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Category: Power BI

Using DAX to Find Products Missing Sales

Published 2023-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari observe the dog that didn’t bark:

What products did not sell in a specific area, store, or time period? This may be an important analysis for several businesses. There are multiple ways to obtain the desired result. Some specific implementations might be needed because of the user or model requirements, whereas developers can choose any formula in several cases. Or you might just find a solution on the web and blindly implement it without questioning whether there is a better way to achieve what you want.

It turns out that different formulas perform very differently. Choosing the right one in your scenario can make a slow report fast. This article analyzes the performance of different formulations of one same algorithm. 

It’s interesting to see the performance profile here: most are reasonably close together, although you can still get a 2x gain from using the fastest approach versus the second-slowest. And then there’s the slowpoke.

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Power BI Shareable Cloud Connections and Multiple Connections

Published 2023-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows off an interesting aspect of a new feature:

A few weeks ago an important new feature for managing connections to data sources in the Power BI Service was released: Shareable Cloud Connections. You can read the blog post announcing them here. I won’t describe their functionality because the post already does that perfectly well; I want to focus on one thing in particular that is important for anyone using Power BI with Snowflake (and, I believe BigQuery and probably several other non-Microsoft sources): Shareable Cloud Connections allow you to have multiple connections to the same data source in the Power BI Service, each using different credentials.

Read on to see what Chris means and how you can take advantage of it.

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Adding a Service Principal to a Fabric Workspace via API

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld tackles a challenge:

Lately, I found myself struggling using the Power BI REST API to add a service principal to the (Fabric) workspace. After I engaged with some other folks, I managed to succeed. In this blog I will elaborate on the mistake I made and how I got it to work. For some this might be a less useful blog. Though, I still wanted to blog this even if it is for my own memory on how to do this.

Read on for the story.

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Documenting Power BI Workspaces with Fabric Notebooks

Published 2023-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Prathy Kamasami shares a use case for notebooks in Microsoft Fabric:

If you are a consultant like me, you know how hard it can be to access Power BI Admin API or Service Principal. Sometimes, you need to see all the workspaces you have permission for and what’s inside them. Well, I found with MS Fabric, we can use notebooks and achieve it with a few steps:

Read on for an enumeration of those four steps, as well as detailed instructions for each.

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Controlling Power BI Chart Ranges with DAX

Published 2023-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrrari control the horizontal, Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari control the vertical:

DAX is a powerful tool in the hands of a Power BI developer. Using simple DAX formulas, you can not only compute interesting metrics but also customize the behavior of Power BI visuals. In this article, we use DAX to control the range of charts to obtain more coherent visualizations.

Read on to see how.

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Thoughts on Third-Party Power BI Tools

Published 2023-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shares some thoughts:

Rather than blog about the tool itself – there’s no point repeating Nikola’s post – I thought it would be good to answer a question someone asked me later that day about Tabular Editor and which I’m definitely going to be asked about DAX Optimizer, namely:

This looks great, but it’s expensive and it’s hard for me to get sign-off to use third-party tools like this. Why doesn’t Microsoft give me something like this for free?

Chris shares his personal opinions on the matter. My opinion on it, as someone who has worked with Microsoft products for a long time and never for Microsoft, is that Microsoft needs to play a balancing act. They build products and tools with the intention of third parties extending them, whether by opening up APIs or creating an explicit extensions marketplace (like we see in Azure Data Studio and Visual Studio Code). If they go and take the best bits of these third party products, then that third party marketplace dries up quickly. On the other side of the coin, depending on third parties can’t always cut it. For example, Azure Data Studio used to have an awful execution plan viewer and the answer was “use SentryOne Plan Explorer instead.” That wasn’t a great solution either for Azure Data Studio (and today, I don’t know if the extension is even still around), so the pushback was firm: a good execution plan reader needs to be a core part of any first-class SQL Server developer tool from Microsoft.

Chris has plenty to say on the topic as well.

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Creating a Power BI Dataset and Report via DirectLake

Published 2023-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers finishes up a series:

In the final part of my series, I am going to be creating the Power BI DirectLake dataset and report from my tables that I had previously loaded into the lakehouse.

In this series I am going to show you all the steps I did to have the successful outcome I had with my client where I created the dataset (measures and fields) and the Power BI report.

Click through for links to the prior posts, as well as a walkthrough on creating a DirectLake asset in Power BI.

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Value and Hash Encoding in VertiPaq

Published 2023-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kristyna Hughes looks at column encodings:

Power BI encoding is a powerful optimizing option that is often overlooked because it’s not visible in neither the Power BI Desktop tool nor in Power BI Service. Natively, the VertiPaq engine in Power BI investigates all columns in the data model and determines how it can store that data most efficiently. To achieve maximum compression, the VertiPaq engine starts by encoding each column which determines the method of compression applied to that column. There are a couple types of encoding – value and hash.

Read on to learn the difference, as well as how to push your columns to use a specific type of encoding.

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First Impressions of DAX Optimizer

Published 2023-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic takes a look:

A few months ago, while scrolling through posts on social media, one of them immediately grabbed my attention! It was about a new tool, called DAX Optimizer, which promised to identify and remove performance bottlenecks in your DAX formulas. For all of us dealing with optimizing Power BI reports on a day-to-day basis, that was a huge promise (and one I was impatiently waiting to see in action).

One important note is that this is not a free tool, as Nikola mentions. Read on for more thoughts about how it works, what it picks up, and whether it’s a good fit for your environment given the price.

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