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Category: Power BI

Documenting a Tabular Model

Published 2023-12-07 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt builds the docs:

A few months ago, I chatted with colleagues about our Tabular Model. More specifically the lack of Tabular Model documentation. Since we were thinking about replacing our current model, I started to think about how to integrate documentation easily.

Having documentation is 1 thing, making sure it’s used is something completely different. And then we’re not even talking about keeping it up to date. My initial idea was to include the documentation task during the development phase. That said, time to get the thoughts into practice.

Read on to see what Olivier did.

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Integrating Azure ML and Power BI

Published 2023-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, I show off how easy it is to integrate Azure ML and Power BI, at least once you get past all of the trouble trying to integrate them.

I expected this to be easy. It turns out that the “make it look easy” depends on having several things in place already and using the correct (by which I mean “old”) deployment type.

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Finding the Local Port Number for Power BI Desktop

Published 2023-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi updates an older post:

In March 2018, I wrote a blogpost called Four Different Ways to Find Your Power BI Desktop Local Port Number. Last week, Zoe Doughlas from Microsoft left a comment reminding me of a fifth method to get the port which encouraged me to write this quick tip. Thanks to Zoe!

As the name suggests, the blog was about finding Power BI Desktop’s local port number. If you do not have any clue what I mean by local port number, I strongly suggest reading that blog.

Read on to see what that fifth method is.

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Building a Radar Chart in Power BI with SVG

Published 2023-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Stephanie Bruno doesn’t need a built-in radar chart visual:

Radar (or spider) charts are a way to look at multiple metrics, perhaps with a different range of values for each metric, on a single chart. In this example, we’ll look at characteristics of Taylor Swift songs from a Spotify dataset (I have a daughter who still hasn’t forgiven me for not getting tickets to the Eras tour, so hopefully this will make up for it). A matrix with the radar SVG allows us to quickly compare these song characteristics (you can get the dataset and the descriptions of the characteristics here). There are existing radar/spider custom visual charts that are great, but none of them currently have a small multiple option, so we can’t use them to create the visual below, for example.

Click through to see the full example.

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Generating Reports in Azure ML with Copilot

Published 2023-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi automates report creation:

In Nov 2023, Microsoft announced Microsoft Fabric’s general availability and Public Preview of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. In a previous post, I explained what Copilot means to Power BI developers, which is valid for other Fabric developers such as data engineers and data scientists as Copilot for Fabric helps with those experiences as well. But the main focus of this blog post is to discuss the requirements, how to enable Copilot, and how to use it from a Power BI development point of view. So, this blog will not discuss other aspects of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. With that, let’s begin.

I haven’t been particularly impressed with the reports it generates, but I suppose this is like the proverbial bear riding a unicycle: it’s not a question of how well it does the task that makes it interesting, but rather that it does it at all.

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Azure Database for MySQL Flex Server and Power BI

Published 2023-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry dips a toe into unfamiliar waters:

Recently, I upgraded our core Azure SQL Database for MySQL Single Server to Azure SQL Database for MySQL Flex Server. The migration was pretty straight forward and I simply did an export with mysqldump and then an import with MySQL. The problem came up when I tried to use Power BI (PBI) and connect to to the Azure SQL Database for MySQL Flex Server instead. When I tried to connect PBI to the Flex server I kept getting “The given key was not present in the dictionary”.

Read on to see what Denny did to resolve the issue.

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Computing Accurate Percentages in Power BI with Row-Level Security

Published 2023-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari don’t want to let any information slip out:

Let us start with a simple challenge: we want to show the percentage of sales in Europe, compared to the sales made to all customers worldwide. It is a relatively trivial question, the kind of DAX code you learn at the beginning of your Power BI career, and it can be solved with a simple measure:

But what happens when the model includes security roles? Well, that’s what you’ll have to read on to learn.

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Many-to-Many Power BI Relationships and Table Refreshes

Published 2023-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter gives us a reason to minimize use of many-to-many relationships in Power BI:

I must admit that in the last two years I’ve told many Power BI/Kusto customers not to worry about relationships that are created as M:M.

I was pretty sure that with Direct Query, such relationships are fine,

Indeed, the generated queries looked fine and performed as expected.

I recently became aware that the number of queries generated for some visuals e.g. Matrix and tables can be affected by the type of relationships between the participating tables.

Read on for a description of why you shouldn’t load your Power BI semantic models with many-to-many relationships, especially once Kusto is involved.

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