A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chris Webb highlights some community efforts:
There are a lot of really cool free, community-developed tools and resources out there for Power BI and Fabric – so many that it’s easy to miss announcements about them. In this post I thought I’d highlight a few that came out recently and which you might want to check out.
Click through for several good resources, and there are a couple of additional ones in the comments as well.
Comments closedNikola Ilic does a bit of sorting:
Recently, I was dealing with a Power BI report where the client had a very specific requirement – to sort the data in the visual based on a particular field from the semantic model. The only “issue” was that this particular field wasn’t part of the visual. So, while figuring out how this can be accomplished (because, yes, everything can be accomplished when the client needs it, hehe), I decided to write it down and share it with everyone who might find it useful.
Nikola successfully uses machine trickery to solve the problem.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck lays out a warning:
I’m in the progress of migrating some legacy stuff at a client, and in their Power BI environment there are still quite some Power BI dataflows Gen1. I had migrated an Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool to an Azure SQL DB (much cheaper for their volume of data), and in the dev/test environment all dataflows were switched correctly to the new database.
However, in production, the dataflows only wanted to connect to the Azure SQL DB production database through a gateway. Weird, right?
Click through for a rundown of the issue, as well as another one Koen ran into regarding Azure Data Lake Storage.
Comments closedBen Richardson digs into a function:
If you’ve ever tried to build a measure that needed more filtering power than a basic slicer, you’ve probably hit a wall.
That’s where DAX’s FILTER function comes in.
While visual filters and slicers work great for basic scenarios:
FILTER gives you row-level control to create sophisticated calculations that respond dynamically to your business logic.
Click through for an explanation of the function, as well as several examples of how it works.
Comments closedJon Vöge isn’t content with slicers:
When building Translytical Task Flows for Power BI / Fabric, you’ll quickly come head to head with a few limitations:
- They won’t work in Embedded scenarios
- They won’t work with PBIR and PBIP formats
- They natively only support inputs coming from the three new slicer types: Text, Button and List Slicers (all of which are in preview at the time of writing).
Read on to see how you can partially get around the third limitation.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers does a bit of connecting:
In this blog post I am going to show you how to use the powerful Semantic Link Labs library for Tabular Object Model (TOM) for semantic model manipulation.
The goal of this blog post is to give you an understanding of how to connect using TOM, then based on the documentation use one of the functions.
Don’t get me wrong the documentation is great, but when implementing it, it works a little differently and I want others to know how to use it, so it can automate and simplify some repetitive tasks.
Read on for the instructions and some of the things you can do with the Semantic Link Labs library in Microsoft Fabric.
Comments closedReza Rad merges tables together:
Power Query gives you the capability of joining (merging) tables together using key columns, and there are multiple types of Merge types to choose from. There is another way to merge tables especially when the data source is a relational database system. In this article and video, You will learn how this options works.
Click through for the article and accompanying video.
Comments closedBen Richardson speeds up a report:
Slow Power BI reports waste time and frustrate users.
The slowdown often comes from hidden issues in the data model, DAX, visuals, or refresh settings.
This guide shows you how to find the cause, fix it, and keep reports running smoothly.
Read on to see some of the built-in tooling for performance optimization, as well as more information on these four common issues.
Comments closedBoniface Muchendu adds a link:
Tables with nothing but text can be… well, boring. In Power BI, you can take your reports to the next level by adding clickable links and images directly into your tables and matrices. This transforms them from static data dumps into interactive dashboards that encourage exploration.
Read on to see how this works.
Comments closedAlex Powers takes us through one major performance optimization technique in Power BI:
One of the most powerful capabilities of Power Query and the M Language is Query Folding (also referred to as query delegation, and predicate push-down). Query Folding allows the Power Query Mashup Engine to push the transformations expressed in an M (mashup) query to the data source, in the data source’s query language, resulting in more efficient data processing.
For inexperienced database technology users this ability to leverage the graphical user interface of Power Query to dynamically generate a query written in the data source’s query language unlocks enormous opportunities to find insights with any data, at any scale.
Click through to see how you can know if query folding is enabled, as well as some hints around when and to what extent query folding will work.
Comments closed