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Category: Power BI

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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Minimizing Callback Counts in SUMX()

Published 2023-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari speed things up a bit:

Pushing calculations down to the VertiPaq storage engine is always a good practice. Sometimes this is not feasible. However, carefully analyzing the aggregated expression can lead to optimization ideas that produce excellent query plans.

DAX developers should not be scared of iterators. Their performance is great as long as the expression computed during the iteration can be pushed down to the VertiPaq storage engine. 

Read on to understand what they mean by callback and the enormous performance cost you’ll want to avoid.

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Taking over a Personal Power BI Workspace

Published 2023-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt performs a hostile takeover:

The end user can save a Power BI report created in the Power BI Service in their own Personal Workspace but then they have no way to share it with their team. It remains a personal report/analysis.

When executing the analysis in Excel, they can distribute the Excel-file as they see fit.

The pitfall of personal workspaces in Power BI, from my point of view, is that if someone leaves the company, there isn’t a straight forward way for other end users to  take-over previously created analysis.

This is where the Power BI Administrator can be of importance.

Read on to see how a Power BI Administrator can gain access to a personal workspace and migrate reports out of it.

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Case Sensitivity in Power BI

Published 2023-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler is going to raise my blood pressure this morning:

Most Power BI models are case-insensitive, meaning that “Bonk” is the same as “BONK”. However, Power BI data models can also be created as case-sensitive if you create a Direct Lake model in Fabric, or create a new model with external tools and enter a case-sensitive collation property. Two otherwise identical models which differ only in this case-sensitivity may produce different results, even though they’re using the same data, DAX, relationships, and tables.

It’s useful to know how case-sensitivity affects your model and its query results. You should also be able to identify and validate whether your model is case-sensitive. This is particularly important in the following scenarios:

Read on for those scenarios and how you can fix the problem of case sensitivity. My official stance on case sensitivity, by the way, is that applications should be case-insensitive on input but retain casing on output, so “dog” = “Dog” = “DOG” for sorting and querying, but if I saved “Dog” then that’s what should display.

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Monitoring Power BI Gateways with Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Martens builds a solution:

No matter what, when the on-premises gateways are not working as expected, data will not refresh, and direct query queries will not succeed. For this reason, I consider it a good idea to track the well-being of these valuable resources. This article describes a solution built with Microsoft Fabric. It’s not necessary to use Fabric, and it’s also not necessary to build a solution on your own. If you want to track the well-being of your on-premises data gateways but do not want to build something, I recommend using the solution by Rui Romano you can find here: https://github.com/RuiRomano/pbigtwmonitor

I built this monitoring solution focusing on the well-being of the on-premises data gateway. I might extend this solution in the future, but for now, it’s about the availability of the on-premises data gateway and the data gateway connections. Availability and analysis will follow during the next weeks.

Click through for Tom’s solution.

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Using Tableau with Power BI and Fabric

Published 2023-10-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler crosses the streams:

If you use Power BI, Fabric, or Excel, connecting to Power BI datasets is straightforward. However if you use other BI tools like Tableau, it’s not obvious how you can leverage a Power BI semantic model in your workflow. In this article, I’ll explain how to connect to and use a Power BI dataset from Tableau Desktop.

Read on to see how. Also check out the notes in drill-down sections, as there’s a lot of content in there.

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Excel Data Analysis with Python

Published 2023-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb takes us through a new add-in for Excel:

In the Power BI/Fabric community everyone is excited about the recent release of Semantic Link: the ability to analyse Power BI data easily using Python in Fabric notebooks. Sandeep Pawar has an excellent blog post here explaining what this is and why it’s so cool. Meanwhile in the Excel community, everyone is excited about the new integration of Python into Excel. But can you analyse Power BI data in Excel using Python? Yes you can – so as my teenage daughter would say, it’s time for a crossover episode.

Click through for an example of it in action.

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Updates to Power BI Field Finder

Published 2023-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Stephanie Bruno has an update for us:

The Power BI Field Finder is a standalone .pbix file you can download and hook up to your reports and data model to. The Field Finder helps you visually analyze where fields are used in reports.

I’ve used this to great effect on a prior project where I had to figure out what was going on in a report with about 20-25 pages that other people had put together.

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