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Category: Power BI

Planning A Power BI Enterprise Deployment

Published 2017-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates announces a new whitepaper co-authored with Chris Webb:

I’m excited to share that a new technical whitepaper I co-authored with Chris Webb is published. It’s called Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment. It was really a fun experience to write something a bit more formal than blog posts. My interest in Power BI lies in how to successfully deploy it, manage it, and what the end-to-end story is especially from the perspective of integration with other data assets in an organization. Power BI has grown to be a huge, wide set of features so we got a little verbose at just over 100 pages.

It is a beefy whitepaper.  I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it’s now on my list.

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Power BI Premium Released

Published 2017-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Dustin Ryan reports that Power BI Premium is now generally available:

Microsoft stated that Power BI Premium would be GA late Q2 of 2017, which could mean nothing else aside from June. Well, today is the day that Power BI Premium, along with Power BI Report Server, are generally available.

Lucky for me, I have a user on a tenant with Power BI Premium capacity available for me to use. When you first log into your tenant after Power BI Premium capacity has been purchased, you are presented with the following welcome screen which includes a link to learn more about Premium capacity.

The Power BI team continues to be busy.

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Allowing Native Queries In An M Project

Published 2017-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Cedric Charlier ran into an error running native queries in his Visual Studio M project:

I was just using it since a few days when I found an interesting case. My query had a native query

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Sql.Database(
   “server”,
   “db”,
   [Query = “select * from myTable where field=” & value]
)

When I tried to execute it, I received a message from the Power Query SDK that

The evaluation requires a permission that has not been provided. Data source kind: ‘SQL’. Permission kind: ‘NativeQuery’.

Read on for the solution.

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Decomposing Power BI Desktop Files

Published 2017-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad wants to see exactly where the M scripts in a Power BI Desktop file are stored:

Talking about Power Query; DataMashup file is all you need. It includes everything from the structure of queries, tables, parameters, list, to the actual M scripts behind the scene. You can Fetch all of these information from this single file. Let’s look at the structure of this file. If you open this file with a text editor. you will see some binary things first (which are related to the zipped nature of this file), and also some XML information. Yes, this is a zipped file. Let’s start with unzipping it into a folder. I’ve done that with 7-zip application.

This is an interesting peek under the covers of a PBIX file.

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Creating Nicer Reports

Published 2017-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reid Havens has a few tips for making Power BI reports look nicer:

This is less of a single applied step as it is multiple formatting practices applied throughout the report. I’ve already hit on this subject a little bit in the two previous Power BI visual design practices in regards to using complimentary colors. The two key takeaways in this section are object formatting and color coordination.

Of all my best practices I’m showcasing here I’d say this one is the most subjective. However I think that maintaining complimentary colors goes a long ways to creating a professional looking report. I also have a strong dislike for the default title design for visualizations in Power BI. By default it is left aligned and a grey color (AGAIN…hard to read!). I center that sucker and color the background. An added benefit to coloring the title background is it actually forces me to make sure my objects are aligned, otherwise it is VERY noticeable now if they aren’t.

Definitely read the comments on this one, as some of these tips are subjective.

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Using Hive As A Power BI Data Source

Published 2017-06-05 by Kevin Feasel

Ust Oldfield shows how to use Hive via Azure HDInsight as a data source for Power BI:

As Hive is part of the Azure HDInsight stack it would be tempting to select the HDInsight or Hadoop connector when you’re getting data. However, note HDFS in brackets beside the Azure HDInsight and Hadoop File options as this means that you’ll be connecting to the underlying data store, which can be Azure Data Lake Store or Azure Blob Storage – both of which use HDFS architectures.

But this doesn’t help when you want to access a Hive table. In order to access a Hive table you will first of all need to install the Hive ODBC driver from Microsoft. Once you’ve downloaded and installed the driver you’ll be able to make your connection to Hive using the ODBC connector in PowerBI.

Read the whole thing.  Connecting to Hive is pretty easy.

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Trimming The Fat From Power BI Data Models

Published 2017-06-05 by Kevin Feasel

Philip Seamark shows how things like getting rid of ID columns can reduce a Power BI data model’s size significantly:

Once saved, the Power BI file size was 289MB!  Is this good for 10 million rows?  It’s certainly better than the 360MB CSV file but not by much.  Certainly not close to the 10:1 compression claimed to be achievable using the SSAS Tabular engine used by Power BI.

I think we can do better than that….

Read on to see the specific optimizations, turning this from a 289 MB data model into a 9 MB data model.

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Kerberos Constrained Delegation On Power BI Report Server

Published 2017-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Regis Baccaro shows how to set up constrained delegation when connecting Power BI Report Server to a SQL Server instance or Analysis Services cube:

In many demo cases, you will have an all-in-one server where you have installed Power BI Report Server, SSAS (tabular or multidimensional) and SQL Server. In those cases you don’t need any form for credentials delegation since the Report Server is on the same box than the data source.

But there are scenarios where you have a distributed environment like the one I have on my VMs demo domain and for jumping around servers and passing credentials around, you need to setup Kerberos Constrained Delegation. Furthermore you will need protocol transition for it to work in Power BI Report Server.

Read on for step-by-step instructions showing how to do this.

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