A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chris Webb talks about the present and the future:
Turning the question around, however, leads you to some aspects of the question that haven’t been fully explored. Instead of asking “Can I run Power BI Desktop on my Mac?”, you can instead ask “Can I do all of my Power BI development using only a browser?”. At Microsoft our long-term goal is to make all Power BI development web-based, but how close are we to that goal?
Read on for Chris’s answer.
Comments closedErik Svensen gets things organized:
This might be the default way of doing it but if you always want the chart to be sorted by a particular measure even though you are showing another measure then you can use this workaround. You should of course inform the user about the chosen sort order for instance in the subtitle or similar.
Click through to see what Erik has in mind.
Comments closedDany Hoter gives us a workaround:
Many users who try ADX in direct query mode encounter errors right away.
The errors complain about lack of memory.
If the tables are small enough, it may work but still performance will not be as advertised on TV.
The reason in most cases is the behavior of joins in ADX as they are created by PBI.
In this article I’ll show different approaches to joining tables as used by PBI for related tables or as can be expressed in KQL in general.
I created a special table in the help cluster with 31 million rows that is big enough to demonstrate the performance differences between the variations.
Read the whole thing. This one’s a little surprising to me.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers needs a refresh:
I have been answering some questions on the Power BI (Or is it now Fabric?) community forum, and I have found recently that there are some people asking how to get data from Excel that is stored in SharePoint Online.
In this blog post I will show you how to connect to a single Excel file using Power BI desktop, and then configure it in the Power BI Service where it does not require a gateway.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedChris Webb doesn’t want query folding limits:
A few months ago a new option was added to the Sql.Database and Sql.Databases functions in Power Query in Power BI and Excel which allows Power Query queries that combine data from different SQL Server databases to fold. Here’s a simple example showing how to use it.
Read on for the setup and the demonstration. This is pretty nice for cases where you have user data in one database and reference data in another, or you’re trying to join together data from two separate systems.
Comments closedRebecca O’Connor builds a map:
Power BI can leverage Geospatial data from snowflake with my favourite map visual – Iconmap – https://www.icon-map.com/ . Icon map can render points, polygons and linestrings using ‘Well Known Text’ format (WKT).
Snowflake supports converting geospatial datatypes to WKT. Not only this, Snowflake has the capabilities to perform the Engineering and analytical needs for Geospatial analysis without using any other tool. And the results can be visualised in a variety of medias such as Tableau, Hex, Carto or even a Custom built Streamlit application. I have written a Streamlit blog on this very recently.
Click through for information on how to get the data shaped in a way that Power BI likes.
Comments closedBink the Data Goblin is a Data Analyst who supports her department by making, maintaining and helping others with Power BI solutions. Bink is quite proficient at Power BI, and is recognized in her user community as a go-to person for answers to Power BI questions. Recently, Bink was promoted to a position in their Center of Excellence to help her department make the most of Power BI.
One day, Bink receives a message on Teams from Bonk the Business Goblin. Bonk is an Analyst who works in Finance and is typically responsible for the reporting on behalf of the Finance team. Bonk asks…
I think some of this is a little idealized (or I’m a bit cynical) but it’s a good reminder that the technical domain is important but not the only thing to think about.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers pulls back the curtain:
I was once again working with the grouping feature in Power BI Desktop.
This time I had a lot of values that I wanted to put into multiple groups. I also did not want to select the individual values (I have previously shown this in my blog post Creating a group with all values (Even if not in the data) in Power BI)
It is amazing that sometimes it takes me a while to fully understand how to use some features in Power BI and today was one of those days!
Click through to see what Gilbert learned and how you can use that information to group by ranges instead of individual values.
Comments closedMeagan Longoria rolls up her sleeves:
If you are using Power BI to connect to a PaaS resource on a virtual network in Azure (including private endpoints), you need a data gateway. While you can use an on-premises data gateway (the type of Power BI gateway we have had for years), there is an offering called a virtual network data gateway that is currently in preview.
The VNet data gateway securely communicates with the data source, executes queries, and transmits results back to the service, just like the on-premises data gateway. But it doesn’t require us to provision a virtual machine in the same network (or a peered network) of our Azure data source.
Read on to see some important caveats, as well as a step-by-step guide.
Comments closedWhen working with cloud data sources you might encounter links where spaces show up as “%20” instead for example. This is called URI escaping or encoding. In Power Query there is a native function that does this kind of encoding: Uri.EscapeDataString – PowerQuery M | Microsoft Learn
However, a native function that does just the opposite is missing. Fortunately, this can be achieved with a custom function that I have found in the Power BI forum:
Click through for that function.
Comments closed