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Category: Power BI

Power BI Model Documenter Version 2.1.0

Published 2022-11-08 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has a new version of the Power BI Model Documenter:

It is long overdue, but time for a new updated version for the Power BI Model Documenter external tool! The latest release lasts from the first week of 2022 and since then close to 6000 people have downloaded the Model Documenter installer directly from the website, excluding the downloads and clones from the GitHub repository. I can’t share enough how happy I am with all the interactions I’ve had with people from all over the world providing feedback, asking questions and willing to contribute to the Model Documenter.

Read on to see what’s changed since the last release.

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Profiler Errors against Power BI Dataset

Published 2022-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson troubleshoots an issue:

I was trying to trace a dataset I had published to Power BI service using SQL Server Profiler and I was getting this error:

Either the trace with the ID of ‘MicrosoftProfilerTrace1667261566’ does not exist in the server with the ID of ‘autopremiumhostnorthcentralus001-081’, or the user does not have permissions to access the object.

Read on for the solution.

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The Importance of the Power BI Service

Published 2022-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains why the Power BI Service is useful:

The Power BI toolset comes in many shapes and forms. There is a Power BI Desktop, Power BI Mobile app, Power BI Report Server, and Power BI Service (and some other applications and components too). The questions I hear from the new users of Power BI are; Do I need to have an account for Power BI? do I need to use the Power BI website for creating visualization etc.? What is the Power BI website or service, and what is its usage? If I can do the reporting using Power BI Desktop for free, then why would I need the service? In this article and video, I will answer all of that.

Click through for a video or for the article explaining the purpose behind the Power BI Service. Having done work with places using Power BI Report Server and places using the Power BI Service, I will say that the latter takes more work to get corporate-compliant but offers a whole lot more.

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Incorporating Power BI with Azure Synapse Analytics

Published 2022-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant counts the ways:

The first is to connect Power BI to Azure Synapse to explore and visualize data. You can examine your datasets that you have loaded in your datalake with Power BI to help with the analysis of the data either for a data science solution or to determine how you are going to transform the data. For more information on how to do this, check out my previous blog .

Click through for three additional methods.

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Refreshing Excel Data Model Tables via VBA

Published 2022-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb does some work in Excel:

Sometimes, when you’re analysing data, you need to be able to change variables and see what the impact is: for example you might want to see what your profit margin looks like if tax rates are set at different levels. Power BI’s what-if parameter feature can do this but it has the limitation that you can’t enter any value you like – you need to create a table containing all possible variable values in advance. The advantage the Excel Data Model/Power Pivot has over Power BI for this type of what-if analysis is that you have the Excel worksheet available, which is not only a place to display your report but which can also be used as a data source for tables in the Excel Data Model, making it easy for users to enter whatever variable they want. Up until recently, though, I assumed that if you were importing data from the worksheet into the Excel Data Model you would need to take some form of manual action, for example clicking a refresh button, to load the new data from the worksheet into the Excel Data Model when the data there changed. In this blog post I’ll show you how you can use VBA to solve this problem and build an elegant what-if analysis solution in Excel where no extra clicks are needed.

Read on for that demonstration.

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Parallel Loading of Tables in Power BI Dataset Refresh

Published 2022-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb hits the turbo button:

Do you have a a large dataset in Power BI Premium or Premium Per User? Do you have more than six tables that take a significant amount of time to refresh? If so, you may be able to speed up the performance of your dataset’s refresh by increasing the number of tables that are refreshed in parallel, using a feature that was released in August 2022 but which you may have missed.

Click through for that tip.

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Automatic Partition Maintenance in Power BI Incremental Refresh

Published 2022-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson goes investigating:

In this post, I am going to look at automatic partition maintenance by Power BI service for datasets with Incremental Refresh and focus on what happens to the partitions as time goes by. To do this, I am going to set up a couple of sample datasets with different Incremental Refresh (IR) policies with and without the Hybrid option, schedule automatic refreshes from the Power BI Service, and record how their partitions change over time. As a result, this post is going to get updated as time goes on as it documents how the partitions evolve.

Read on to learn more about what Incremental Refresh does and how things have changed over time. This looks like a post to come back to a few times.

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Row-Level Security against Power BI Shared Datasets

Published 2022-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev combines two capabilities in Power BI:

In a typical engagement, I create an organizational semantic model(s) and “report packs”, such as Sales Report Pack, Inventory Report Pack, etc. These report packs are typically implemented as Power BI reports connected to the semantic model as a shared dataset using the Power BI Datasets connector. Reports sanctioned by IT are published to a dedicated workspace, such as Corporate BI. Departmental reports are deployed to their respective workspace, such as Sales, to enforce content-level security. Usually, the semantic model has row-level security (RLS) roles defined to enforce restricted access to data depending on the identity of the interactive user.

Read on to see how you can test out the results once you get it working.

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Improving Power BI Q&A with Synonyms

Published 2022-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc pulls out the thesaurus:

Most struggle with getting Q&A to be effective in Power BI. Usually this comes down to either model naming or synonyms. Patrick shows you how you can update these and also a nice feature to let you share them with others.

I’ve found the Power BI Q&A component to be a bit tetchy, even with synonyms, when you’re asking for non-trivial slices of the data. Still, what Patrick shows does help a lot.

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