Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Power BI

Power BI Aggregations from Azure Data Explorer Data

Published 2022-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter has some recommendations if you’re aggregating data from Azure Data Explorer into Power BI:

Every visual shown in a report in PBI, contains some form of aggregation

The question is how the aggregations are calculated and at which step in the pipe of bringing the data from the data source to the report.

In this article, I’ll be using data coming from Azure Data Explorer aka Kusto aka ADX.

Most of the content is relevant for other sources as well.

Read on for the advice, which I’d call fairly unexpected—I actually expected the recommendation to go the other way for performance reasons.

Comments closed

Power Query Online Memory and CPU Usage

Published 2022-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb wants to see how things are going:

Power Query Online is, as the name suggests, the online version of Power Query – it’s what you use when you’re developing Power BI Dataflows for example. Sometimes when you’re building a complex, slow query in the Query Editor you’ll notice a message in the status bar at the bottom of the page telling you how long the query has been running for and how much memory and CPU it’s using:

Read on to understand what the memory value indicates and for a few tips on the topic.

Comments closed

Exporting Power BI Row-Level Security Details

Published 2022-06-22 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers needs a report, stat!:

In a previous tweet on twitter, I had elaborated on how I had extracted the RLS Roles with the details and then exported it into a CSV file which then allowed the organization to keep an audit of the RLS for the dataset.

In the steps below I will show you how I did this.

In my previous blog post I explained how to export data from a Power BI report to a CSV file here: Exporting a Power BI Visual data to a CSV File in SharePoint

Read on to see how, as well as a few notes on what it takes to get this report.

Comments closed

Operating Power BI Desktop as a B2B User

Published 2022-06-22 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria shares some notes:

I noticed Adam Saxton post a tip on the Guy in a Cube YouTube channel about publishing reports from Power BI Desktop for external users. According to Microsoft Docs (as of June 21, 2022), you can’t publish directly from Power BI Desktop to an external tenant. But Adam shows how that is now possible thanks to an update in Azure Active Directory.

Click through for the sign-in process as well as what you can do and the pitfalls you might run into along the way.

Comments closed

Delta Live Tables and Power BI Data Modeling

Published 2022-06-21 by Kevin Feasel

Tahir Fayyaz goes from Delta Lake to Power BI:

To get the optimal performance from Power BI it is recommended to use a star schema data model and to make use of user-defined aggregated tables. However, as you build out your facts, dimensions, and aggregation tables and views in Delta Lake, ready to be used by the Power BI data model, it can become complicated to manage all the pipelines, dependencies, and data quality as you need to consider the following:

– How to easily develop and manage the data model’s transformation code.

– How to run and scale data pipelines for the model as data volumes grow.

– How to keep all the Delta Lake tables updated as new data arrives.

– How to view the lineage for all tables as the model gets more complex.

– How to actively stop data quality issues that result in incorrect reports.

Read on for recommendations, a couple architectural diagrams, and some sample code.

Comments closed

Power BI Field Parameters and Type 2 SCDs with Bonus Fields

Published 2022-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck extends the type 2 slowly changing dimension:

Power BI field parameters are a new feature in Power BI Desktop, and it’s one of the best of the past months. In short, Power BI field parameters allow you to easily switch between dimensions attributes or measures in a filter. Previously, you had to do all sorts of DAX wizardry to make this happen, but now it’s just a couple of clicks.

The goal of this blog post is not to tell you exactly how they work, but rather showcase an interesting use case. You can find more info about Power BI field parameters in the official blog post, but also here, here and here. The use case I’m talking about is slowly changing dimensions of Type 2, you know, the one where we insert a record for every change. Often, I also include an extra column for each column of which we’re tracking history: the “current value column”. For example, if we keep history of the department for an employee, I have a column “CurrentDepartment”. If a type 2 change occurs, the values of this columns are updated to the last known value for this dimension member. This allows to answer different types of questions, because sometimes users are interested in the historical values, but sometimes they just want to know the current value.

Read on for the use case as well as how you might combine field parameters with the idea of current values on type-2 slowly changing dimensions.

Comments closed

Creating Calculation Groups in Power BI Desktop via Powershell

Published 2022-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Seamark helps those who are stuck lacking tools:

I recently shared on Twitter a 7-module learning path on MS Learn that teaches all you need to know about calculation groups in Power BI. This learning path is an excellent course, and I highly recommend it. However, as part of this exchange, I received a reply from someone lamenting that calculation groups are unusable in organisations that will not allow non-Microsoft applications. Power BI Desktop does not currently have UX enabling you to create/manage calculation groups in a Power BI Model, so the most common method today is to use 3rd party tools such as Tabular Editor.

This exchange is not the first time I have heard this feedback, so I decided to share a technique showing how you can use Microsoft tools. The approach used in this article uses PowerShell but can quickly get translated to VS Code or other scripting environments.

Click through if you’re in that unfortunate situation.

Comments closed

Building a Rank in Power Query

Published 2022-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad ranks things:

Although, calculating rank dynamically is often useful, It is not rare to need to do ranking on a pre-calculated basis. Let’s say, for example, you want to create an aggregated table by customers and year. and you want to rank customers based on their sales amount in that table. the period and other factors are remaining static. This pre-calculated aggregated table can speed up the performance of your report significantly in the future. In a case like this, the rank calculation can be done as a pre-calculation. And when you do this as a pre-calculation, Power Query is a useful option. Because then you can do that even in a Dataflow, and the result can be used in multiple Power BI datasets.

Click through to see how you can do it, as well as what Power Query calls its equivalents to ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), and DENSE_RANK().

Comments closed

Extracting Data from DAX Measures into CSV

Published 2022-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers builds a process:

In this blog post I am going to demonstrate how to use the new Power Automate Flow to extract data from a DAX measure into a SharePoint CSV file.

I got this idea after reading the blog post from the Microsoft Power BI Team: Unlocking new self-service BI scenarios with ExecuteQueries support in Power Automate | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

The great news is that this works on Power BI Pro, Premium Per User and Premium.

Read on to see how.

Comments closed

Using SELECTEDVALUE with Field Parameters

Published 2022-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo diagnoses an error:

If you try to use SELECTEDVALUE on the visible column of the table generated by the Fields Parameters feature in Power BI, you get the following error:

Calculation error in measure ‘Sales'[Selection]: Column [Parameter] is part of composite key, but not all columns of the composite key are included in the expression or its dependent expression.

Read on to understand what causes this error and what you can do to resolve it.

Comments closed