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Category: Power BI

Connecting to Power BI PPU via SQL Server Profiler

Published 2021-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants to use SQL Server Profiler for a good reason:

I was recently looking on how to use SQL Profiler to connect to my Premium Per User (PPU) dataset so that I could see where the processing of my incremental partitions was.

When I first tried to connect using the default options, I got the error “Either the race with the ID of ‘AAA’ does not exist in the server of ID ‘BBB’, or the user does not have permissions to access the object”

This was rather a confusing error and it took me a little while to figure it out.

Click through to see the solution.

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Measure Filters in Power BI

Published 2021-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari dive into a topic:

The first paragraph of this article needs to be a warning: the article itself is here for DAX and Power BI enthusiasts only. We are going to show a report that does not work, and then we explore how to fix the problem by performing a deep analysis of the queries generated by Power BI, finding the problem, and finally fixing it. The article contains a lot of references to advanced DAX concepts and the final solution is NOT a best practice. The value of the article is not in the specific solution. Rather, the important part is that a deep understanding of DAX and Power BI can help you obtain the right results, specifically when you have the feeling that you are faced with a bug because Power BI is acting strange. If you do not like DAX before reading this article, you will like it even less at the end. But if you love DAX, then chances are you will really enjoy the reading, even though it requires quite a lot of brain bandwidth. For sure, it took all of mine when I first encountered this behavior.

Break out the propeller hats before you dive in.

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Leading Zero Padding with DAX and M

Published 2021-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakshi gives us two methods to pad those numbers:

There are some cases that we want to add a leading zero to a digit, such as showing 01 instead of 1, 02 instead of 2 and so on. We have two options to do this in Power BI, doing it in Power Query or doing it with DAX.

Click through for the two methods, and for a bonus item which incidentally bolsters the argument that dates should be YYYY-MM-DD.

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Dynamic Transparency Changes in Power BI

Published 2021-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar explains how to allow users to control transparency in Power BI visuals:

As someone who uses Python/R heavily for exploratory data analysis and Power BI for publishing the final data analytics reports, I have always missed the ability to adjust the color transperancy in Power BI. In Power BI you can change the color dynamically and conditionally but there is no native functionality to change the transperancy.

I was working on a project where I wanted to highlight certain clusters in the data to the business user. Sure, I could change the color but it’s very challenging when the data points are concentrated in a small area and they overlap each other. In Python and R you can easily adjust the alpha value in most plots to see the dense area clearly.

Click through for one Power BI solution.

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Tying DAX Queries to Visuals in a Power BI Report

Published 2021-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows off some diagnostic skills in published Power BI visuals:

The integration between Azure Log Analytics and Power BI opens up a lot of new possibilities for Power BI administrators. It’s still in preview (there’s a lot more cool stuff still to come) but the Analysis Services events that are available at the time of writing are still very useful: they give you pretty much everything you had in Profiler plus some new stuff too. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this data to work out which visual in a published report generated a particular DAX query.

Read on for a demonstration.

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Relative-Time Slicers in Power BI

Published 2021-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl wants your Power BI reports to know what day it is:

A very common requirement for a Power BI report that I stumble across at almost all of my customers is to automatically show data for the current day/month/year when a report is opened. At first sight this seems like a very trivial problem but once you dig into the problem, you will realize that all of the common solutions out there have some disadvantages and only solve the problem partially.

Click through for a clear description of the problem and a clear description of the answer.

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An Introduction to Aggregations in Power BI

Published 2021-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Seamark begins a new series:

One of the most powerful features of Power BI data modelling today is creating aggregation tables in your dataset and having simple calculations automatically make use of the tables without writing complex DAX. This feature is available in both Pro and Premium.

What does “automatically make use of” mean in this context?

Read on for that answer and a whole lot more.

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Adding Report Names to the Log Analytics Report

Published 2021-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers feels complete:

I was really excited to use the Power BI Log Analytics for Analysis Services Engine report when it was released along with this blog post from the Power BI Team: Announcing long-term usage and performance insights (Public Preview) | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

This is really a great report when using Log Analytics.

I found the one thing that I wanted to view was my report names. The standard report did not have this.

Protip: displaying GUIDs is not the same as displaying useful information. I recommend reading through this just to see how much pain and effort it takes to make the Log Analytics report actually become useful.

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Enabling Modern Styles on Old Power BI Reports

Published 2021-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi saves us some time:

I see some developers really hate the old style of the visuals when they have to work on an old report and it makes them crazy to see that the visuals style remains the same even if they create a new report page and add new visuals to the page. So some developers go through a lot of pain to get the visuals to work in the modern style. I even know some developers copied all queries from Power Query from the old report and pasted them to a new Power BI file. Then they used Tabular Editor to copy the tabular objects from the old report to the new one. And some even started to build everything from scratch. If you are one of those developers, be aware that there is a simple setting that can help to quickly switch all the old visuals to their new modern style.

Read on to learn which setting that is.

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