A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Gilbert Quevauvilliers dumps AAS:
I thought it would be a good idea to walk through the steps when looking to migrate AAS to PBI.
In the past when I had to do this for clients it was a lot of manual steps and a lot of small things to get just right. This process is now seamless and awesome!
Reviewing Gilbert’s step-by-step process, yeah, this is easy, though watch out for the pitfalls Gilbert found.
Comments closedChris Webb follows up on a prior post:
One of the most popular topics I’ve ever written about here is the dataset refresh errors you get with dynamic data sources and the Web.Contents function in Power BI (see here and here for example). Recently I learned about an interesting new detail regarding this problem that I thought was worth blogging about, and which may help someone trying to troubleshoot it.
Read on for the scenario, as well as what you can do to avoid an issue.
Comments closedKristyna Hughes has an interesting use case for row-level security:
Making multilingual reports in Power BI requires a lot of different elements. Translations can be added to PBIX files to translate column names, visual titles, etc. but these translations will not impact the data itself. One way to translate the dimensions themselves (star schema introduction) is to have a translation table that contains a display language and value column for each ID of the dimension. In the example below, the translation table would replace the original table and we could apply RLS to the Language column.
I think this is a clever use case for row-level security.
Comments closedPaul Turley avoids “big, wide tables”:
Power BI is architected to consume data in a dimensional model, with narrow fact tables and related dimensions. Introducing a big, wide table in a tabular model is extremely inefficient. It takes up space and memory resources, impacts performance, and complicates measure coding. Flattening records into a flat table is one of the worst things you can do in Power BI and a common mistake made by novice Power BI users.
This is a conversation I’ve had with many customers. We want our cake, and we want to eat it too. We want to have all the analytic capabilities, interactivity and high performance but we also want the ability to drill-down to a lot of details. What if we have a legitimate need to report on transaction details and/or a large table with many columns? It is well-known that the ideal shape is a star schema but what if we need to shape data for detail reporting? The answer is that you can have it both ways, but just not in one table.
Read on for a better model design (hint: the Kimball style) as well as several tips and tricks.
Comments closedShabnam Watson answers an attendee question:
During one of my presentations on Incremental Refresh (IR) in Power BI, someone asked what happens during a Power BI automatic partition maintenance window when Power BI has an opportunity to merge smaller partitions into larger ones. Does Power BI use the data that is already imported into Power BI for the smaller partitions and combine it into a bigger one or does it re-read the data for those smaller partitions again. For example, if a dataset has an IR policy to refresh the last 1 day, and it has read data for all the days in a previous month, one day for each, when the new month arrives, it has an opportunity to merge the smaller day partitions into a month partition for the previous month. Does it re-read the previous month’s data from the source again or does it use what it already has in its memory?
Read on for the answer.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi helps us find the best data:
One of the key aspects of users’ experience in Power BI is their ability to collaborate in creating and sharing content, making it an easy-to-use and convenient platform. But the convenience comes with a cost of having a lot of shared content in large organisations raising concerns about the content’s quality and trustworthiness. It would be hard, if not impossible, to identify the quality of the contents without a mechanism to identify the quality of the contents. Content endorsement is the answer to this.
“I’m Commander Shepherd and this is my favorite dataset on the Power BI Citadel.”
Comments closedPaul Turley continues a series on working with large amounts of data in Power BI:
You don’t have to have massive tables to benefit from partitioning. Even tables with a few hundred thousand records can benefit from partitioning, to improve data refresh performance and to detect source data changes. There is little maintenance overhead, so the benefits usually outweigh the cost, in terms of effort and management.
Click through for Paul’s thoughts on the topic.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld wants to see what’s out there in the wild:
In some scenarios, it can happen that you do not even have a Power BI desktop data model. For example, when you migrated from Analysis Services to Power BI Premium, or in case you have to deal with large datasets and it is directly developed using Visual Studio, Tabular Editor or any other tool of your preference and deployed over the XMLA endpoint. Similar setup could be that you once enriched your data model using Tabular Editor or ALM Toolkit, which resulted in the fact that your Power BI Desktop file, is no longer your golden version of your data model.
Another scenario could be gaining an overview of partitioning when using incremental refresh. The partitions of Incremental Refresh are only generated in the Power BI Service. So, including this information in your generated documentation is only possible when you connect directly to the Power BI Service.
But what if you still want to show a complete view of your Power BI data model, and extract insights using the Power BI Model Documenter? I can tell you; it is possible!
Read on to see what you can do in that case.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers tries it:
Did you know that there is an easy way to run and extract Power BI REST API data?
The good news is that you can do this directly in your web browser. You don’t have to install or configure anything!
The method below works well if you want to either test the API to see what it returns.
Or if you want to run it to extract some data.
Read on for the process.
Comments closedJason Cockington makes several recommendations of external tools for Power BI Desktop:
The External Tools ribbon is a feature that has been available in Power BI Desktop since the July 2020 release. This feature should be considered essential to anyone who is regularly working in the Power BI space. In this article I recommend my top five External Tools, that I consider essential to any Power BI developer.
Read on for the recommendations. I regularly use two of the five but these do look good.
Comments closed