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Category: Power BI

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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Generative AI Assistance in Building Power BI Custom Visuals

Published 2025-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler discusses a process:

In Power BI, advanced report creators often need to use custom visuals to fulfill their requirements or create certain designs. In previous articles that we published at SQLBI, we discussed the options available to make custom visuals, such as SVG visuals that you can make by using DAX. We also gave examples of when you might choose one approach over another, for example, if you want to make a bullet chart. However, creating custom visuals in Power BI is complex, and requires technical skills that most Power BI report creators do not have. In this article, we examine how you can use AI assistance to help you plan and create custom visuals.

A high-level overview of the process we will take and the desired result is below. It is important to emphasize that this article focuses on the general process, and not specific steps to obtain the result.

Click through for a long-form article on the subject. I’m generally fairly sour on relying too much on generative AI solutions for, well, much of anything. That’s part of why you see so few posts on the topic here. My main problem is that it works best in situations where you already know enough to separate wheat from chaff, or good code from broken/insecure/buggy code. I think Kurt strikes a good tone in this article and it’s well worth the read.

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Speeding up Dataflow Validation and Publish Times

Published 2025-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb doesn’t want to wait:

If you’re working with slow data sources in Power BI/Fabric dataflows then you’re probably aware that validation (for Gen1 dataflows) or publishing (for Gen2 dataflows) them can sometimes take a long time. If you’re working with very slow data sources then you may run into the 10 minute timeout on validation/publishing that is documented here. For a Gen1 dataflow you’ll see the following error message if you try to save your dataflow and validation takes more than 10 minutes:

Click through for that common error message, as well as some tips to avoid this issue. There was also an interesting approach in the comments section that circumvented the problem as well.

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Common Power BI Mistakes

Published 2025-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck lays out some common mistakes people make when developing Power BI reports:

What are some of the most common mistakes when working with Power BI? For example, when a junior colleague starts on a Power BI project for the first time, what are the pitfalls you try to warn them about? What advice would you give them?

The last one hurts me in particular because .pbip and TMDL aren’t compatible with Power BI Report Server.

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Building a Top N Analysis in Power BI

Published 2025-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Hamza Boubou builds a dynamic report:

There was a requirement from my client that seemed simple at first but turned out to be a Trojan horse after deeper investigation. The goal was to create a Power BI Time Comparisons Top N Analysis page, giving users complete control over the Top/Bottom N products based on multiple metrics. Users needed to define the period, compare it with other periods, and adjust the N parameter dynamically.

Read on to see how Hamza was able to solve this customer request.

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The Pain of Power BI in GovCloud

Published 2025-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

John Kerski notes a pain point:

“I hate to tell you this, but it’s not available for us yet.” This is an all-too-common phrase I find myself saying to customers in U.S. Sovereign Cloud tenants who come across new features in search engine results only to find they’re not available in our regions. For those unfamiliar, U.S. Sovereign Cloud regions allow U.S. government, public sector, and other highly regulated entities to use the cloud with the security, compliance, and data sovereignty required by their organizations.

If you do a search for “sovereign cloud,” you will find that most of the cloud providers have their own Sovereign Cloud if you are interested in the concept for any other cloud services you need to use. In this article, I am going to look specifically at how you extend this support to Power BI, and make a few suggestions for how I think it could work better.

I call John’s pains and raise him “We can only use Power BI Report Server here.”

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Conditional Formatting via Power BI Visual Calculation

Published 2025-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari talk highlighting:

However, visual calculations are incredibly convenient when it comes to calculations that are specifically tied to a visual. Let us face it: every semantic model contains measures with intricate ISINSCOPE, HASONEVALUE, and SELECTEDVALUE function calls whose only goal is to determine the color of a font or the background of a cell. An example of the intricacy of those measures is in one of our most viewed articles here: https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/filtering-the-top-products-alongside-the-other-products-in-power-bi/.

Visual calculations can be used to control conditional formatting starting with the February 2025 version of Power BI. Several small details must be known to use them, but they are definitely worth learning.

Read on to see how it works. Conditional formatting has always seemed to be oddly difficult to do in Power BI. If you were in the happy path for conditional formatting, it’s a few mouse clicks. But if not, then good luck.

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