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Category: Power BI

Power BI Admin Portal

Published 2016-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates looks at the Power BI tenant settings in the admin portal:

Keep in mind that these selections apply to all users across the entire tenant. At this time we can’t control them by groups or anything of that nature.

In addition to the above settings for controlling user experience, the Admin Portal is also the place for viewing usage metrics which are helpful for determining who runs what how often (it’s not everything we could possibly want to know, but it’s a good start). The other two options, manage users and audit logs, redirect you over to the Office 365 Admin Center.

Another week, another few dozen Power BI additions…

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Query Folding In Power Query

Published 2016-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad discusses the performance implications of query folding in M:

I can’t start talking about the issue without explaining what Query Folding is, so let’s start with that. Query Folding means translating Power Query (M) transformations into native query language of the data source (for example T-SQL). In other words; when you run Power Query script on top of a SQL Server database, query folding will translate the M script into T-SQL statements, and fetch the final results.

Click through for more details.  The advice here sounds pretty similar to what we get for optimizing Integration Services:  push as much of the heavy lifting onto well-optimized source queries as possible, particularly when it comes to filtering out rows.

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Flow From Power BI

Published 2016-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb uses Microsoft Flow’s REST API to pass messages via Power BI:

So basically, in this case I’ve used Flow to create a web service without writing a single line of code. I can see a lot of potential uses for this and I suspect I’ll be blogging about Flow a lot in the future. A word of warning though: do not try to use this as a way of updating a data source. As I mentioned last time, when you run your query you’ll find Power Query/Power BI calls the web service twice. For example, I created a Flow similar to the one above that used the Insert Row step to take text sent to a Request trigger and add it to a table in an Excel workbook, and of course every time I refreshed my query I got two identical rows in my Excel table.

Read the whole thing.

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Making Cortana Work

Published 2016-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell shows how to integrate Cortana with dbareports via Power BI:

When you start using Cortana to query your data you will find that at times it is very frustrating. My wife was in fits of giggles listening to me trying to record the video below as Cortana refused to understand that I was saying “servers” and repeatedly searched Bing for “service” Whilst you can negate the effect by using the alternate names for the Q and A settings it is still a bit hit and miss at times.

This is an interesting post.

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SSRS + Power BI Desktop

Published 2016-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Peterson walks through the steps to check out the SSRS 2016 preview which supports Power BI Desktop:

SSRS 2016 supporting Power BI Desktop reports is now in preview on Azure. But for many of us, we’d rather be able to review this in our own virtual environment, and more specifically – VirtualBox. We’ll now you can.

Our starting point was a blog posting my Microsoft employee Christopher Finlan outlining the steps needed to setup this preview in a Hyper-V environment. A great start, but what we wanted was the ability to run it Virtual Box. Fortunately for us, running the downloaded VHD in VirtualBox is much easier than Hyper-V.

Click through for the instructions.

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Power BI Streaming Datasets

Published 2016-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows how to use Streaming Datasets functionality in Power BI:

This query does the following:

  • Reads the data from the Sales table in the workbook

  • Converts the data to JSON (for some background on how it does this, see here)

  • Sends the data to the streaming dataset using Web.Contents() to make a POST request. See this post on how to make POST requests using Web.Contents() and this post on the technique I’m using to handle HTTP errors manually.

  • Returns a table containing a message saying whether the data was updated successfully or not, and the time of execution like so:

There are some limitations on what’s available now, but getting streaming data out to Power BI can make a near-real-time dashboard possible.

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Globe Map Visual

Published 2016-11-08 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight has part 24 of his custom visuals series:

  • The Globe Map is a 3D globe visualization.

  • It looks similar to the technology Power Map in Excel but lacks a few features like animating the data across time.

  • The map can have multiple data visualization layers on top of the map like a bar chart and a heat map.

Under the right circumstances, this can be a useful visualization.  I think its benefit is mostly limited to the “wow, this looks cool” effect.

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Grouping And Binning

Published 2016-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad discusses a couple new additions to Power BI, grouping and binning:

Binning is grouping a numeric field based on a division. This type of grouping is called Banding as well. For example you might have customers with different yearlyIncome range from $10,000 to $100,000 and you want to create a banding by $25,000. This will generate 4 groups of yearly income for you. This is exactly what Binning in Power BI does. Let’s look at the example.

Create a Table in Power BI Report and visualize YearlyIncome (from DimCustomer), and SalesAmount (from FactInternetSales) in it. Change the aggregation of YearlyIncome from Sum to Do Not Summarize as below

You could already build this yourself, but I’m glad they introduced this, as it’s an easier solution.

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Visualizing Checkins

Published 2016-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell uses Power BI to map where he’s been:

I am using the swarm API but the principle is the same for any other API that provides you with data. For example, I used the same principles to create the embedded reports on the PASS PowerShell Virtual Chapter page showing the status of the cards suggesting improvements to the sqlserver module for the product team to work on. Hopefully, this post will give you some ideas to work on and show you that it is quite easy to get excellent data visualisation from APIs

First up we need to get the data. I took a look at the Swarm developers page ( The Trello ishere by the way) I had to register for an app, which gave me a client id and a secret. I then followed the steps here to get my user token I was only interested in my own check ins so I used the steps under Token flow Client applications to get my access token which I used in an URL like this.

This post includes some Powershell and quite a few animated GIFs, making it easy to follow.

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