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Category: Power BI

Power BI Semantic Model Monthly Refresh via Fabric Data Pipelines

Published 2025-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has another way for scheduling refreshes:

I’m sure you already know how to configure scheduled refresh for your semantic models in Power BI. While the options you have for controlling when refresh takes place are generally good enough – you can configure daily or weekly refreshes and set up to eight times a day for refreshes to take place – there are some scenarios it doesn’t work for, such as monthly refreshes. Up to now the workaround has been to use Power Automate to trigger refreshes (see here for an example) or to call the refresh API from another application. Now, with Fabric, you have a much better option for scheduling refreshes: Data Pipelines.

Click through for the demonstration.

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Aging Accounts Receivable Data in Power BI

Published 2025-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari inform us that we owe them money:

The Accounts Receivable (AR) Aging report helps companies track overdue receivables and better manage their cash flow. It is a common requirement from the finance department that often represents a challenge for Power BI reports, especially when you want to show the trend over time. Here is a typical visualization for the Open Amount at the end of each month, colored by the age range of the Accounts Receivable.

Read on for a dive into the report concept and some of the most common issues you may run into.

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Reading Delta Table Metadata in Power Query

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us the scoop:

There’s a new M function rolling out now that allows you to read metadata from Delta tables (at the time of writing it’s available in Dataflows Gen2 and will be available soon in Desktop). It builds on the DeltaLake.Table M function that allows you to read data from Delta tables and is similar to the Parquet.Metadata function that was released last year. 

Click through for an example of how to use it against a Delta table in OneLake.

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Configuring and Testing Power BI Aggregation Functions

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad does a bit of configuration:

Aggregation can speed up the performance of DirectQuery sourced tables significantly. To use it, firstly, you need to create an aggregation table. Secondly, you must set up proper storage modes for tables in the model. Finally, you have to configure the aggregation functions, which I will explain in this post. You can learn about aggregation in other posts of this series and continue the example here. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Read on to learn more.

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Improving Power Query CSV File Performance with Data Columns

Published 2025-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb makes things go faster:

A few weeks ago I replied to a question on reddit where someone was experiencing extremely slow performance when importing data from a CSV file using Power Query. The original poster worked out the cause of the problem and the solution themselves: they saw that removing all date columns from their query made their Power Query query much faster and that using the Date.FromText function and specifying the date format solved the problem. While I couldn’t reproduce the extreme slowness that was reported I was able to reproduce a performance difference between the two approaches and Curt Hagenlocher of the Power Query team confirmed that this was expected behaviour.

Read on for the example and explanation.

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Retrieving Power BI Licenses in a Tenant

Published 2025-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants to figure out who has licenses:

In this blog post I am going to show you how to get all the Power BI licenses in your tenant.

This can be very useful to understand how many licenses you have, what type of licenses are being paid for, and potentially how you can save by removing licenses due to inactive use or if the licenses are no longer required.

I’m going to be pulling on my previous Blog post where I explained how to get the Entra ID users and groups using a Service Principal for access

Click through for the demonstration.

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Choosing the Right Power BI Canvas

Published 2025-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska shares some advice:

The same goes for your Power BI report—get the size wrong, and your users will struggle with cluttered visuals, excessive scrolling, or awkward gaps. Or worse, you’ll create a report that looks amazing on your screen but completely breaks when someone else opens it.

Trust me, I’ve seen it—an ultrawide masterpiece designed for the boss’s fancy monitor… except no one else at the company had that monitor.

Yeah, this brings back memories, though in my case, it was that the developers (including me) had wide-screen monitors in 1080p and the people using our product had standard resolutions like 1280×1024 or even 1024×768.

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Reducing Query Timeout on DAX and MDX Queries

Published 2025-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shuts it down:

The recent announcement of Surge Protection gives Fabric/Power BI capacity admins a way to restrict the impact of background operations on a capacity, preventing them from causing throttling. However, at the time of writing, Surge Protection does not prevent users that are running expensive DAX or MDX queries – which are interactive operations – from causing problems on your capacity. Indeed, right now, there is no direct way to stop runaway queries from consuming a lot of CUs, although there is something you can do which will help a lot: reducing the query timeout.

Read on for information about why Surge Protection doesn’t currently work with DAX and MDX queries, and how you can change the query timeout. This is kind of interesting considering that, outside of the Microsoft Fabric world, we typically move the query timeout higher rather than lower, to deal with long-running queries.

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Git for the Power BI Developer

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley has a tutorial:

Both Azure DevOps and GitHub are supported Git hosts for Power BI and Fabric workspace integration. I will demonstrate using GitHub rather than Azure DevOps because, it is free for personal use. Getting started with GitHub is quite easy, and anyone can have a free GitHub account. Simply navigate to http://GitHub.com and sign-up for an account. You may create a personal or organizational account, and your personal account can be associated with multiple organizations.

Click through for the process.

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Automatically Refreshing a Power BI Semantic Model after Dataflow Loads

Published 2025-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad refreshes a model:

Although this seems to be a simple thing to do, it is not a function that you can turn on or off. If you have a Dataflow that does the ETL and transforms and prepares the data, then to get the most up-to-date data into the report, you will need to refresh the Power BI semantic model after that, only upon successful refresh of both dataflow and semantic model is when you will have the up-to-date data into the report. Fortunately, in Fabric, this is a straightforward setup. In this article and video, I’ll explain how this is possible.

Click through for the video and the blog post. Granted, this feature is in preview, but using it is pretty straightforward.

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