Category: Power BI

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.

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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.

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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.

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Dennes Torres has written a tool:

On the article Automating table refresh in Power BI I explained many methods to automate refresh of individual objects, which could be tables or partitions.

This creates the need of good ways to visualize the last refresh date and time for each partition and table. The portal shows the refresh date/time for the entire dataset, we can’t identify on the Power BI portal the exactly date for each table last refresh.

Read on for a link to the refresh code and an example of it in action.

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Reza Rad looks at e-mail subscriptions of Power BI reports:

Have you ever wondered is it possible to have updates of the Power BI report to be emailed to you (or some other colleagues) on a daily basis? Power BI, fortunately, has this feature, it is called Subscription. Subscriptions are helpful ways to send an up-to-date version of the report and dashboard to the users’ email addresses on a scheduled basis. In this article and video, I’ll explain what a subscription is and how it works in Power BI.

Click through for the video and complete blog post.

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Dennes Torres digs into a challenge:

The refresh schedule on the Power BI portal is made at the Dataset level. This means all the tables refresh on the same schedule. Some models may not have a problem with this, but many models will. This article explains how to automate table level refresh in Power BI.

This refresh schedule means you will be creating a bigger workload than you really need compared to a refresh at the table level if it were possible.

There are some options to ignore and work-around this, and there is one option which will require more effort but can solve the problem. This article will analyse these options and go deeper into how to build custom refresh automation solutions.

Read on for a detailed solution.

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