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Category: Power BI

Finding Guidance on Power BI

Published 2022-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra puts together a compendium:

Recently there has been a number of great articles published on Power BI that I wanted to make you aware of that go beyond the features descriptions found in the Power BI documentation. These new articles fall under the Power BI guidance documentation and are designed to address common strategic patterns.  Below is my summary of the articles, and check out Power BI guidance from the CAT by Matthew Roach for a more detailed summary.

If you’re interested in Power BI administration and strategic deployment, there’s a lot of good information here.

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Multi-Developer Power BI Development

Published 2022-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad architects a solution for multiple developers working on a Power BI project:

Before I start explaining the architecture, it is important to understand the challenge and think about how to solve it. The default usage of Power BI involves getting data imported into the Power BI data model and then visualizing it. Although there are other modes and other connection types, however, the import data is the most popular option. However, there are some challenges in a model and a PBIX file with everything in one file. Here are some;

– Multiple developers cannot work on one PBIX file at the same time. Multi-Developer issue.

– Integrating the single PBIX file with another application or dataset would be very hard. High Maintenance issue.

– All data transformations are happening inside the model, and the refresh time would be slower.

– The only way to expand visualization would be by adding pages to the model, and you will end up with hundreds of pages after some time.

– Every change, even a small change in the visualization, means deploying the entire model.

– Creating a separate Power BI file with some parts it referencing from this model would not be possible; as a result, you would need to make a lot of duplicates and high maintenance issues again.

– If you want to re-use some of the tables and calculations of this file in other files in the future, it won’t be easy to maintain when everything is in one file.

– And many other issues.

After laying out all of the challenges, Reza puts together a plan to resolve them.

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Power BI Enhanced Refresh API and Custom Connectors

Published 2022-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb starts a new series:

I love the new Power BI Enhanced Refresh API: it allows you to do things like refresh individual tables in your dataset, override incremental refresh policies, control the amount of parallelism, cancel refreshes and a lot more, while being easier to use than the XMLA Endpoint. However, like the XMLA Endpoint, one problem remains: how can you schedule a dataset refresh using it? One option is to create a custom connector for Power Automate (similar to what I described here for the Export API, before the Power BI export actions for Power Automate had been released): this not only allows you to schedule more complex refreshes but also gives you more flexibility over scheduling and do things like send emails if refreshes fail.

Read on for a link to an in-depth guide on creating a custom connector as well as a few notes on the topic.

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From Azure Data Explorer to Excel

Published 2022-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter views data in Excel:

In a previous article Direct Query from Excel to Azure Data Explorer (microsoft.com) I described a way to mimic Direct Query access ala Power BI in Excel.

The method used in this article that allows the user to filter the imported data using values entered into cells in the grid.

In this article I would like to describe a way to really query Kusto data in real time without importing any data and without any volume limitations.

Read on to see how, though there’s a pretty big intermediate step.

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Power BI Dataflows and On-Prem Data Gateways

Published 2022-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld keeps getting pulled back in:

Another week, another challenge! Summer holidays is the perfect time to run into challenges that you normally would not encounter or simply do not know about because they are fixed before you know. This blog will elaborate on a case I had at a client, where we run into issues with the on-premises data gateway in Power BI and in particular related to building dataflows based on sources that connect via the gateway.

Read on for the problem as well as Marc’s solution.

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Showing Filter Selections on Power BI Reports

Published 2022-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Mara Pereira makes a Power BI breadcrumb:

When I’m developing reports, I’m asked multiple times to “hide” the slicers/filters from the report page. Usually this is to make space in the page for other visuals and because customers don’t want to use the filter pane for some reason.

This happened so many times, and only in the last couple of months I decided to try some things out and get a bit creative with Power BI.

I came up with two solutions, which I think work great in these scenarios.

Read on to see the solutions.

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Variables in DAX

Published 2022-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show us how to use variables in DAX:

Variables were introduced in DAX in 2015 and so far, they have proven to be the best enhancement of the DAX language ever. When presented with the concept of variables, most newbies focus on performance improvement, thinking that you introduce variables in your code mainly to obtain better performance. Although variables can improve performance, performance is a minor advantage. There are several more important considerations that should encourage any DAX developer to make extensive use of variables. In this article we share a few considerations, along with best practices about variables and DAX.

Read on to see what makes variables so powerful.

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Power BI CAT Guidance

Published 2022-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Roche advises customers:

I’ve written previously about some of what the Power BI CAT team does, but the Power BI guidance documentation only gets a passing mention… and it’s worth going into more deeply.

A lot of what the Power BI CAT team does involves working with large enterprise customers. These customers are often trying to achieve difficult goals that often involve complex data architectures, and Power BI is often a significant part of their end-to-end information supply chain. We get involved when these enterprise customers need help achieving their strategic goals, and this help often includes helping them effectively use the existing capabilities of Power BI.

Read on to learn more about this guidance documentation.

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An Overview of Power BI Datamarts

Published 2022-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates has a new diagram for us:

An new diagram of Power BI Datamarts is now available. It includes the technical components of a Power BI datamart.

Want to download a copy? Head on over to the Diagrams page where the latest version will always be. You can download a PDF copy of it from the Diagrams page.

This blog post includes a brief summary of each technical component of a Power BI datamart. Datamarts are really new, and they’ll be changing as (1) the functionality matures over time, and (2) based on feedback that customers give. Therefore, I’ve kept the descriptions below brief.

Despite their brevity, the descriptions are worth the read.

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Detecting Data Changes in Power BI Incremental Refresh

Published 2022-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb writes some M:

One feature of Power BI incremental refresh I’ve always been meaning to test out is the ability to create your own M queries to work with the “detect data changes” feature, and last week I finally had the chance to do it. The documentation is reasonably detailed but I thought it would be a good idea to show a worked example of how to use it to get direct control over what data is refreshed during an incremental refresh.

Read on to see how it works, including a couple gotchas around things like the shape of query results.

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