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Category: Power BI

Implementing a Power BI Composite Model

Marc Lelijveld walks us through an implementation of the Power BI composite model:

Have you been working with Composite Models in Power BI? Did you run into challenges while you did? Then this blog is for you! In this blog I will further elaborate on what the composite models (including DirectQuery for Power BI datasets) are and everything that comes into play when you start implementing them.

During this blog I will introduce you to topics like source groups, storage modes and relationship evaluation. All different topics that come into play when you start building composite models.

If composite models sound interesting, be sure to check this out.

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Reviewing Power BI Field Parameters

Teo Lachev is pleased:

Coming back from a long vacation and I almost missed this new Power BI killer feature: Field Parameters! Not to be confused with Dynamic M Query Parameters that I ranted about here, field parameters solve a long-standing limitation of Power BI that prevents you to bind dynamically dimension members to a visual. Dynamic binding wasn’t issue with measures because they are dynamic and can evaluate runtime conditions, such as slicer selection. But dimensions were a different story. Once you have bound them to a category bucket in a visual, you couldn’t change them on the fly.

Read on for more information on a common scenario in which field parameters can be quite helpful.

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Reviewing Power BI Datamarts

Teo Lachev looks at Power BI Datamarts:

As Microsoft announced here, Power BI datamarts are upon us. I can almost see an important enterprise client demanding “self-service datamarts me now or else… “, thus inspiring an opportunity for another premium feature, spearheaded with great vision and effort, but questionable practical value. In a nutshell, a Power BI datamart is a combo of Power BI Premium and a Microsoft-hosted Azure SQL Database aiming to simplify the implementation of a departmental datamart.

This take is a bit more negative than most of the others I’ve seen, so it’s worth a read in comparison to what others have written.

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KEEPFILTERS in DAX

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

KEEPFILTERS is a CALCULATE modifier used to change the way CALCULATE merges new filters with the outer filter context. Indeed, the default behavior of CALCULATE is to override existing filters. By using KEEPFILTERS you ask CALCULATE to add the new filter to the outer filter context, instead of overriding the outer filter.

Read on for the explanation and a demo.

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Calculating Weekdays with M

Kristyna Hughes calculates weekdays on the fly:

Knowing the days between events is a fairly common reporting request because a lot of reporting is created to track SLA’s (service level agreement) and other KPI’s (key performance indicators). While getting the days between two dates is fairly easy to achieve, they tend to follow up and ask how many week days there are between two timed events. For example, one company may have a SLA to ship an order within three week days of the order being placed or else a discount is applied to the order. In this case, I would highly recommend that the company have software that calculates these days in the background and stores the actual week days between order date and ship date in a database. Unfortunately, many companies create policies like this without considering future reporting needs and these values have to be calculated on the backend.

Click through for the code but be sure to read the note that this is all weekdays, including holidays.

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Language Translation via Power BI Field Parameters

Gerhard Brueckl shows off a great use of Power BI Field Parameters:

The current approaches when it comes to data and value translations are more workarounds than actual solutions. They probably work fine for small data models and very specific use-cases but usually fall short in performance, usability or maintainability when implemented on a larger scale enterprise models.

The recently introduced Field Parameters in Power BI give us a bit more flexibility here and another potential solution to implement data and value translations in Power BI.

Click through for an example which shows data in English, Spanish, and French.

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Using Power BI Field Parameters with Data from Kusto

Dany Hoter combines Azure Data Explorer and a new feature in Power BI:

Field parameters are a new feature in Power BI as of the May version.

With field parameters you can give the consumer of a report a lot of flexibility about the content of the report, what fields are used in the visuals, what time granularity is used and what measures are displayed.

All this without writing any DAX or M code.

Click through for an example of how this works.

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How It Works: Power BI Field Parameters Edition

Gilbert Quevauvilliers figures out how field parameters work:

In this blog post I want to give a visual representation as to how field parameters works and what the current limitations are.

It is important to be aware of the limitations so that you do not get caught out later or you are trying to figure out why it is not working.

I do hope my descriptions and pictures below help you understand how it works and when it does not work!

Click through for some detailed graphics and explanation.

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