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Category: Power BI

Changes to the Power BI Datamarts UI

Published 2022-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres notices the difference between the two pictures:

I wrote an article about Power BI Datamarts which was released together the feature, on the exact moment it was being announced in a conference. Of course, this feature has being evolved since that time.

I would emphasize the performance. The general UI performance seems way better than when it was first released. Let’s talk about some more news on the Power BI Datamarts, specially on the UI.

Read on for an overview of those changes.

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Refreshing One Power BI Dataset Table via SSMS

Published 2022-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven performs a small update:

A few weeks back I was working on a dataset at a client where I needed to import Excel files from a folder into said dataset. I filtered the files on a prefix and loaded around 30 files of the same structure to a table in my dataset. The Excel files are exports from a budgetting system (I know, right?) that have to be updated multiple times in the next coming weeks on an ad-hoc basis.

Rather than refreshing the entire dataset, there’s a better way, though there is a caveat.

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Solving Common CALCULATE Filter Argument Errors

Published 2022-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari catalog some errors:

The expression contains columns from multiple tables, but only columns from a single table can be used in a True/False expression that is used as a table filter expression.

This error is seen when the predicate includes column references from more than one table. For example, if we need a measure that returns the sales made to customers living in the same country as the store, we could try to write the following measure:

Read on for several examples and solid guidance on how to resolve these common issues.

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Thoughts on a Migration: Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English shares some thoughts:

Over the past month couple of months I got the opportunity to test out the new migration experience that was just made available for Public Preview this past month during the PASS Data Community Summit and announced on the Power BI blog here Accelerate your migration experience from Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium with the automated migration tool. The blog post also shows a very quick animated gif walkthrough of the process and there is a thirteen minute video from the MS Build conference earlier this year where this was first demoed that you can check out here as well The Future of Enterprise Semantic Models.

Click through for a detailed analysis.

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The Lowdown on the Power BI Gateway

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad gives us a primer:

Power BI is a data analysis tool that connects to many data sources. Suppose the data source for Power BI is located in an on-premises location. In that case, the connection from the cloud-based Power BI Service to the on-premises located data source should be created with an application called Gateway. In this post, you will learn what the Gateway is, the types of the gateway, their differences, installing the gateway, and scheduling a data set with that gateway.

Click through for a video, as well as a lengthy article covering the topic.

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Migrating Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium

Published 2022-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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Text Concatenation and Dataset Refresh Errors

Published 2022-11-30 by Kevin Feasel

Chris 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.

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Power BI Row-Level Security for Language Selection

Published 2022-11-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kristyna 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.

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The Importance of Proper Data Modeling in Power BI

Published 2022-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Paul 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.

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Automatic Partition Maintenance in Power BI

Published 2022-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam 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.

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