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Category: Power BI

No More Default Semantic Models in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven has good news for us:

Another quick post, because today is an important day for everyone working with Fabric and Power BI!

Last month, Microsoft announced they are Sunsetting Default Semantic Models: Yaay! 
Today marks that day: No more automatic child semantic models!

The idea of having a default semantic model seemed like a good one, but the problem was that too many environments had very specific needs that a default semantic model couldn’t anticipate or address. As a result, these tended to confuse end users more than save them time.

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The Consequences of Hitting Semantic Model Guardrails

Published 2025-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb smashes into a wall:

Direct Lake mode in Power BI allows you to build semantic models on very large volumes of data, but because it is still an in-memory database engine there are limits on how much data it can work with. As a result it has rules – called guardrails – that it uses to check whether you are trying to build a semantic model that is too large. But what happens when you hit those guardrails? This week one of my colleagues, Gaurav Agarwal, showed me the results of some tests that he did which I thought I would share here.

Click through to see what happens when you go past one of those guardrails.

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Enabling Map Visuals in Power BI

Published 2025-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu gets past the X:

Have you ever tried to create a map in Power BI only to see an error instead of your visualization? If your Power BI maps are not working, you’re not alone. By default, some map and filled map visuals may be disabled due to security settings. The good news? With a few quick adjustments, you can enable maps in Power BI Desktop or, if needed, in your organization’s tenant settings.

Read on to see why this visual might be disabled and how to enable it.

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Worst-Case Testing for Direct Lake Semantic Models

Published 2025-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb updates a prior post:

Two years ago I wrote a detailed post on how to do performance testing for Direct Lake semantic models. In that post I talked about how important it is to run worst-case scenario tests to see how your model performs when there is no model data present in memory, and how it was possible to clear all the data held in memory by doing a full refresh of the semantic model. Recently, however, a long-awaited performance improvement for Direct Lake has been released which means a full semantic model refresh may no longer page all data out of memory – which is great, but which also makes running performance tests a bit more complicated.

Read on to learn more about the improvement as well as how you can still perform your performance testing.

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Passing Selections from Visuals to Translytical Task Flows

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge sends along some data:

A common misconception about Translytical Task Flows is that the only way for you to parameterize and pass user inputs to the User Data Function, is through Slicers in Power BI.

That is not true at all.

In fact, one of the most powerful ways of integrating Task Flows into your Power BI reports, is by allowing user selections made in visualisations in your report, flow through to your task flow.

Read on to see how you can do this.

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Week-over-Week Calculations in Power BI without DAX

Published 2025-08-26 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu wants to avoid DAX for this calculation:

Power BI visual calculations provide a simplified way to perform time-based comparisons like week-over-week (WoW) analysis without writing complex DAX. Power BI’s time intelligence functions are powerful, but they can become challenging when working with custom calendars or unique business logic. If you’ve ever struggled with calculating WoW performance, this post will show you how to streamline the process using visual calculations.

Read on to see how. Though one thing to keep in mind is that it says week-over-week, but that assumes you have data for each week. I don’t believe this solution would cleanly handle gaps in data, so that would be something you’d want to do beforehand.

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Community Resources for Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-08-25 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb highlights some community efforts:

There are a lot of really cool free, community-developed tools and resources out there for Power BI and Fabric – so many that it’s easy to miss announcements about them. In this post I thought I’d highlight a few that came out recently and which you might want to check out.

Click through for several good resources, and there are a couple of additional ones in the comments as well.

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Sorting a Visual by a Field Not on the Visual

Published 2025-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic does a bit of sorting:

Recently, I was dealing with a Power BI report where the client had a very specific requirement – to sort the data in the visual based on a particular field from the semantic model. The only “issue” was that this particular field wasn’t part of the visual. So, while figuring out how this can be accomplished (because, yes, everything can be accomplished when the client needs it, hehe), I decided to write it down and share it with everyone who might find it useful.

Nikola successfully uses machine trickery to solve the problem.

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Power BI Dataflow Gen1 and Connecting to SQL DB

Published 2025-08-21 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck lays out a warning:

I’m in the progress of migrating some legacy stuff at a client, and in their Power BI environment there are still quite some Power BI dataflows Gen1. I had migrated an Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool to an Azure SQL DB (much cheaper for their volume of data), and in the dev/test environment all dataflows were switched correctly to the new database.

However, in production, the dataflows only wanted to connect to the Azure SQL DB production database through a gateway. Weird, right? 

Click through for a rundown of the issue, as well as another one Koen ran into regarding Azure Data Lake Storage.

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Using the DAX FILTER Function

Published 2025-08-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson digs into a function:

If you’ve ever tried to build a measure that needed more filtering power than a basic slicer, you’ve probably hit a wall.

That’s where DAX’s FILTER function comes in.

While visual filters and slicers work great for basic scenarios:

FILTER gives you row-level control to create sophisticated calculations that respond dynamically to your business logic.

Click through for an explanation of the function, as well as several examples of how it works.

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