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Category: Power BI

Corporate Networks and Power BI Performance

Published 2022-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb notes a problem:

Over the years I’ve seen a few examples of how issues with an organisation’s corporate network can affect Power BI report performance. I’ve never blogged about them because, to be honest, I know next to nothing about networks and I’m not sure I could describe them properly. However, recently, I have seen a few instances of what I think could be a widespread but little-diagnosed problem – so I would like you to check if it’s happening to you and tell me what the cause is, if you can find out.

Some time ago I wrote a post about how Power BI report performance could be worse in Internet Explorer 11 and older Windows operating systems because some report performance optimisations we do are only available with HTTP/2. 

Read on for one potential issue which could add several seconds to report calls. There’s also a good comment which adds more helpful information.

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Parameterizing Stored Procedures from Power Query

Published 2022-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi calls a stored procedure:

From time to time, Excel users require to get the data from a SQL Server stored procedure. The stored procedures usually accept some input parameters and return the results. But how can we dynamically pass values to the stored procedures from cells in Excel to SQL Server?

Read on for two approaches to the problem. Like Soheil, I think the second approach is much smoother, in part because it isn’t 30-something steps long.

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E-Mailing Power BI Query Outputs as CSV Files

Published 2022-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers finds a way:

I recently had a requirement from a customer where they wanted a list of all Customers and the Primary Contact to be emailed to them every day.

The reason for this to be emailed daily is to ensure that when calling the customer, they know whom to speak to.

This got me thinking and I could use Power Automate to achieve this task which I detail in this blog post below.

I appreciate the ingenuity involved in getting this to work, though this also presents a good case for having this data in a warehouse, where data export to CSV would be easier.

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Using a Service Principal Account for Power BI + Dedicated SQL Pool

Published 2022-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English provides a hookup:

In this post I will go over a topic that is frequently asked about and that is using a Service Principal account with Power BI when connecting to data sources. Currently today none of the built-in connectors support this capability natively, but the SQL Server ODBC driver does support the use of a Service Principal account. The one caveat with using an ODBC driver with Power BI is that a gateway would be required once the report is published to the service.

Read on for the step-by-step process.

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Getting User Access Lists to All Power BI Reports

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun wants to know what you can see:

This way, you will have a better view of users, and their access to data and reports (if these are containing sensible data). You can always retrieve the list of workspaces and access the list of all users with the PowerShell cmdlet Get-PowerBIWorkspace.

I have also added the Join-Object module. It can join two objects or two arrays, based on the given matching columns.

Click through for a Powershell script which does the job.

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Creating Multiple Audiences in a Power BI App Workspace

Published 2022-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers plays to the audience:

With the recent announcement (Announcing Public Preview of Multiple Audiences for Power BI Apps | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI) it is now possible to create multiple audiences in a single App Workspace.

What this means you can now have a single app workspace but create a view for specific users (each view is known as an Audience)

This blog post will detail how to manage multiple audiences with AAD Security Groups, where the only requirement will be to update the app when new reports get created and to which audience to make them available.

There’s also a big warning on Gilbert’s post that you will not want to miss.

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Thoughts on Power BI Datamarts

Published 2022-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld dives into the topic of Datamarts in Power BI:

The first post after my vacation. I was in doubt for a while whether I should write this one or not… given the preview state. Since one of the customers I work for asked me for advise today about Power BI Datamarts, I thought lets do it! They convinced me that it would be a valuable blog for many. I hope for you too.

What is this blog about? I will explain my first experiences with Power BI Datamarts which is currently in preview state. I will elaborate on my test cases, the value I see in Datamarts but also some open ends and where you can potentially position it in your Power BI solution architecture.

I think Marc ends up pretty far on the positive side of the opinion curve here relative to many early reviews.

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ALLSELECTED in DAX

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari explain how the ALLSELECTED function works:

There are two ways to describe what ALLSELECTED performs and what its use cases are: a simple way and a complex way. In this article, we focus on a simple description of the function and its main use cases. We also provide details about when and how you can use ALLSELECTED without having to worry about the intricate details. If and when you want to go to the next level, invest the proper amount of time required to study this article: The definitive guide to ALLSELECTED. Be careful, the details are really complex and if you stick to the best practices, you can safely ignore said details. A real DAX guru should know all the details, but in this article we focus more on an introduction to ALLSELECTED.

Because of its inherent complexity, we describe ALLSELECTED by first focusing on a business case where ALLSELECTED is a good fit. We then provide an imperfect – yet useful – description of what ALLSELECTED is performing. And finally we provide the few best practices to follow when using ALLSELECTED. We will not provide the complete description of ALLSELECTED in terms of shadow filter context, not even as an introduction.

Even the simple solution is fairly complex.

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