A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows off the Power BI Embedded Playground:
One of the great things about Power BI is how they make things a lot easier and better to use.
I have been answering some questions in the Power BI Community and other people have been looking into using Power BI Embedded.
This led me to find out that there is a quick and easy way to test out Power BI Embedded. The best part is that I can use my own reports and do a drag and drop test!
Click through to see how.
Comments closedAdam Aspin shows us how to use DAX functions in Power BI paginated reports:
In the previous articles, you learned – or revised – the basics of using DAX as the query language to populate paginated reports with data from Power BI datasets. However, as befitted an introduction, the focus was essentially on getting up and running. Specifically, the only DAX table function you looked at was
SUMMARIZECOLUMNS().Despite its undeniable usefulness, this function is far from the only DAX function that you can use to query Power BI Datasets when creating Paginated Reports. Moreover, it has limitations when you wish to deliver complete lists of results as it is an aggregation function. This means, for instance, that you will never find duplicate records in the tabular output from
SUMMARIZECOLUMNS()as, by default, it is grouping data. Alternatively, if you wish to useSUMMARIZECOLUMNS()to output data at its most granular level, you will need to include a unique field (or a combination of fields that guarantee uniqueness) – even if these are not used in the report output.It follows that, to extract data in ways that allow effective report creation, it is essential to learn to use a whole range of DAX table functions.
Click through for a list of functions and how to use them.
Comments closedChris Webb continues a series on using Log Analytics:
It’s actually very easy to build a simple KQL query to look at query activity on your datasets: you just need to look at the QueryEnd event (or operation, as its called in Log Analytics), which is fired when a query finishes running. This event gives you all the information you need: the type of query (DAX or MDX), the duration, the CPU time, the query text and so on. The main challenge is that while you also get the IDs of the report and visual that generated the query, you don’t get the names of the report or visual. I wrote about how to get a list of visual and report IDs here and here, but how can you use that information?
Read on to see how.
Comments closedAndrew Jones builds an automation solution:
I recently faced a customer question:
“How do we export a Power BI Paginated Report to SharePoint for different parameters on a schedule and get notified when the PDF file is available”?
Generating a report based on a subscription is easy. Putting it into Sharepoint is a bit less easy. Click through to see the process.
Comments closedKristi Cantor notes a Power BI update:
Hello P3 Adaptive Nation! Happy New Year, ring out the old and ring in the new! Speaking of ringing in the new, with all the hustle and bustle associated with the holiday season and the excitement of welcoming the new year, did anybody happen to notice the new feature quietly rolled out in Power Bi back in November to take the edge off creating and maintaining custom pages and bookmarks?
Read on to see what has changed.
Comments closedAlice Drummond shows off a custom visual in Power BI:
Working across the environmental industry – it’s fair to say that pretty much ALL of DiscoverEI’s Power BI reports have a map! And if you thought that MapBox was good, well you’re going to LOVE the Icon Map custom visual in Power BI – which allows you to display interactive polygons, points, lines and of course – icons, all in the one visual…plus so much more!
We’ve been using the Icon Map custom visual in Power BI for the last couple of years and it’s safe to say that it is hands down our favourite mapping visual for Power BI! This visual is created for free for the community by James Dales. James is always making updates and enhancements to the visual so the best place to get the latest version and some helpful instructions and tips on how to use it is from his dedicated website: https://icon-map.com/index.html. And while you’re there remember to shout James a coffee or 10 to say thanks for creating such a fantastic mapping visual
Click through for a few examples of the visual and be sure to check it out in the link above.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld has a new two-parter:
Time for a more governance related blog this time. It will be a series of two blogs, where in this first part, I will elaborate on the overall setup of your Power BI workspace and naming. The second part will continue about workspace permissions, sharing and ownership. I feel this is a wide topic and therefore deserves a separate blog.
In this part, focus on the overall setup of workspaces. In my work at various clients, I regularly encounter situations where there is a lot of confusion around workspaces, the scope of a workspace, audience and naming. A blog not only for Power BI tenant administrators, but also for passionate Power BI content creators to better understand each other’s standpoints.
Click through for part one and stay tuned for part two.
Comments closedChris Webb meets us on the playground:
Log Analytics contains information on the dataset, report and visual that are associated with a DAX query but that information is in the form of IDs rather than names. Getting the IDs for specific datasets and reports is fairly straightforward – you can get them from urls in the Power BI Portal – and as I wrote here, it’s possible to get a list of IDs and names for the visuals in a report from the JSON file you get when you export from Performance Analyzer in Power BI Desktop. However, my colleague Rui Romano recently showed me a different way to get the same information using the Power BI Embedded Analytics Playgound, which may be an easier option to use in some cases.
Click through to learn more about the playground itself, as well as a way to convert visual names to their component IDs.
Comments closedReza Rad gives us the lowdown on sparklines:
You can, of course, achieve the same thing using a line chart. You have to multiply it for each of the categories (you can do that in Power BI using small multiples). However, if you have many categories, then a small multiple might now show a nice view. that is why Sparkline can be helpful.
Sparklines are normally with minimal information. Their X-axis is a trend based on date (or something similar), but the axis is hidden because of minimal space. You can use the sparkline to understand the trend, the highest, the lowest, the starting and the ending point, etc. Because of their minimal nature, Sparklines are not used for a very detailed analysis. Instead, they are used to understand the trend of different categories over time in a high-level view.
Click through to see how you can add a sparkline to a table or matrix.
Comments closedChris Webb continues a series on DicrectQuery over Log Analytics:
In the first post in this series I showed how it was possible to create a DirectQuery dataset connected to Log Analytics so you could analyse Power BI query and refresh activity in near real-time. In this post I’ll take a closer look into how you can use this data to monitor refreshes.The focus of this series is using DirectQuery on Log Analytics to get up-to-date information (remember there’s already an Import-mode report you can use for long-term analysis of this data), and this influences the design of the dataset and report
Click through for some KQL and explanatory instructions.
Comments closed