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Category: Power BI

Analyzing Power BI Refresh Performance with Log Analytics

Published 2023-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb starts a new series:

If you’re tuning refresh for a Power BI Import mode dataset one of the areas you’ll be most interested in is throughput, that is to say how quickly Power BI can read data from the data source. It can be affected by a number of different factors: how quickly the data source can return data; network latency; the efficiency of the connector you’re using; any transformations in Power Query; the number of columns in the data and their data types; the amount of other objects in the same Power BI dataset being refreshed in parallel; and so on. How do you know if any or all of these factors is a problem for you? It’s a subject that has always interested me and now that Log Analytics for Power BI datasets is GA we have a powerful tool to analyse the data, so I thought I’d do some testing and write up my findings in a series of blog posts.

In the first post, Chris gives us an overview of information available and provides one way to query it.

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Power BI Report Deployment with Connections to Shared Datasets

Published 2023-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev does some large-scale deployment:

Let’s say you have a collection of Power BI .pbix files stored in a git-based source control system (GitHub, Azure DevOps, or any other system). Among these files, one is your data model, while the others are Power BI visual reports and dashboards connected to the published dataset from your data model. Your published dataset is located in a separate workspace dedicated to shared content, and the visualization Power BI reports are placed in another workspace with appropriate permissions to access them.

Now, let’s consider an additional complexity: you have this collection of files not only in one development environment but also in two others. These environments support your Power BI reporting testing (UAT) and the release of your Power BI reports to end-users (Production).

The questions that arise are: How do you deploy your solution, and most importantly, how do you automate it?

Click through for an architectural diagram, as well as the answer to this question.

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Data Validation in Excel from a DAX Query

Published 2023-07-13 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers builds a data validation tool in Excel:

I had a requirement where the customer wanted to make sure that the right user could only see the colour from the stock item assigned to them. Essentially using the Excel file for Row Level Security.

For the Row level security to work correctly it required the colour name to be an exact match.

For me to ensure that this would happen, I wanted to make sure I could get the data from my Power BI dataset, and then using the Excel data validation make sure that the user could either type in the value 100% correct or pick it from the drop-down list.

There are quite a few steps, but I can see business people being happy about the final outcome.

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Power BI Projects and Git Review

Published 2023-07-12 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev wants to wait:

But to digress from Fabric, let’s take a look at two developer-oriented and frequently requested features that fortunately doesn’t require Fabric: Power BI Desktop projects and workspace integration with Git. The video in the link is a good starting point to understand how these features work.

Basically, the first feature lets you save a Power BI Desktop file as a *.pbip file which generates a set of folders with human-readable text files, such as the model.bim file (has the model definition described in JSON). Next, you can put these files under source control both in Power BI Desktop using any source-code enabled tool, such as Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio. Currently in preview, Power BI projects is an experimental feature (in fact, the Publish button is disabled so you can’t publish a project to Power BI Service).

Click through for Teo’s thoughts. This is something that I wish had been done 8 years ago, and as Teo points out, there’s still room to grow. But I do consider it a step forward from only being able to save PBIX files.

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Tips for Performance Testing Direct Lake Mode in Power BI

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us some performance testing advice:

If you’re excited about Direct Lake mode in Fabric you’re probably going to want to test it with some of your own data, and in particular look at DAX query performance. Before you do so, though, there are a few things to know about performance testing with Direct Lake datasets that are slightly different from what you might be used to with Import mode or DirectQuery datasets.

Chris shares some great advice and takes us through a good approach for testing. This post is all about the how, not the results.

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Finding Active Security Roles in Power BI

Published 2023-07-05 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari retrieve security roles:

Security roles automatically restrict the data visible in a Tabular model. However, for a more personalized user experience, report authors may desire to further customize elements of the report. Examples may include changing the colors of visuals or adding and modifying report information, all based on the active security roles.

This article explores how to display active security roles in card visuals. We will also outline how to implement a measure to determine if the current user belongs to a specific security role, and provide more tools for customizing the user experience based on active security roles.

Click through for the article.

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On-Demand Loading and Direct Lake in Power BI

Published 2023-07-03 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us the beginnings of an origin story:

For any Power BI person, Direct Lake mode is the killer feature of Fabric. Import mode report performance (or near enough) direct on data from the lake, with none of the waiting around for data to refresh! It seems too good to be true. How can it be possible?

The full answer, going into detail about how data from Delta tables is transcoded to Power BI’s in-memory format, is too long for one blog post. But in part it is possible through something that existed before Fabric but which didn’t gain much attention: on-demand loading. 

Click through for another blog post on the topic and an idea of how these tie together.

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Balancing Governance and Collaboration with Fabric

Published 2023-06-29 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld makes it sound like I can’t just say “No!” to everything as a Microsfot Fabric administrator:

Frequently, I am approached by curious individuals who inquire about my job and how I contribute to the success of our customers, especially since I am not directly involved in building solutions for each and every one of them. These questions have made me realize that it might be interesting to share insights into my role as a Fabric Administrator, or as some may refer to it, a Power BI Administrator.

In this blog post, I aim to shed light on the essence of daily activities of a Fabric Administrator, the meaningful conversations people in this role engage in, and the additional value they bring to the table.

Read on to see what people like Marc do all day.

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Power BI Visual Has Exceeded the Available Resources

Published 2023-06-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb diagnoses an error:

One of my most popular blog posts of the last few years is this one on the “Visual has exceeded available resources” error in the Power BI Service:

https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2020/01/20/visual-has-exceeded-the-available-resources-error-power-bi/

This error only used to appear in the Power BI Service, but the good news is – and trust me, this is good news – it may now appear in Power BI Desktop too following the May 2023 release.

It’s not often good news that you get a new error, but knowing that the Service will behave a certain way and replicating that on Desktop, at least it prevents an issue from popping up in production that you can’t find during initial development.

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