A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chris Webb gives Internet sleuths something to chew on:
The ever-vigilant folks on the internet have spotted that there’s a new M function in the latest versions of Power BI and Excel: Module.Versions. This function, at the time of writing, returns a record with a single field in that contains the version number of the Power Query engine currently in use.
Click through for an example of calling the function and what it returns as of right now.
Comments closedThe Synthelize blog performs a compare-and-contrast:
In this article we will compare the two main ways to manipulate data in Power BI – Power Query and DAX (Data Analysis Expressions). Along the way we will look at the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and give suggestions on how to make the most of each method.
Click through for the comparison. H/T Toby Basalla.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld tries out a feature:
It has been roughly two years since the last update on the Power BI Model Documenter, an external tool that I developed to auto-document Power BI Semantic Models. Back then, we still called it datasets though. Looking at the stats of my website, the model documenter and related posts/pages are still most read on my website – every month again.
As the technology has kept on improving, there are new options that will help you to kick-start generating documentation about your semantic model. In this post, I will elaborate on how you can use AI in Power BI to enrich your Model Documenter output, by helping you describing the measures you’ve added to your semantic model.
Read on for a demonstration, as well as what the auto-generated results get right and wrong.
Comments closedChris Webb does a bit of sleuthing:
A few months ago I blogged about the new limits available for the Maximum Connections Per Data Source property in Premium and why the number of connections that a DirectQuery semantic model can open to a data source is so important for report performance. At that time, however, there was no way for you to know whether the performance of your reports was being affected by a lack of available connections. The good news is that, with the announcement this week of the new Execution Metrics event in Log Analytics and Profiler, you can now see when this is happening.
Read on for an illustration of the problem and how you can resolve it.
Comments closedKenneth Omorodion demands order:
Sorting values on a Power BI visual is a common requirement for reporting. For example, it is standard practice to sort months from January to December when months are represented in a visual. This might also be required in a slicer visual. In both cases, it is easy to sort when it’s a continuous value, like months, years, quarters, or alphabetically.
However, in Power BI, business users might require a slicer visual with string values to be ordered in a way that makes it easier for them to make a slicer selection based on what they want to view on a report page. The issue here is that string values are not continuous in nature, and we cannot leverage the usual sorting approaches. This tip will demonstrate this problem and an approach to resolve it.
Read on for the solution.
Comments closedChris Webb has a public service announcement:
Since the announcement in March that Power BI Premium P-SKUs are being retired and that customers will need to migrate to F-SKU capacities intead I have been asked the same question several times:
Why are you forcing me to migrate to Fabric???
This thread on Reddit is a great example. What I want to make clear in this post is the following:
Moving from P-SKU capacities to F-SKU capacities is not the same thing as enabling Fabric in your tenant
Click through for Chris’s explanation. Also check out the comments section for this one, as there are plenty of questions and responses in there.
Comments closedKristyna Ferris shows how to refresh a Power BI data source from Excel files in Sharepoint:
Ever since Excel made its debut in the 1980’s, it has been used as a quick way for end users to input and manipulate data on their own without going through the extensive data engineering and data ingestion processes. With Power BI coming on to the scene in 2015, it quickly became the go-to visualization tool for various data sources. These two powerful tools can be used together to drive customized insights for your organization. By uploading your Excel file into SharePoint/OneDrive, you can easily connect and set up a refresh to a Power BI report in the Power BI Service without an on-premises gateway.
Read on to see how it all works.
Comments closedReza Rad checks out a new visual:
The Button Slicer is one of the recent visuals that is very helpful in taking your report layout and visualization to the next level. Although this visual has been available for some time, many are still unfamiliar with its features. In this article and video, I’ll take you through this visual, its features, and how you can use them to have a better Power BI report layout.
Read on to see how (at least until it’s out of preview) you can get access to the visual, as well as what you can do with it.
Comments closedChris Webb provides an explanation:
I have always wondered what the partialBatch option for the commitMode parameter in the Enhanced Refresh API does exactly. There is some documentation here and here but I was curious to find out more as part of the research I’m doing for my ongoing series on Power BI refresh memory errors, in case it was useful for reducing overall memory usage (spoiler: it may be). In this post I’ll share what I found out after running some tests.
Read on for the demonstration and explanation, as well as tips on when you might want to use it.
Comments closedChris Webb continues a series on Power BI semantic model memory errors:
In the Power BI Service, Import mode models are stored offline and paged into memory only when they are needed – for example because someone runs a report that uses the model as its source. As discussed in my last post, though, there’s a limit on the amount of memory that a model can use which varies by the size and type of capacity you’re using using. There’s also an extra complication in that Import mode models are stored offline in a compressed format that means the Power BI Service doesn’t know exactly how much memory will be needed if the entire model needs to be held in memory. As a result there is an additional limit enforced on the size of the offline copy of Import mode models to ensure they don’t use too much memory when they are eventually paged in.
Read on to learn more about this setting and what it looks like if you trigger the error.
Comments closed