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Category: Power BI

Dynamic Historical Partition Refresh in Power BI

Published 2024-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld digs into partition refreshing:

I’ve heard the question pretty often from customers: “You told me to use incremental refresh, but how can I regularly run a full load or refresh onder partitions?” Well, there are perfect ways to do this using Tabular Editor or SQL Server Management Studio. But this often includes manual work to trigger the processing.

Today, this question was asked again to me. I thought, there should be a smarter way to do this. Since I recently explored more in the wonderful world of Fabric Notebooks and Python, decided to dive a bit deeper in this world and see if it is possible to script something like this using Semantic Link. And obviously, the answer is “Yes!”

Read on to learn how to do it with a bit of Python and Microsoft Fabric’s Semantic Link library (sempy).

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Building a Power Query Template

Published 2024-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic looks at Power Query templates:

In this “ocean” of innovations, there are certain features that don’t get the deserved limelight – as they somehow go under the radar. Some of them, I really consider “hidden gems” – you might not use them in each and every solution, but in some scenarios, they can be of immense help.

A hidden gem that I’m introducing today is called Power Query Template. As of today, this feature is still in preview (the same as many others in Microsoft Fabric), but this doesn’t minimize its potential.

Read on to see why Nikola likes capability this so much.

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Module.Versions in Power Query

Published 2024-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives Internet sleuths something to chew on:

The ever-vigilant folks on the internet have spotted that there’s a new M function in the latest versions of Power BI and Excel: Module.Versions. This function, at the time of writing, returns a record with a single field in that contains the version number of the Power Query engine currently in use.

Click through for an example of calling the function and what it returns as of right now.

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Trying Power BI Copilot to Describe DAX Measures

Published 2024-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld tries out a feature:

It has been roughly two years since the last update on the Power BI Model Documenter, an external tool that I developed to auto-document Power BI Semantic Models. Back then, we still called it datasets though. Looking at the stats of my website, the model documenter and related posts/pages are still most read on my website – every month again.

As the technology has kept on improving, there are new options that will help you to kick-start generating documentation about your semantic model. In this post, I will elaborate on how you can use AI in Power BI to enrich your Model Documenter output, by helping you describing the measures you’ve added to your semantic model.

Read on for a demonstration, as well as what the auto-generated results get right and wrong.

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Diagnosing DirectQuery Connection Limit Performance Problems

Published 2024-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb does a bit of sleuthing:

A few months ago I blogged about the new limits available for the Maximum Connections Per Data Source property in Premium and why the number of connections that a DirectQuery semantic model can open to a data source is so important for report performance. At that time, however, there was no way for you to know whether the performance of your reports was being affected by a lack of available connections. The good news is that, with the announcement this week of the new Execution Metrics event in Log Analytics and Profiler, you can now see when this is happening.

Read on for an illustration of the problem and how you can resolve it.

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Sorting Date Values in Power BI Slicers

Published 2024-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Omorodion demands order:

Sorting values on a Power BI visual is a common requirement for reporting. For example, it is standard practice to sort months from January to December when months are represented in a visual. This might also be required in a slicer visual. In both cases, it is easy to sort when it’s a continuous value, like months, years, quarters, or alphabetically.

However, in Power BI, business users might require a slicer visual with string values to be ordered in a way that makes it easier for them to make a slicer selection based on what they want to view on a report page. The issue here is that string values are not continuous in nature, and we cannot leverage the usual sorting approaches. This tip will demonstrate this problem and an approach to resolve it.

Read on for the solution.

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Using F-SKU Power BI Capacity and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has a public service announcement:

Since the announcement in March that Power BI Premium P-SKUs are being retired and that customers will need to migrate to F-SKU capacities intead I have been asked the same question several times:

Why are you forcing me to migrate to Fabric???

This thread on Reddit is a great example. What I want to make clear in this post is the following:

Moving from P-SKU capacities to F-SKU capacities is not the same thing as enabling Fabric in your tenant

Click through for Chris’s explanation. Also check out the comments section for this one, as there are plenty of questions and responses in there.

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Refreshable Excel Files in the Power BI Service

Published 2024-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kristyna Ferris shows how to refresh a Power BI data source from Excel files in Sharepoint:

Ever since Excel made its debut in the 1980’s, it has been used as a quick way for end users to input and manipulate data on their own without going through the extensive data engineering and data ingestion processes. With Power BI coming on to the scene in 2015, it quickly became the go-to visualization tool for various data sources. These two powerful tools can be used together to drive customized insights for your organization. By uploading your Excel file into SharePoint/OneDrive, you can easily connect and set up a refresh to a Power BI report in the Power BI Service without an on-premises gateway.

Read on to see how it all works.

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Previewing the Power BI Button Slicer Visual

Published 2024-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad checks out a new visual:

The Button Slicer is one of the recent visuals that is very helpful in taking your report layout and visualization to the next level. Although this visual has been available for some time, many are still unfamiliar with its features. In this article and video, I’ll take you through this visual, its features, and how you can use them to have a better Power BI report layout.

Read on to see how (at least until it’s out of preview) you can get access to the visual, as well as what you can do with it.

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