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Category: Power BI

Connecting Power BI to ADX via Private Endpoint

Published 2023-05-09 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter keeps it all on the Azure backbone:

The PBI developer creating datasets and reports need to connect to the ADX cluster using Power BI desktop.

To establish such a connection, the user’s IP address should be allowed access to the private end point.

The access should be tested using Kusto Web explorer (KWE) to make sure that the cluster can be reached.

If KWE can connect , Power BI desktop should also connect successfully and a report using the cluster in Direct Query or import can be created.

That’s the goal, and Dany shows us the way to do it.

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WaitTime in Power BI

Published 2023-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb explains what a new metric means:

What does WaitTime represent? Here’s the technical explanation: it’s the wait time on the query thread pool in the Analysis Services engine before the query starts to run. But what does this mean for you as someone trying to tune DAX queries in Power BI?

Chris provides an examplation of exactly that. This tracking of noisy neighbors is interesting, as it would provide insight if you’re noticing variance in dataset refresh times.

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Modifying Dynamic Format Strings in Power BI

Published 2023-05-02 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers tries out a neat feature:

I was recently testing out and using the great new Power BI feature using dynamic format strings in Power BI.

What I found that currently it is not possible or easy to modify an existing dynamic format string.

In this blog post below I show you how I managed to modify the dynamic format string, so that you do not need to DELTE it and re-create it!

Click through to learn how. This works really well for currency-style scenarios, like the one Gilbert shows. I could also see it providing different levels of precision based on how large the value is.

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Notes for Power BI Governance

Published 2023-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi provides advice:

In recent years, Power BI has become one of the most widely used business intelligence (BI) tools. Power BI is more than just a reporting tool; it is a comprehensive analytical platform that enables users to collaborate on data insights and share them internally and externally. In addition to creating reports and dashboards, Power BI allows users to collaborate and share their work with others. For instance, users can share dashboards with their colleagues, allowing them to view, interact, and engage with the data quickly. However, as more organisations adopt Power BI, it becomes essential to ensure appropriate governance processes, policies, and rules are in place. This blog post explains Power BI governance and why business owners need to be conscious of it.

Read on for more advice.

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Measuring Power BI Dataset Memory and CPU Utilization

Published 2023-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb checks resource utilization:

This post is a follow-up to my recent post on identifying CPU and memory-intensive Power Query queries in Power BI. In that post I pointed out that Profiler and Log Analytics now gives you information on the CPU and memory used by an individual Power Query query when importing data into Power BI. What I didn’t notice when I wrote that post is that there is also now information available in Profiler and Log Analytics that tells you about peak memory and CPU usage across all Power Query queries for a single refresh in the Power BI Service, as well as memory usage for the refresh as a whole.

Click through for a demonstration using Profiler.

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Version Control for Power BI Datasets

Published 2023-04-27 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank improves on a prior version control system:

In the previous post, I outlined a possible workflow for Power BI development, and implemented an Azure DevOps pipeline to show how steps in such a workflow could be automated. To build the pipeline I stored an entire .pbix report file – data and all – in version control, which is a problem for at least two reasons:

  • storing large report files in a version control system won’t scale well
  • datasets may contain confidential or sensitive data which must be kept out of version control.

In this post I’ll look at separating a report’s dataset from its visuals, version controlling the standalone dataset (without data), and deploying the dataset automatically to Power BI.

Read on for the process.

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Updating Power BI Dataset Compatibility Level

Published 2023-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler wants the newest toys:

In the monthly updates for Power BI, there may be new features that appear for preview. For example, in the April 2023 update, dynamic format strings for measures released into preview. This feature allows you to specify a DAX format string expression for measures, like you already could do with calculation groups.

In Power BI, these features become readily available once enabled from the ‘Preview features’ section of the ‘Options’ menu. However, when you are connected to a dataset or metadata with Tabular Editor, the properties will not be visible. That’s because behind-the-scenes, Power BI upgrades the model compatibility level when using a preview feature for the first time.

Click through to learn how.

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Using Redis as a Power BI Datasource

Published 2023-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Kyle Teegarden has me wondering:

Power BI is a widely used, interactive visualization tool capable of querying a variety of SQL-powered back ends. To accelerate these queries, and provide an even more responsive Power BI user experience, we’ve developed Redis SQL ODBC.

Redis SQL ODBC is a native ODBC driver that lets you seamlessly integrate Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise and Enterprise Flash tiers with Power BI. This may dramatically improve your Power BI query response times.

Knowing that the intent of Redis is individual point lookups, this was a bit surprising. Doing the queries over secondary indexes does help square that circle, however.

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Load Testing in Power BI

Published 2023-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us the why and the how:

If you’re about to put a big Power BI project into production, have you planned to do any load testing? If not, stop whatever you’re doing and read this!

In my job on the Power BI CAT team at Microsoft it’s common for us to be called in to deal with poorly performing reports. Often, these performance problems only become apparent after the reports have gone live: performance was fine when it was just one developer testing it, but as soon as multiple end-users start running reports they complain about slowness and timeouts. At this point it’s much harder to change or fix anything because time is short, everyone’s panicking and blaming each other, and the users are trying to do their jobs with a solution that isn’t fit for purpose. Of course if the developers had done some load testing then these problems would have been picked up much earlier.

With that in mind, Chris explains some of the things we can do to help with load testing in Power BI.

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