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Category: Power BI

Power BI: Microsoft Store or Direct Download?

Published 2024-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi shares some advice:

Within the regular Power BI Desktop, there are also two flavours:

  1. Power BI Desktop (Store Version)
  2. Power BI Desktop (Download Version)

These flavours, though similar in functionality, offer different features and experiences. In this blog, we’ll examine why these two versions exist, how they differ, and which version might suit your needs and why you might want both.

Read on to learn about the differences between the two and when you might prefer one to the other.

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Sending Alerts from Fabric Workspace Monitoring

Published 2024-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has a new Bat-signal:

I’ve always been a big fan of using Log Analytics to analyse Power BI engine activity (I’ve blogged about it many times) and so, naturally, I was very happy when the public preview of Fabric Workspace Monitoring was announced – it gives you everything you get from Log Analytics and more, all from the comfort of your own Fabric workspace. Apart from my blog there are lots of example KQL queries out there that you can use with Log Analytics and Workspace Monitoring, for example in this repo or Sandeep Pawar’s recent post. However what is new with Workspace Monitoring is that if you store these queries in a KQL Queryset you can create alerts in Activator, so when something important happens you can be notified of it.

Read on to learn more.

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Hiding Power BI Report Pages in Workspace and Org Apps

Published 2024-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge hides a link:

Do you want to share Power BI Reports with End Users through an app, but hide the Page Navigation of the report?

This is especially useful if you have built-in navigation using Buttons, Sidebars or other menus in your report.

Luckily, there is a quick solution. Well, two solutions actually, depending on whether you are using Workspace Apps, or the new Organizational App item in Fabric.

Read on to see how it all works.

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Refreshing a Power BI Semantic Model via Eventstreams

Published 2024-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb builds a Rube Goldberg device:

Following on from my last post where I showed how to send data from Power Automate to a Fabric Eventstream, in this post I’m going to show how to use it to solve one of my favourite problems: refreshing a Power BI semantic model that uses an Excel workbook stored in OneDrive as a source when that Excel workbook is modified.

Now before I go on I want to be clear that I know this is a ridiculously over-engineered and expensive (in terms of CUs) solution, and that you can do almost the same thing just using Power Automate or in several other different ways – see my colleague Mark Pryce-Maher’s recent videos on using Fabric Open Mirroring with Excel for example. I’m doing this to teach myself Fabric Eventstreams and Activator and see what’s possible with them. Please excuse any mistakes or bad practices.

Click through for the process.

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Using Stored Procedures in Power BI

Published 2024-12-05 by Kevin Feasel

Annamarie Van Wyk makes a call:

The aim of this blog is to take you through one example of executing SQL stored procedures in Power BI. Similar to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) we can create parameters that will be used to return a result set based on the output parameters that were selected.  The parameter selection will be available on the Power BI home page. The data used in his example is production line data. The production line is inside a factory where products are being packaged during a certain shift and at a certain production run date. It is literally a factory line with products being packed.

Read on for a simple answer, followed by how to parameterize the procedure call.

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Benchmarking Power BI Local Data Import Speed

Published 2024-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger has all the data he needs on his desktop:

The chart above shows the number of seconds it took to load X million rows of data from a given data source, according to a profiler trace and Phil Seamark’s Refresh visualizer. Parquet is a clear winner by far, with MS Access surprisingly coming in second. Sadly the 2 GB file limit stops Access from becoming the big data format of the future.

Part of the reason I wanted to do these tests is often people on Reddit will complain that their refresh is slow and their CPU is maxed out. This is almost always a sign that they are importing oodles and oodles of CSV files. I recommended trying Parquet instead of CSV, but it’s nice to have concrete proof that it’s a better file source.

Read on for the chart. Also, don’t tell his accountants about the gaming laptop. It’s 100% for work purposes, just like my desktop PC. Only work, nothing else, IRS. The high-end GPU is for AI work. And the big screen is for doing big business.

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Determining Power BI Report Fields in Use

Published 2024-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria performs a search:

Have you ever wondered where a certain field is used in a report? Or maybe you need an easy way to find broken field references in a report? Certain 3rd-party tools such as Measure Killer and Power BI Helper (not updated recently) have helped us with this task in the past. But now we can perform this task with a notebook in Fabric!

This is made possible by the Semantic Link Labs Python library. Please note that PBIR format is still in preview at the time of publishing this blog post, so use it at your own risk. Also, this works only on reports published to the Power BI service. Since this notebook is not making any changes to the report, I feel it’s pretty safe to run, but do remember that it uses CUs on your Fabric capacity while you run it.

Read on to see how it works.

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Contrasting Power BI and Power BI Report Server

Published 2024-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi makes me sad:

Depending on your organisation’s preferences, data governance requirements, and the platforms you intend to use for report deployment you may use either Power BI Desktop, the “standard version”, or Power BI Desktop RS (Report Server). Power BI Desktop has variations tailored to meet specific needs, such as cloud-based analytics or on-premises reporting. While many users might only encounter the standard version, there’s another important variant for specialised scenarios.

You know the meme where the kid asks, “Mom, I want Power BI!” and mom says, “We have Power BI at home.” Power BI Report Server is Power BI at home, in all of the senses of the joke. I’ve been stuck with it at two employers and although it is better than nothing, you quickly find out how annoying it gets when that thing you know how to do in Power BI Online doesn’t work because they never supported it in PBIRS.

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Power BI Writeback via Fabric SQL Database

Published 2024-11-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Voge gives us a use case for Fabric SQL Databases:

Until recently, Fabric has allowed us to choose between Lakehouses and Warehouses as a backend. For write-back use cases, neither are ideal.

  • The SQL Endpoint of Lakehouses are Read-Only, making writes from Power Apps impossible.
  • While the SQL Endpoint of Warehouses are write-enabled, they do not support enforced Primary Keys, which are a hard requirement for Power Apps to be able to write directly to a data source.

Jon briefly describes two mechanisms people used and then how you can do this more effectively with a Fabric SQL Database. Based on the article, it seems that you could probably still do the same with an Azure SQL Database, though I suppose handling the managed identity could be an issue.

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Obtaining VisualIDs for Visuals in a Power BI Report

Published 2024-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar checks for ID:

Log Analytics and Workspace Monitoring in Fabric logs all the activities of datasets in a workspace. These logs contain dataset, report, visual IDs which the user has to decipher to get the full picture. Dataset, report ids are straightforward but it’s not easy to get visual IDs programmatically. Chris Webb already has a blog on couple of different ways to get the visual IDs. That blog was published in 2022 and in the Fabric world we now have a couple of more options.

Read on for two additional methods you can use.

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