Category: Power BI

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.

Gilbert Quevauvilliers doesn’t waste time:

I had a requirement where I wanted to only have the underlying query run if there was data in the table.

As shown in the image below a query would run, scan 20GB and then return zero rows.

Instead of performing such an expensive scan, Gilbert provides an alternative. This is important in the case of querying the Synapse serverless SQL pool, as Gilbert does—in that case, the 20GB scan costs money.

Richard Swinbank thinks about process:

In this series I’ll be talking a lot about workflow. Loosely speaking, report development workflow is the set of steps you have to take to create or update a Power BI report. This typically starts in Power BI desktop, and doesn’t end until users are able to get business value out of a report in the Power BI service.

A good workflow frees a report developer to do the things they like and are good at – understanding business problems, and crafting beautiful reports to help solve them. Anything that that doesn’t contribute to that just gets in the way – a bad workflow clutters up the development experience with peripheral tasks like version control, managing environments and performing deployments.

Richard shares a good number of thoughts on the matter, so check them out.

Chris Webb disables a visual element:

These numbers are counts of the number of rows for each value in the table that the field is from. The query to get these counts is usually quite fast and inexpensive, but if you’re filtering on a field from a very large table (for example a fact table) and/or using DirectQuery mode that might not be true. For example, the screenshot above is taken from a DirectQuery dataset and here’s the SQL query that generates the counts shown:

Read on to see how to do this.

Reza Rad provides an overview of what Power BI includes:

Power BI is a cloud-based technology from Microsoft for reporting and data analysis. This reporting technology is built in a way that is not only useful for developers to create reports but also for power users and business analysts. Power BI created a simple, easy-to-use, and user-friendly environment for creating reports. And on the other hand, it is based on several powerful components which help create reports and data analysis for complex scenarios.

Every component of Power BI is responsible for a specific part of the technology. There are components for building reports, connecting to data sources, doing analytics calculations, sharing reports, etc. The following sections explain what each component is. Some of these components are explained in detail in other articles.

Click through for a long list and a series of high-level summaries.