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Category: Power BI

Automatically Refreshing a Power BI Semantic Model after Dataflow Loads

Published 2025-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad refreshes a model:

Although this seems to be a simple thing to do, it is not a function that you can turn on or off. If you have a Dataflow that does the ETL and transforms and prepares the data, then to get the most up-to-date data into the report, you will need to refresh the Power BI semantic model after that, only upon successful refresh of both dataflow and semantic model is when you will have the up-to-date data into the report. Fortunately, in Fabric, this is a straightforward setup. In this article and video, I’ll explain how this is possible.

Click through for the video and the blog post. Granted, this feature is in preview, but using it is pretty straightforward.

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Power BI Embedded and Direct Lake Mode

Published 2025-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Abo Shally announces a new preview feature:

As we step into 2025, we’re excited to announce the preview of Power BI Embedded with Direct Lake Mode, a new feature designed to enhance how developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) provide embedded analytics in their applications. This capability, available in preview starting Q1 2025, leverages the power of Direct Lake Mode to allow an even enhanced performance and experience for embedded analytics.

This probably affects a small audience, though the functionality is good to see.

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Trusted Servers for Power BI TLS Connections

Published 2025-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword works around an issue:

I recently had an issue when sourcing data in Power BI from a server which was accessed by a DNS alias. Here I’ll demonstrate the issue and how to resolve it.

After entering the server details, we could be greeted with the message below:

The server name provided does not match the server name on the SQL Server SSL Certificate. Please contact your administrator or try changing your Connection encryption settings

Click through for a solution if you cannot re-issue the certificate with the relevant DNS alias.

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An Example of TMDL View in Action

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb puts the pieces together for us:

For me the biggest new feature in the January 2025 release of Power BI Desktop is the new TMDL View; many other people like Marco are excited about it too. For more advanced Power BI developers (and honestly, I don’t think you need to be that advanced to get value out of it) it makes certain editing tasks for semantic models much simpler, and while I won’t be abandoning the main Power BI Desktop UI completely or stopping using external tools like Tabular Editor it is something I see myself using on a regular basis from now on.

Click through to see one thing you can do with it.

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Thoughts on Separating Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger calls out my favorite law of headlines:

If you know Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, then you know the answer is no. But let’s get into it anyway.

Recently there was LinkedIn post that made a bunch of great and valid points but ended on an odd one.

Number one change would be removing Power BI from Fabric completely and doubling down on making it even easier for the average business user, as I have previously covered in some posts.

It’s hard for me to take this as a serious proposal instead of wishful thinking, but I think the author is being serious, so let’s treat it as such.

Read on for a bit of history and why Eugene thinks this is a very bad idea.

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Changing the Source Lakehouse in a Power BI Deployment Pipeline

Published 2025-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb makes a switch:

If you’re using deployment pipelines with Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI you’ll have found that when you deploy your model from one stage to another by default the model still points to the Lakehouse it was originally bound to. So, for example, if you deploy your model from your Development stage to your test stage, the model in the Test stage still points to the Lakehouse in the Development stage. The good news is that you can use the deployment rules feature of deployment pipelines to make sure the model in the Test stage points to a Lakehouse in the Test stage and in this post I’ll show you how.

Click through for the process.

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Thoughts on Dogma and Power BI

Published 2025-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger wants you to leave Plato’s cave:

I continue to be really frustrated about the dogmatic approach to Power BI. Best practices become religion, not to be questioned or elaborated on. Only to be followed. And you start to end up with these 10 Power BI modeling commandments:

Click through for those ten, followed by a valuable rant. This one’s a challenge for me because I understand where Eugene is going and agree. But there exists a fairly large subset of the population for whom Power BI (or whatever) isn’t a core part of the job and these people simply want an answer in order to complete a task and move on, not to gain a deeper understanding of the product. And it can be a challenge to differentiate these people from the people who would benefit from the more detailed explanation.

In short, you can drag a man out of Plato’s cave, but you can’t make him think.

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Replacing Images in PBIR Reports

Published 2025-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria performs a switcharoo:

With the PBIR format of Power BI reports, it’s much easier to make report updates outside of Power BI Desktop. One thing you may want to do is to switch out an image in a report. Maybe you need to rebrand a report, updating some of the images (logos and background images). You could import the images or use image URLs with DAX, but that comes with its own problems. If you have some dev ops or automation skills, this becomes pretty easy.

Read on to see how.

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Recovering Power BI Reports and Semantic Models

Published 2024-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler saves the day:

In the Power BI service or Microsoft Fabric, you might encounter situations where you can’t download a report or model from a workspace. Depending on your workflow, this could be problematic; for instance, you might need to work further on this file in Power BI Desktop. To do that, you first need to recover a Power BI Desktop (PBIX) file or the newer format, Power BI Projects (PBIP).

Read on for several reasons as to why you might not be able to download the file, and what you can do about it, using the semantic link library and semantic-link-labs.

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