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Category: Power BI

DirectQuery Data Modeling

Published 2023-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Cockington share some advice:

From my experience, most people who have reports built on a DirectQuery connection into their data source did so because of a lack of understanding of what the DirectQuery connection was designed to achieve.  For the vast majority of reports, Import mode is the best solution for working with data in Power BI.  DirectQuery should really only ever be applied when you are trying to solve one of the following challenges.

  1. Real-time Data – you need to see the latest available data from the source
  2. Huge Datasets – you have many billions of rows of data (more than 10Gb) so you just can’t import it into Power BI
  3. Regulatory Compliance – the data must stay in the source for data security/privacy reasons

Click through for more information.

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Calculating Moving Averages with DAX

Published 2023-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati smooths the curve:

The calculation will be done for all rows, till we don’t have the anymore data ahead ( 3 rows ahead) as you can see it will finished on row 2018 as 2018 is the average of 2018, 2019 and 2020.

so in the moving average we will miss some data point but replacing with average of data.

Less data point but help us to see a clear trend.

Click through to see how to do this. Moving averages is really good for the reports in which you want to get a rough magnitude but don’t care about exact values and don’t want oscillations to throw you off. For example, if I need to know how many seats to reserve for an event, I might use a moving average of the last several events as my baseline, rather than the prior event’s number.

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Power BI Theme Generator Updates

Published 2023-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Seth Bauer has some updates for us:

Gradients add depth and visual interest to your reports and dashboards. With our enhanced gradient selections, you can now choose from a wide array of gradient styles to create eye-catching visualizations. Whether you prefer subtle transitions or bold color shifts, the Power BI Tips Theme Generator has you covered. Unleash your creativity and elevate your designs with stunning gradient effects.

Not all of the updates are in the free plan, though some of them are.

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Contrasting Lakehouse, Warehouse, and Datamart in Fabric & Power BI

Published 2023-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad disambiguates three terms:

Three types of objects in the Microsoft Fabric have similarities in what they can do for an analytics system. These three are; Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, and Power BI Datamart. All three objects provide storage for the data, which can be loaded into them using an ETL process and read using something like a Power BI report. In this article and video, I’ll explain the actual differences and how to choose the best option for your implementation and architecture.

Reza does a good job explaining when each of the three fit in and even has a nice chart to work out which one you might want to use.

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What’s New in Power BI: May 2023 Edition

Published 2023-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Ronald Kraijesteijn talks about some of the more interesting updates:

In May 2023, Microsoft announced a series of updates and new features to its Power BI platform, aiming to improve user experience, accessibility, and performance. As a skilled blog writer, I will provide you with a comprehensive summary of these updates, covering all areas from reporting and modeling to embedded capabilities and accessibility improvements.

There’s a lot on this list to check out.

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Power BI: Unable to Access the Dataset

Published 2023-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven troubleshoots an error:

I opened a report with a Live connection to a dataset and I was presented with the error below:

We encountered an error while trying to connect.

Details: “Looks like we’re unable to access the dataset. Please contact the owner of the dataset.”

Read on for the answer to this. And if that doesn’t work, the next question is, do you actually have rights to the dataset?

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Creating a Hierarchy for Power BI Field Parameters

Published 2023-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers needs a simpler method for navigation:

I was working with a customer where they had a lot of measures which they wanted to use with the awesome Field parameters for measures.

The challenge was that there was a LOT of measures, and I wanted to see if there was a way to create a hierarchy in my field parameters so that it would be easier to find the measure.

Click through to see how you can group field parameters.

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Speeding up a Power BI Report via Constant Line

Published 2023-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic tries something different:

Essentially, the idea here is, since these four lines are not changing based on the numbers in the visual itself (they have constant value based on the slicer selection), to leverage the Constant line feature from the Analytics panel. Since no Constant line is available with Line and clustered column chart visual, let’s duplicate our visual and change its type to a regular Clustered column chart.

This is a good reminder that the best outcome isn’t always the most straightforward one.

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Deploying to Multiple Power BI Dataset Environments

Published 2023-06-07 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank configures some deployments:

In earlier posts in this series, I talked about to developing and deploying standalone Power BI datasets and automating report deployment into different environments. I’ll bring together those approaches in this post, to enable deployment of shared datasets into multiple environments. This has consequences for automated report deployment, and I’ll take a look at that too.

Read the whole thing.

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Monitoring Datasets with Log Analytics for Power BI

Published 2023-06-07 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has had a busy month:

Maybe the fourth- or fifth-most exciting Power BI-related announcement last month (admittedly it was an exciting month) was that Log Analytics for Power BI datasets is now GA and you can now link multiple Power BI workspaces to a single Log Analytics workspace. This, for me, means that enabling Log Analytics has gone from being useful to essential for anyone interested in monitoring Analysis Services engine activity in an enterprise Power BI/Fabric deployment. It also works with Direct Lake datasets too!

Read on for a few KQL queries which allow you to get pertinent information from your Log Analytics workspace.

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