh. While the individual events are easy to understand when you look at a simple example they don’t make it easy to analyse the data in the real world, so here’s a KQL query that takes all the data from all these events and gives you one row per partition per refresh:

Click through for the KQL script, as well as what it all means and what you can get out of it.

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Power BI: Git Integration vs Deployment Pipelines

Published 2023-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld notes a chemical reaction:

Together with the introduction of Microsoft Fabric a long-awaited feature for Power BI also became available. Git integration now allows us to connect your workspace to a git repository to sync the meta data from your Power BI dataset and report between the workspace and the repository.

At the same time, Power BI deployment pipelines are around. The pipelines help you to move content between workspaces from Development to Test and finally to Production. The question that arises, when to use what? And how do they complement each other, or maybe even clash with each other?

Read on for Marc’s thoughts across these two topics.

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Creating a Power BI Deployment Pipeline

Published 2023-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank does some deployment:

In part 4 of this series, I introduced a standard pattern for organising report files and pipelines, with a standard process for creating new reports. Repeatable patterns and processes are great candidates for automation, and in this post I’ll build a report creation process that automatically configures a new report and creates its deployment pipeline .

This video (5m31s) shows you the process in action, from creating a new report to seeing it deployed automatically to Power BI:

Click through for the video, as well as plenty of written instruction.

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Viewing the Power BI Format Pane during On-Object Interaction

Published 2023-07-19 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers is missing something:

I have enabled the new On-Object Interaction for the formatting pane in Power BI and while it is constantly improving there are times when I would like to have the good old formatting pane available.

I have also found that sometimes when you create a new visual there is no option to format it as shown below.

There’s a workaround to this, so check it out.

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