Category: Power BI

Craig Porteous show how to cluster the Power BI Data Gateway to allow for disaster recovery:

I love PowerShell and I even wrote a module with functions to query Power BI metadata but there should always be another way to get this vital information.

The documentation I mentioned earlier points you to a PowerShell module file included in the November update. You can load this file & use the commands they provide to get information about your Gateway cluster and its members or make changes to clusters.

If it’s important enough to use, it’s important enough to include in a disaster recovery plan.

Imke Feldmann has created an M function to get the set of dates from a start date to an end date at some fixed interval in Power BI:

This function takes 3 parameters:

1. From- or Start-date
2. To- or End-date
3. A selection of ONE of these intervals: Year, Quarter, Month, Week or Day

All dates will be created at the end of the chosen interval: So if you want to analyse events with a duration for example, where you want to transform your data to show one day per (monthly) event, this function generates month-end-dates for every month within the timespan. Please not that if the To-/End-date is within a month, the last element of the list will NOT be that day, but the day of the end of that month.

The default-value for the 3rd parameter is “Day”, so if you omit the specification, the function will return a list of all days in between.

Click through for the script and some explanation of the code.

Jason Thomas shows how to embed an image into Power BI without using an image URL:

And I completely understood his concerns as I had the same issue with some of the public facing reports that I made, for eg., the US Election report that I had made 1 year back. The images for the candidates were sourced from Wikipedia and certain candidates like George Bush, Donald Trump, etc. are not displayed, because the image URLs are no longer valid.

This is where you can use my workaround to embed the images within the report by converting the images into Base64.

It’s an interesting approach when you need to solve this problem.

Matt Allington contrasts the EARLIER function with the EARLIEST function in DAX:

The EARLIER function by default refers to the row context that immediately preceded the current row context being considered.  In the examples used here there have only been 2 row contexts, the outer and the inner.  Given there are only 2, when using EARLIER within the inner row context it is always referring to the outer row context.  In this case, EARLIER and EARLIEST refer to the same outer row context.  If there are more than 2 row contexts, the EARLIER function accesses the previous row context by default (starting from the inner and moving out) and the EARLIEST function refers to the outermost row context. But did you know that EARLIER has a second optional parameter?

Read the whole thing.

Matt Allington solves a particular associative purchasing behavior problem:

The requirement is to be able to select a single customer from a list of customers and see what products they have purchased.  Then the next things is to be able to compare sales of this same group of products across all customers while ignoring sales of all other products.  Stated another way, the report should show sales from all customers but only for the products purchased by the original selected customer.  Now there is a “cheats” solution to this problem using visual level filters – more on that later.  The purpose of this article is to show a DAX only solution.

Read Matt’s answer, but also check out the comments for an even better solution if you’re using a proper star schema.

Gogula Aryalingam shows how to access Power BI usage metrics for a report or dashboard:

Each app workspace gets its own report usage metrics data set, it’s just that you don’t see it when you are in the portal. In order to access it (at least for now) you need to use Power BI Desktop. When you open Power BI Desktop, you need to sign-in with the appropriate login, and then choose Power BI service from Get Data menu item. You then get listed with a set of app workspaces; within each you would find a list of all the datasets that were every published to each of the workspaces. Additionally, Power BI will also give you two more datasets: Report Usage Metrics Model and Dashboard Usage Metrics Model. However, these data models will only show up if you had attempted to view usage metrics at least once on one of the reports of the app workspace.

Read the whole thing.

Melissa Coates has a great checklist to help you figure out if your Power BI dashboard is done:

Auto time intelligence is enabled by default, and it applies to each individual PBIX file (there’s not a global option). For most datetime columns that exist in the dataset, a hidden date table is created in the model to support time-oriented DAX calculations. This is great functionality for newer users, or if you have a very simple data model. However, if you typically utilize a standard Date table, then you will want to disable the hidden date tables to reduce the file size. (Tip: You can view the hidden date tables if you connect to the PBIX via DAX Studio.)

There are a lot of good things to think about here.