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Category: Power BI

Power BI Authentication to Synapse via Sharable Cloud Connection

Published 2023-11-08 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English continues a series:

This is a bit overdue and a follow up to a few other posts I have regarding using Service Principal authentication with Power BI reports Power BI using Service Principal with Synapse SQL Pool and Power BI using Service Principal with Synapse Data Explorer (Kusto) Pool.

With the other two posts I did last year I had to use the SQL Server ODBC driver to get that to work and the big downside to that is that you need to use a gateway with that. Well in this case we are going to take a look at the new Shareable Cloud Connections that were announced earlier this year Streamlining cloud connection management for datasets, paginated reports, and other artifacts | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

Click through to see what you need to get it working.

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Calculating Current-Period Month, Quarter, and Year-to-Date in Power BI

Published 2023-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show off their intelligence:

Time intelligence functions such as month-to-date (MTD), quarter-to-date (QTD), and year-to-date (YTD) in DAX operate relative to the current filter context. Their outcome depends on the filter applied, making them both adaptable for various periods and useful for comparisons. But, if you wish to showcase the most recent data – for the “current” period – there is a complication: without the proper filter, you may not get the data you aim for.

Read on to see what they mean and how you can avoid this issue.

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Run-Length Encoding in Power BI

Published 2023-11-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb performs some experiments:

Recently I was involved in an interesting discussion on Twitter X about how partitioning a table in a Power BI dataset semantic model can affect compression and therefore its size and query performance. You can read the thread here. It got me thinking: is there a way to get more detail on how well compression, and in particular run-length encoding (RLE from hereon), is working for a column when you’re using Import mode or Direct Lake? After a bit of research I found out there is, so let’s see some examples that illustrate what I learned.

The results are interesting and Chris explains why we see what we do.

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A PBIX Report for Microsoft Fabric’s Support Page

Published 2023-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers checks the status of Microsoft Fabric services:

What I wanted to show you is that I have created a Power BI report which shows the Microsoft Fabric Support page details.

I created one for Power BI which I receive daily, and it is great to get the subscription so that I am aware of any potential issues or changes affecting the Power BI Service.

I now have done the same thing for the Microsoft Fabric Support page; I have enabled the report subscription which I get daily.

Click through to see what it looks like and how you can get a copy of it for your own nefarious purposes.

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Pulling XMLA-Modified Power BI Datasets into Source Control

Published 2023-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has a fix:

Have you ever found yourself stuck with a modified Power BI dataset, thanks to those well-intentioned but troublesome changes you made through the XMLA endpoint? Does that sound familiar to you? What seemed like a convenient solution quickly turned into a frustrating challenge when you encountered the error message in the Power BI Service.

You wanted to seamlessly continue your development journey in Power BI Desktop, avoiding the need for a full data refresh or just quickly making that one small change, but now hitting a roadblock when trying to download PBIX file. The error message declared that your data model had been modified with the XMLA endpoint. But now, with Git integration you can overcome this challenge!

Read on to see how.

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Formatting DAX Expressions with Python

Published 2023-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar makes the code a bit more readable:

There is an old Italian saying “If it’s not formatted, it is not DAX”

When you get the list of measures from SemPy, it’s not formatted and is hard to read and understand. Thankfully, the SQLBI team has made the DAX parser and the formatter available via an API. I wrote a quick function to return the formatted DAX expression of a measure. You can either pass a DAX expression or the FabricDataFrame returned by fabric.list_measures()

Click through for the process, including the Python code to do the work.

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New Release: Power BI VS Code Extension

Published 2023-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl has been busy:

I am working a lot with Power BI in my daily business and there have always been a couple of things that bothered me since the very beginning. Most of this is related to the web UI and its usability, mainly that you need too many clicks to get to where you want (e.g. viewing Datasets refreshes) but also that some features are simply not exposed in the UI that are possible with the Power BI REST APIs (e.g. rebinding a report to another dataset). So I thought there must be some better way to do this and make management and usability of Power BI easier and I came up with the idea for a Visual Studio Code extension for Power BI to close this gap.

Read on to see how it works, how you can get it, and what Gerhard has in mind for it over the short term.

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ApplicationContext Updates for Power BI

Published 2023-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shares an update with us:

If you’re a fan of using Log Analytics for monitoring Power BI activity, then you may have noticed there’s some new data in the ApplicationContext column of the PowerBIDatasetsWorkspace table. Up until recently the ApplicationContext column only contained IDs that identify the report and the visual that generated a DAX query (something I blogged about here); it now contains additional information on the type of Power BI report that generated the query and an ID for the user session.

This is quite useful for seeing not just that people are using your Power BI services, but also who and what they are using to consume the information. Though do beware Chris’s warning about consumption method before you get too excited.

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Finding Power BI Report Visual IDs

Published 2023-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb goes digging for IDs:

Back in 2021 I wrote a post showing how you can link a DAX query generated by a Power BI report in Log Analytics to a visual in a Power BI report. In that post I showed how you can get the unique IDs for each visual in a report using Performance Analyzer, an approach which works but has drawbacks. Then, in 2022 I wrote another post showing how you can get the same IDs using the Power BI Embedded Analytics Playground, which again works but isn’t perfect. After that, this August, my colleague Rui Romano pinged me on Teams to point out that the new Power BI Desktop Developer Mode and the .pbip file format provides the best and easiest way to get these IDs.

Read on to learn more, but also check out Mike Rudzinski’s comment for a fourth technique.

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