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Category: Power BI

An Overview of DAX Visual Calculations

Published 2024-02-29 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev takes us through visual calculations in DAX:

Suppose you need a measure that calculates the difference between the product categories in the order they were sorted in the visual. Implementing this as a regular DAX measure is a challenge. Yet, if we had a way to work with the cells in the visual, we can easily find a way to get this to work. Ideally, this would work similar in Excel, but DAX doesn’t know a think about cell references. However, visual calculations do.

As always, Teo gives us a view of the good, the bad, and the ugly with this feature.

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dataConvergeDefinition and DirectQuery Partitions

Published 2024-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb talks about hybrid tables:

Hybrid tables – tables which contain both Import mode and DirectQuery mode partitions to hold data from different time periods – have been around for a while. They are useful in cases where your historic data doesn’t change but your most recent data changes very frequently and you need to reflect those changes in your reports; you can also have “reverse hybrid tables” where the latest data is in Import mode but your historic data (which may not be queried often but still needs to be available) is in DirectQuery mode. Up to now they had a problem though: even when you were querying data that was in the Import mode partition, Power BI still sent a SQL query to the DirectQuery partition and that could hurt performance. That problem is now solved with the new dataCoverageDefinition property on the DirectQuery partition.

Read on to see what dataCoverageDefinition does.

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Power BI Visual Calculations Now Available

Published 2024-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld jumps into a new feature:

You might have seen some buzz around already, although the official blog post is not out yet, the February release of Power BI desktop is already available to download. After a month waiting (traditionally, there is no January update) it has some great new features in it! Not only Tabular Model Definition Language is there now, but more towards solution development, we now have Power BI Visual Calculations! It was announced for a while already, the more excited I am that we finally can start exploring Visual Calculations in practice!

Read on to learn what a visual calculation is and why it’s a big deal.

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Programmatic Power BI Datamart Refreshes

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld looked like he was going to violate Betteridge’s Law of Headlines but ultimately doesn’t:

Last week, I was attending and speaking at the first ever Fabric February, a great in-person conference dedicated to Microsoft Fabric taking place in Oslo – Norway. (I recommend attending future editions of this event!) During the conference, someone walked up to me and asked if I knew a way to programmatically refresh Power BI Datamarts. Cause I shared many PowerShell or API related blog posts in the past, this person (apologies, I don’t remember your name) asked if I knew a way to automate Datamarts as well.

Read on to see what Marc tried along the way.

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Adding Pagination to Bar Charts

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Riqo Chaar turns the page:

Good User Experience (UX) design is crucial in enabling stakeholders to maximise the insights that they are able to derive from Power BI reports.  One common challenge of report design is effectively managing and displaying large datasets in bar charts without overwhelming the user. This article will describe the process behind a method that can mitigate this issue: adding pagination to bar chart visuals. This visual will provide the following functionality:

  • A number of categories filter: users can specify how many categories they would like to see per bar chart page
  • A page filter: users can navigate to different pages to see more categories

Click through to see how. I tend to prefer Power BI dashboards be glanceable, so pagination defeat that purpose to some extent. But so does having to scroll through a large list.

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Reading Parquet Metadata in Power Query

Published 2024-02-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb taps into the source:

There’s a new M function in Power Query in Power BI that allows you to read the data from a Parquet file: Parquet.Metadata. It’s not documented yet and it’s currently marked as “intended for internal use only” but I’ve been told I can blog about it. Here’s an example of how to use it:

Click through to see what you can get in a Parquet file. This is part of the secret of why the Parquet file format is so fast.

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New Power BI Course

Published 2024-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger has gone indie:

The goal of this course is to orient you to the various pieces of Power BI, identify the source of problem, and give some general tips for solving them. If you are stuck and need help now, this should help.

Note! This is an early launch. Modules 1 and 2 are available now, and the remaining ones will be coming out weekly.

You can see the first module of Eugene’s course on YouTube and throw money at him to get the rest as he rolls it out. And if you do decide to throw money at him, load a bunch of pennies into a cannon and blast them at him, then tell him I sent you.

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Performance Costs of using Calculated Columns in Power BI Composite Models

Published 2024-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb share a warning:

I don’t have anything against the use of calculated columns in Power BI semantic models in general but you do need to be careful using them with DirectQuery mode. In particular when you have a DirectQuery connection to another Power BI semantic model – also known as a composite model on a Power BI semantic model – it’s very easy to cause serious performance problems with calculated columns. Let’s see a simple example of why this is.

Read on for Chris’s example.

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The State of CI/CD in Power BI

Published 2024-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley violates Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

The answer – finally – is a resounding YES! It has been a long road and the path to implementing Continuous Integration & Delivery (CI/CD) in all of its forms for Power BI is still a journey, but the capabilities are now a reality. This broad category includes a range of features and capabilities related to managing project files with version control and the ability to share and collaborate with other development team members. Additionally, we also have the ability to assign individual components of a solution to different team members who then check-out files and develop features, check them back in and merge changes into a feature branch. In enterprise-class projects, having these capabilities enables true Development Operations or DevOps: a process for managing iterative development, testing and deployment with automated builds, using a central process management tool. Implementing full-fledged DevOps is a big lift for most Business Intelligence professionals but the core concept of code version control is essential for any durable project.

Read on for Paul’s thoughts on the importance of source control and how you can pull this off.

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