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Category: Power BI

Fixing Formula.Firewall Issues in Power Query

Imke Feldmann shorts out a firewall issue:

Formula.Firewall issues can hit you when designing your queries or even “out of the blue” when suddenly refreshes in the service are failing due to changes in the query evaluation.
You will find a lot of methods published on the internet which are good and cover different scenarios. But there is also a very quick fix method that I learned from Miguel Escobar that I want to demonstrate in this post. This will basically circumvent the data privacy level, so make sure that you understand the implications (risk of data leakage from one source to another). If not, please read Miguels article first!

After reading Miguel’s post, read on for a fix.

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Running Power BI Report Server

Reza Rad stays on-premises:

Power BI is not only a cloud-based reporting technology. Due to the demand for some businesses to have their data and reporting solutions on-premises, Power BI also has the option to be deployed fully on-premises. Power BI on-premises hosting is called Power BI Report Server. This post concerns using Power BI in a fully on-premises solution with Power BI Report Server.

This post will teach you everything you need about the on-premises world of Power BI. You will learn how to install Power BI Report Server, learn all requirements and configurations for the Power BI Report Server to work correctly, and see all the pros and cons of this solution. At the end of this post, you will be able to decide if Power BI on-premises is the right choice for you, and if it is, then you will be able to set a Power BI on-premises solution up and running easily.

I used Power BI Report Server for a few years. My short version is that it’s really useful if you aren’t allowed to use Power BI Online (as was my case) but if you know what’s in the Online version, you’ll see just how much you’re missing out on.

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Fixing VertiPaq Analyzer Dictionary Size Errors

Marco Russo troubleshoots an issue:

There are cases where the dictionary size reported by VertiPaq Analyzer (used by DAX Studio, Bravo for Power BI, and Tabular Editor 3) does not correspond to the actual memory required by the dictionary. However, the number reported is technically correct because it represents the memory currently allocated for the dictionary. The issue is that – after a refresh – this memory amount is larger than the actual memory required for hash-encoded columns.

Read on to learn what the consequences are and how you can resolve this in Power BI Desktop as well as in Analysis Services.

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Paginated Reports in Power BI Pro

Andy Jones has some good news for us:

Microsoft recently announced that Power BI Paginated Reports is now available to users with a Pro licence. Previously, you required a Premium licence to take advantage of Paginated Reports in Power BI.

Read on to learn how paginated reports work in Power BI (hint: almost like SSRS). Even with Power BI Premium Per User being a fairly reasonable $20 per user per month, it’s nice to see Pro get a bit more value.

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Sharing Excel Reports Connected to Power BI Datasets

Chris Webb makes us take a step back and think:

love Excel as an alternative to Power BI reports, especially now that Excel Online allows you to interact with browser-based Excel reports that use Power BI datasets or the Excel Data Model (aka Power Pivot) as a source. After all, why try to recreate a PivotTable in a Power BI report when you can give your users an actual PivotTable? You can publish Excel reports to Power BI and view them there; however if you want to share these reports using OneDrive for Business, outside Power BI, you’ll need to think carefully about how you do so before you allow other people to view the report.

Click through for more information.

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Changes to the Power BI Datamarts UI

Dennes Torres notices the difference between the two pictures:

I wrote an article about Power BI Datamarts which was released together the feature, on the exact moment it was being announced in a conference. Of course, this feature has being evolved since that time.

I would emphasize the performance. The general UI performance seems way better than when it was first released. Let’s talk about some more news on the Power BI Datamarts, specially on the UI.

Read on for an overview of those changes.

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Refreshing One Power BI Dataset Table via SSMS

Nicky van Vroenhoven performs a small update:

A few weeks back I was working on a dataset at a client where I needed to import Excel files from a folder into said dataset. I filtered the files on a prefix and loaded around 30 files of the same structure to a table in my dataset. The Excel files are exports from a budgetting system (I know, right?) that have to be updated multiple times in the next coming weeks on an ad-hoc basis.

Rather than refreshing the entire dataset, there’s a better way, though there is a caveat.

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Solving Common CALCULATE Filter Argument Errors

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari catalog some errors:

The expression contains columns from multiple tables, but only columns from a single table can be used in a True/False expression that is used as a table filter expression.

This error is seen when the predicate includes column references from more than one table. For example, if we need a measure that returns the sales made to customers living in the same country as the store, we could try to write the following measure:

Read on for several examples and solid guidance on how to resolve these common issues.

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Thoughts on a Migration: Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium

Dan English shares some thoughts:

Over the past month couple of months I got the opportunity to test out the new migration experience that was just made available for Public Preview this past month during the PASS Data Community Summit and announced on the Power BI blog here Accelerate your migration experience from Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium with the automated migration tool. The blog post also shows a very quick animated gif walkthrough of the process and there is a thirteen minute video from the MS Build conference earlier this year where this was first demoed that you can check out here as well The Future of Enterprise Semantic Models.

Click through for a detailed analysis.

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