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Category: Power BI

The Importance of Star Schemas in Power BI

Published 2023-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley lays out facts (and dimensions):

There is no secret about this. If you do any legitimate research about Power BI (reading blogs, books or training from reliable sources), you will quickly learn that a lot of basic functionality requires a dimensional model, aka “Star Schema”. This is a hard fact that every expert promotes, and self-taught data analysts either have learned or will learn through experience. So, if everyone agrees on this point, why do so many resist this advice?

Perspective is everything. I didn’t understand why getting to the star schema was so out of reach so often until I was able to see it from another perspective. There are a few common scenarios that draw source data into different directions than an ideal dimensional model.

Read on for Paul’s take on the subject.

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Collaboration in Power BI Workspaces

Published 2023-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad takes us through the workspace model in Power BI:

Workspaces are another way of sharing Power BI content with other people. The benefit of this sharing approach is that you can share content with a group of people and create a collaborative development environment where everyone can access it. In this article and video, I get you through sharing with workspaces, what the limitations and advantages are, and how it is different from dashboard sharing, and you will have a complete understanding at the end of this article which scenarios are suitable to be used with this method of sharing.

Click through for a video and an article.

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Power BI Report Source Redirection

Published 2023-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English re-binds some reports:

This is a follow up to the post Azure Analysis Services (AAS) Migration to Power BI Premium Experience that I did back in December. In that post I mentioned the following towards the end of the post –

If you have existing Power BI reports using the AAS live connection you are able to use the report rebind API to point the report to use the Power BI dataset. The one thing to note as pointed out in the documentation is that as of now if you need to modify the report layout you would need to do that directly in the service. That portion of the migration process is still being worked on and hopefully should be updated to resolve the issue so that you will be able to download the redirected report from the service, modify it, and then publish the report back to the Power BI service.

In this post I want to touch on this a bit more and provide some follow up based on work that has taken place since that post on the migration rebind (redirection) process.

Dan shows the process and also tells us about a gotcha along the way.

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Power BI Workspace Roles

Published 2023-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad shares some recommendations with us:

Power BI workspaces are not like the old days when we had Edit access and View access only. You have more options for roles in a workspace, and in my courses, I have found that many people have chosen the incorrect role without knowing what the role does. In this article, I’ll explain all the roles in the workspace, and what is the best way to set them up to have a secure workspace.

Click through for the article, as well as an accompanying video. Or a video and an accompanying article, if that’s how you roll.

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Regionally Formatted Dates in Excel and Power BI

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Kennedy wrangles dates:

Dates are fundamental to pretty much every report. No matter what industry you work in, at some stage you’re going to work with dates in your reporting. This might be in the form of Semesters, Quarters, Seasons, Weeks, or just good old fashioned Dates. 

If you’re working with Power Query or Power BI, you should have a Date Table. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how to work with Dates that can be tricky to format. 

Click through for examples of three common challenges when working with dates in Excel and Power BI.

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Power BI App Audiences and Workspaces

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld looks at an update to Power BI:

Back in August 2022, Microsoft released a feature to have multiple audiences for Power BI Apps, or if you will deploying multiple versions of the same app where you can actively show and hide content for different audiences. A very welcome feature that has a big impact on the number of workspaces people require to have to reach the same goals. In this blog, I will elaborate on the impact of multiple audiences for Power BI Apps, as well as the impact on workspace governance.

Read on for Marc’s thoughts on the topic.

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Automating Power BI Premium Dataset Backup

Published 2023-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shares the first part of a two-part series:

The first part in this 2-part series I am going to explain how configure the Azure Runbook so that you can then re-use it for multiple different Power BI datasets.

I am confident that most people have more than one dataset that needs to be backed up.

Before starting, please make sure that you have connected your Power Per User or Premium App Workspace to Azure Storage

Read on for a high-level overview of how to create a runbook in Powershell, as well as the runbook code.

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Window Functions in DAX

Published 2023-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari lay out the foundations of window functions:

Window functions by themselves do not increase the expressivity of DAX. Most if not all of the calculations performed with window functions can be expressed with more complex DAX code. The goal is to simplify authoring these calculations and improve their performance.

These new functions also introduce a new concept to the DAX language: “apply semantics”. We will publish more articles about window functions and “apply semantics” over time. SQLBI+ subscribers will get a dedicated video course later this year and already have access to the window functions whitepaper we are currently writing.

Click through for an introduction.

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Minimizing Cross-Highlighting on Direct Query

Published 2023-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter explains why cross filtering might not be the best when you are using Direct Query in Power BI:

Every time a user clicks on a row or a column in a visual, every other visual in the page feels an urge to refresh itself and respond to the click.

Visual that are based on direct query may issue multiple queries for each refresh.

Depending on the number of measures used in the visual, the number of generated queries can be as high as 10 or even more for a single visual.

Read on for more information and what you can do to avoid this problem.

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