Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Power BI

Reviewing an Existing Data Model with Power BI Model Documenter

Published 2022-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld wants to see what’s out there in the wild:

In some scenarios, it can happen that you do not even have a Power BI desktop data model. For example, when you migrated from Analysis Services to Power BI Premium, or in case you have to deal with large datasets and it is directly developed using Visual Studio, Tabular Editor or any other tool of your preference and deployed over the XMLA endpoint. Similar setup could be that you once enriched your data model using Tabular Editor or ALM Toolkit, which resulted in the fact that your Power BI Desktop file, is no longer your golden version of your data model.

Another scenario could be gaining an overview of partitioning when using incremental refresh. The partitions of Incremental Refresh are only generated in the Power BI Service. So, including this information in your generated documentation is only possible when you connect directly to the Power BI Service.

But what if you still want to show a complete view of your Power BI data model, and extract insights using the Power BI Model Documenter? I can tell you; it is possible!

Read on to see what you can do in that case.

Comments closed

Testing Power BI REST APIs

Published 2022-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers tries it:

Did you know that there is an easy way to run and extract Power BI REST API data?

The good news is that you can do this directly in your web browser. You don’t have to install or configure anything!

The method below works well if you want to either test the API to see what it returns.

Or if you want to run it to extract some data.

Read on for the process.

Comments closed

Essential Power Tools for Power BI Desktop

Published 2022-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Cockington makes several recommendations of external tools for Power BI Desktop:

The External Tools ribbon is a feature that has been available in Power BI Desktop since the July 2020 release.  This feature should be considered essential to anyone who is regularly working in the Power BI space.    In this article I recommend my top five External Tools, that I consider essential to any Power BI developer.

Read on for the recommendations. I regularly use two of the five but these do look good.

Comments closed

Fitting 10 Pounds of Data into a 5-Pound Power BI

Published 2022-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb does some compacting:

Power BI can handle large data volumes, but just how much data can you load into Power BI? Can Power BI handle big data? How big is “big” anyway? These are questions you may have when you’re starting out on a new Power BI project and the answers can be hard to find. Indeed the answer in most cases is “it depends”, which isn’t very helpful. In this post I will try to explain the various limits on Power BI dataset size and how you can know if you’re likely to hit them.

Click through to learn more about these limitations.

Comments closed

Data Scaling Thoughts for Power BI

Published 2022-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley starts a series:

The Power BI service can handle a lot of data, but just because your data sources are big doesn’t mean that your Power BI datasets will also take up a lot of space. If the data model is designed efficiently, even terabytes of source data will usually translate into megabytes, or a few gigabytes of dataset storage at most. As the industry has largely made the transition from on-prem SQL Server Analysis Services and AAS tabular models to Power BI datasets in Premium capacity, the size limits in the cloud service are notable. The following reference chart from the Microsoft Learning docs shows that a P1 Premium dedicated capacity is limited to 25 GB per dataset. That’s a lot but there are Premium capacity SKUs that can handle up to 400 GB of compressed data in an in-memory data model.

Click through for Paul’s introductory thoughts and stay tuned for part 2.

Comments closed

Defragmenting Power BI Fact Tables

Published 2022-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb reminds us that Power BI incremental refresh can lead to some fragmentation:

A lot of people are building large datasets in Power BI Premium nowadays, and if you’re building a large dataset you’re very likely to be using Power BI’s incremental refresh functionality with your fact tables or manually creating and refreshing partitions in them. If so, you should occasionally do a special kind of refresh to shrink the dictionaries on your fact tables.

Read on for a test of the most extreme scenario, though even less extreme versions can be bad.

Comments closed

Schedule a Power BI Dataset Refresh

Published 2022-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers keeps to the schedule:

Below are the steps on how to use Power Automate to schedule a refresh of a Power BI dataset at the time you want it to.

I have recently seen some questions in the Power BI Community with regards to refreshing Power BI datasets. I thought it would be a good idea to blog on how to use Power Automate (Flow) to schedule a refresh of a Power BI Dataset.

Read on to see what the limitation is in Power BI and how you can use Power Automate to get around it.

Comments closed

Performance Tuning Tables with Filters in Power BI

Published 2022-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb doesn’t want to wait:

There are four columns: Date, Town and two measures. One measure called [Fast Measure] is, as the name suggests, very quick to execute; the other measure, called [Slow Measure], is very complex and slow. The definitions are irrelevant here. Notice that there is a filter on this table visual so only the rows where [Fast Measure] is greater than 1 are shown.

If I measure the amount of time to render this table in Performance Analyzer, it takes around 17.5 seconds to run. However, if I remove the filter on [Fast Measure], the table only takes 8 seconds to run. Why? The filter is on the fast measure and surely more rows are returned without the filter, so wouldn’t the slow measure be evaluated more?

Click through for the answer.

Comments closed