Category: Power BI

Reza Rad shares some advice:

A relationship in Power BI is often for when we want a table to filter another table (based on the selection of items in the visuals). This filtering happens in the direction of the relationship. Meaning that if DimCustomer has a one-to-many relationship with the FactSales, and the relationship direction is single directional from the DimCustomer to FactSales, then DimCustomer can filter the FactSales, but not the other way around.

What we see a lot in the Power BI models is that the developer changes the relationship to both-directional so that each of the tables can filter the other table. This looks like a nice feature, but it will come at a big cost.

Click through for five good tips in blog format as well as written form.

Chris Webb walks us through some inconsistencies:

A few months ago one of my colleagues at Microsoft, David Browne, showed me an interesting Power Query problem with how the Xml.Tables and Xml.Document M functions handle null or missing values. I’m posting the details here because the problem seems fairly common, it causes a lot of confusion and it’s not easy to deal with.

In XML there are two ways to represent a null or missing value:<a></a> or omitting the element completely. Unfortunately the Xml.Tables and Xml.Document M functions handle these inconsistently: they treat the <a></a> form as a table but the other as a scalar.

Click through for an example and a workaround for the issue.

Marc Lelijveld is in a sharing mood:

Recently, I have had a challenge at a customer, where a central teams maintains many dataflows in Power BI, to store their only and single version of the truth. However, this central team maintained many different dataflows in a single workspace, but did not want to share the entire workspace with others. What now? How can they share a single dataflows in Power BI?

In this blog, I will describe different ways to share dataflows in the Power BI service and highlight pros and cons of each solution. Read on to find out what options you have, and what my personal preference would be.

Read on to learn why you might want to share a dataflow, as well as four techniques to do it.

Soheil Bakhshi’s reports get the Kate Moss treatment:

Shared Datasets have been around for quite a while now. In June 2019, Microsoft announced a new feature called Shared and Certified Datasets with the mindset of supporting enterprise-grade BI within the Power BI ecosystem. In essence, the shared dataset feature allows organisations to have a single source of truth across the organisation serving many reports.

A Thin Report is a report that connects to an existing dataset on Power BI Service using the Connect Live connectivity mode. So, we basically have multiple reports connected to a single dataset. Now that we know what a thin report is, let’s see why it is best practice to follow this approach.

Read on for Soheil’s thoughts on the topic and a tutorial on how to create a thin report.

Dany Hoter shows off dynamic M parameters in Power BI:

The user is creating an application in which he wants to embed Power BI.

The same Power BI report will be used in different contexts and the user wanted to have a different header each time and to provide the header as part of the URL.

There may be other ways to solve this problem(?) but as the solution was already using ADX, the user came with a way that involves Direct Query and a dynamic parameter to solve the dynamic header.

Click through to see how to solve this problem.

Chris Webb looks into activity IDs:

I was looking at the output of Power Query’s Query Diagnostics feature recently (again) and trying to understand it better. One of the more confusing aspects of it is the way that the Power Query engine may evaluate a query more than once during a single refresh. This is documented in the note halfway down this page, which says:

Jorge’s comment on the post adds even more context around what the ID Chris comes up with actually means.