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Category: Power BI

Query Memory Utilization of Distinct Count Measures in Power BI

Published 2025-04-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb does the math:

The series of blog posts I wrote last year on semantic model memory usage, in particular this post on the query memory limit and the “This query uses more memory than the configured limit” error in Power BI, gets a lot of traffic. Since writing that post on the query memory limit I’ve written a few follow-ups on common mistakes that lead to increased query memory usage, such as this one on measures that never return a blank. Today’s post is sort of in that series but it isn’t about a design mistake – it’s just to point out that distinct count measures can be surprisingly memory-hungry.

Read on for Chris’s findings and the explanation, as well as a couple of potential workarounds if you find yourself in this situation.

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Loading Excel from SQL Server via Power BI XMLA

Published 2025-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover doesn’t want to share:

Users want to pull data from tables in an Azure SQL database into Excel via Power Query. This situation sounds simple. However, I don’t want to provide direct access to the database for several reasons, including the potential governance and permissions nightmare. We have a Fabric workspace, and most of the data already exists in Power BI reports. How can we give users access to the data they need without providing direct access to the database for an easy SQL export to Excel?

Click through for the answer. This solution is a bit more roundabout than granting direct database access, but also comes with a host of security benefits.

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Binding a Power BI Report to a Separate Semantic Model via Power BI Studio

Published 2025-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers makes use of a Gerhard Brueckl extension:

The default option to rebind a Power BI report is to use the Power BI REST API.

This works well, but for a lot of people this can be quite intimidating.

Fortunately, Gerhard Brueckl, has created the amazing Power BI Studio, which is a Visual Studio Code Extension.

Click through to see how to install it and how to use this extension to rebind an existing Power BI report to a different semantic model, whether in the same workspace or even a different one.

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Snowflake Query Tags in Power BI

Published 2025-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb takes some of the shine off of things:

Since the November 2024 Power BI release blog post announced that queries sent to Snowflake by Power BI include a query tag I’ve had a lot of questions from people who couldn’t see this happening or wanted to know what the query tags contained, so in this blog I thought I would outline the current status.

It turns out that the query tag isn’t as far along as the blog post indicated, and there are some pretty big limitations in the cases in which there actually is tagging.

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Bulk Replacement in Power BI via TMDL

Published 2025-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers finds and replaces:

It is great to see the advancements in Power BI with regards to TMDL.

Recently I was working on a customer’s semantic model where I was doing some optimizations in the semantic model.

One of the changes I wanted to make was to replace the Dynamic Format String for the measures.

My challenge was that there were roughly 40 measures where the Dynamic Format String needed to be updated.

I could have done this using Power BI Desktop, but that would mean making the changes 40 times.

Read on to see how Gilbert was able to make this change en masse.

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Fuzzy Matching in Power Query and Power BI

Published 2025-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad does a bit of a match:

Have you ever wanted to match two tables together but not on exact matches, but also on a threshold of similarity? if your answer to this question is yes, then this feature is built for you. Let’s explore in details how the fuzzy matching works in Power BI. To learn more about Power BI, read Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star.

As always, Reza has a video and a blog post for us, explaining how the fuzzy matching process works and some of the knobs you can control. In the comments, Reza even digs up the specific algorithm that Microsoft uses for fuzzy matching.

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Filtering Weekdays using DAX

Published 2025-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show that tracking weekdays is like an onion:

Computing time intelligence calculations in DAX is rather simple. However, as soon as the requirements are not trivial, the complexity of formulas skyrockets, and it is necessary to have a very good understanding of several details about DAX to obtain a good formula. In this article, we show a simple requirement: the need to maintain a filter on weekdays while computing time intelligence. As you are about to read, it will require several complex steps despite being a simple requirement; but let us start by clarifying what we want to obtain and what a filter-preserving column is.

Click through for the full article.

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FabCon Announcements for DAX and Semantic Models

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo summarizes the announcements:

I usually do not write about announcements and new features until we have had time to try and test them in the real world. However, there are always exceptions, and some of the announcements at the Microsoft Fabric Conference 2025 fall into this category because I have worked with them enough to provide hands-on feedback.

In short, these are the topics I am covering in this blog post:

  • Direct Lake and Import mode
  • Calendars in DAX
  • User-Defined Functions (UDF) in DAX

These weren’t the headline-grabbers of the conference, but Marco explains the importance behind each of them.

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A New Dashboard for Distributed Availability Groups

Published 2025-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler has been busy:

This comes off of the back of my last post looking at using a distributed availability group (DAG) to help facilitate a SQL server migration. SQL Server Migration Using a Distributed Availability Group

One thing that I mentioned in that post was that, although SSMS gives us a nice dashboard to check the health of our regular AGs. There’s nothing there to look at the state that the DAGs are in. The only choice that we’ve got is to tap up and compare results from a couple of DMVs on each side.

David has met that demand. Read on to see what the solution includes and how you can get your hands on it.

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Finding Mismatched Rows in Power Query

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad looks for that other sock:

Finding rows that are in one table, but not the other is one of the most common scenarios happening in any data related applications. You may have customer records coming from two sources, and want to find data rows that exist in one, but not the other. In Power Query, you can use Merge to combine data tables together. Merge can be also used for finding mismatch records. You will learn through this blog post, how in Power Query you can find out which records are missing with Merge, and then report it in Power BI. To learn more about Power BI, read Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Click through for the video and article.

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