A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Paul Turley has a video showing how to use row-level security with Power BI:
The best method to implement row-level security in a published Power BI model or SSAS Tabular model consumed from the Power BI service will depend on will depend on your data and requirements. The method I demonstrate here is one of the most flexible approaches and one that I commonly use in my projects.
Click through to watch the video.
Comments closedDusty Ryan shows off What-If Analysis in Power BI:
Next, I’m going to create a calculated measure that multiples Revenue Last Year by Revenue Target % Value. Here’s the formula for the calculated measure:
Revenue Target = [Revenue Last Year] * [Revenue Target % Value]
Now I’m going to add this new measure, Revenue Target, to my line chart. And now when I use my slicer slider bar, I can dynamically change my Revenue Target line on the chart!
This is pretty cool. Definitely check out Dusty’s example; it’s something that might make many an executive happy.
Comments closedMeagan Longoria shifts our perspective by 90 degrees:
Back in January 2016, I wrote a blog post explaining a DAX workaround that allows you to put measures on rows in a matrix in a Power BI report. I’m happy to say that you no longer need my workaround because you can now natively put measures on rows in a matrix in both Power BI Desktop and PowerBI.com.
This is accomplished via a new formatting option for the matrix.
Click through to see how to pull this off.
Comments closedWhen we need to process streams of real-time data, Storm is a great contender. Examples of streaming data are the number of consumer clicks and navigations on a website, IIS or user logs, IoT data, and social network information. In all these scenarios, we use real-time data processing. Apache Storm can process real-time unbounded streams of data.
The term “unbounded” defines streams of data with no start or end. Here, the processing of data is continuous and in real-time. Twitter is a good example. Twitter data is continuous, has no start or end time, and is provided in real-time by millions of Twitter users around the world.
Storm wouldn’t rank in my top three technologies for doing this, but it certainly does the job.
Comments closedDevin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:
In this module you will learn how to use the Quadrant Chart Custom Visual. The Quadrant Chart is used to show a distribution of data across separate quadrants.
There’s an interesting mix of 2D layout plus bubble size. This is probably one of the better custom visuals available.
Comments closedMitchell Pearson shows how to slice results based on text input:
In this installment of the Problem, Design, Solution series we are going to show you how to perform a text search using slicers in Power BI, this simulates a “LIKE” type search. In the following screenshot you can see that when “Tax” is selected all records in the table that have “Tax” anywhere in the record are returned, likewise whenever “IT” is selected from the slicer all records in the table that have IT in them are returned. Hope you enjoy this post!
Click through for the explanation, followed by a video that walks you through the process.
Comments closedGinger Grant shows how to build a dynamic date dimension in Power BI using either DAX or M:
Recently I needed to create a date dimension for a Power BI model as there was not one in the source database. There are two different ways that I could do this, using DAX from the Modeling Tab within the Data View or using M via the Query Editor window. As a general rule, when it is possible data manipulation should be done in M as it offers a greater level of compression. In this case though I am using a function in DAX, which is not the same as creating a calculated column.
Read on to see code examples for each method, as well as Ginger’s analysis.
Comments closedJesse Gorter explains why you shouldn’t overwhelm your dashboard chart users with colors:
In this example we use a signal color for the past too. Do you notice how the usage of green distracts from the current week which is a red? This suggest we are doing great overall even though at this time, we are doing not so great. It is up to you to decide what you want to communicate. If you are a sports team showing the rank during the season, only the current position would be important. In sales, having 30 weeks of outstanding sales above the target and the current week selling slightly under, it would make sense to show the signal color for the past.
Not to mention making it easier for people with CVD to read your report, something with which the red-green scheme does not do great.
Comments closedYou can push data to the Power BI streaming dataset API in a few ways… but they generally boil down to these 3 options…
- Directly call the API from code
- You could use something like Azure Function Apps to iteratively pull NEW rows that land in a SQL table, create the API Call, and push the new data directly to the API
- See here info on Azure Functions – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/
- Directly call the API from an Azure Logic App
- Azure Logic Apps are cool as for simple functions like this you can do pretty much the same as in the code option above but just using drag/drop and WITHOUT writing any code – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/logic-apps/
- Use Azure Stream Analytics to push data into the API
- This is leveraging the solution in my previous post to push data from SQL CDC and into an Azure Event Hub, then via Azure Stream Analytics to Power BI
- Azure Stream Analytics – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/stream-analytics/
- Azure Event Hubs – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/event-hubs/
This blog post extends on my previous post – and thus I will be leveraging Option #3 above.
Definitely worth checking out if you are interested in real-time Power BI dashboards.
Comments closedGinger Grant runs into a problem with some of the custom visuals (not) in the Office Store:
This week I decided to do a demo using the Aquarium custom visual. As readers of my blog know, I have used the custom visual before, but it has been a while and I have changed PCs since then. No worries I can always go download the visual from the store, right? Wrong. The aquarium visual is not available on the new store. Neither is Image Viewer, if one is looking to add that into your latest Power BI report it is not available. What happened?
Read on to learn why the aquarium is missing. RIP aquarium (hopefully only temporarily).
Comments closed