Category: Power BI

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show off two techniques:

Our readers know SQLBI position regarding bidirectional relationships: they are a powerful tool that should be used with great care and avoided in most scenarios. There actually is one scenario where bidirectional relationships are useful: when you need to create a model involving a many-to-many relationship between dimensions. In this scenario, using a bidirectional filter relationship is the suggested solution. Nonetheless, there may be reasons why the bidirectional relationship cannot be created, because of ambiguity. If you face this situation, you can use a different modeling technique based on a limited many-to-many cardinality relationship, which would work even when it is set as a unidirectional relationship. The choice between the two models is not an easy one. Both come with advantages and disadvantages that need to be deeply understood in order to make the right choice.

In this article, we first provide a description of the two techniques, and then we proceed with the performance analysis of both solutions, so to provide information about which technique to use and when.

Read on for the analysis.

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Chris Webb begins a series on troubleshooting timeouts:

If you’re working with a large Power BI dataset and/or a slow data source in Import mode it can be very frustrating to run into timeout errors after you have already waited a long time for a refresh to finish. There are a number of different types of timeout that you might run into, and in this series I’ll look at a few of them and discuss some of the ways you can work around them.

In this post I’ll look at one of the most commonly-encountered timeouts: the limit on the maximum length of time an Import mode dataset refresh can take. 

Click through to see the limits and ways to (sort of) get around them.

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Reza Rad uses a date slicer:

Power BI from and to date slicer

It happens that you might have two fields as From and To date (or Start and End date) in your dataset, and you want a date slicer in the report. The date slicer has to filter records in a way that the FROM and the TO dates are in the range of dates selected in the slicer. There are multiple ways of doing this. In this article and video, I’ll explain a simple but effective method for that. I have explained in another article, how this can be done using two date slicers, you can read that from here.

Click through to see what you need and how you can put one of these in place.

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Jeroen ter Heerdt explains why you might see the capitalization change in text loaded into Power BI:

Some of you might have seen this before – you load some data into Power BI and suddenly the capitalization (uppercase / lowercase) of your text changes on you. Let me explain what is happening here.

Click through to learn why. Normally I’d say “and what you can do about it,” but there’s not much. I guess the best answer is, embrace consistent capitalization and then you won’t notice anything.

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Chris Webb is on a mission:

In my quest to check out every last bit of obscure Power Query functionality, this week I looked into the ContextInfo option on the Sql.Database and Sql.Databases M functions. This option allows you to set CONTEXT_INFO in SQL Server (see here for a good article explaining what this is) and here’s an example of how to use it:

Click through for that example.

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Meagan Longoria looks at some helpful new icons in Power BI’s Selection pane:

If you’ve visited the Tab order area of the Selection Pane in Power BI in the last couple of months, you might have noticed some new buttons.

Click through to see the three functions in action.

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Sebastian Cattes continues a series on using Pydantic:

In part 1 of the article we learned about dynamic typing, Pydantic and decorators.

In this part we will learn how to combine these concepts for Pandas DataFrame validation in our codebase.

1. Combining Decorators, Pydantic and Pandas – Combine section 2. and 3. of Part 1 to showcase how to use them for output validation.

2. Let’s define ourselves a proper spaceship!

3. Summary

Check out both parts of the article.

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Reza Rad shows off a new connector:

Power BI can get data from Google Sheet now. This functionality is released just yesterday and announced in both Power BI and Power Query blogs. The feature is still preview (Beta) but it is worthwhile looking at how it works in a quick article and video.

There are several steps involved but it’s still a lot simpler than the old method of parsing a website, especially if you had any sort of security on the spreadsheets.

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